Chapter 4 #4
“Na, child, take your time for a gossip. The Vestals will be happy to see you again. You’re a favorite here and you ought to know that.” The cook bestowed a fond smile upon her, and it arrowed into Inez’s heart.
It was good to be a favorite somewhere. She’d been accepted in the household at George Court, warmly, at least by the other small servants and staff.
But things hadn’t been the same since Miss Amaranthe became a duchess.
The servants Inez knew went with her, and a new housekeeper and maid arrived.
Joseph, after he had his heart broken by the faithless Miss Pettigrew, grew irritated and distracted.
Then he was gone for months, and Inez drifted through the house, dusting and airing, keeping the mice away, hiding like a coward and longing for his return.
Fool of a man. Anyone could have seen at a moment that Miss Pettigrew wasn’t a girl willing to be won.
Her face might be soft as fresh dough, but her heart was adamant.
She let men woo her because she thought it would be cruel to squash their hopes when doing so was in fact a kindness.
She was a girl whose heart ran in train with her convictions, and only a man as devoted to the same morals would be able to soften that heart.
Inez was the opposite, she supposed as she lifted the wooden tray and set out. She had no convictions to guide her, and a soft heart that spilled everywhere, nothing to contain it. She felt like a great pulsing vein exposed to the world, and every little cut made her bleed.
Certainly she was soft in the head to fall as she had for Joseph Illingworth.
What did the man have to recommend him? The son of a vicar in one of the poorest corners of Britain.
A man whose head was filled with old languages and book lore and not enough common sense to keep him out of the cold when he had a new thought to occupy him.
The first time she took shelter there, over two years ago now, Inez had been at George Court a week before she saw the man of the house.
She’d been told on her arrival that he was traveling with the family he tutored but wouldn’t be much bother when he returned.
Miss Amaranthe promised that Joseph was easy to please but must be looked after as he would forget to eat or trim his candle, and then he would come to the kitchens in a huff looking for hot soup and a new candlestick, and at such times he could be a bother to everyone, so it was best to anticipate his needs.
And so Inez had been sent to his study when he first returned, this brother Miss Amaranthe spoke of with equal parts admiration for his intelligence and exasperated affection for his absent-mindedness.
Inez had the duty of bringing tea to both the Illingworths, each of them absorbed in their separate tasks, Miss Amaranthe in the parlor making a copy of some unreadable ancient manuscript, Mr. Illingworth in the smaller study mewed up with his books.
The study lay at the back of the small house, catching the light from the open yard beyond.
The wind that day was blowing all the smoke from the coal fires away to the west, and the sun was golden and clear as it fell through the panes of windows.
Inez crept softly, not sure yet what sort of creature this brother of Miss Amaranthe’s would turn out to be, and far too accustomed to the predations of men to expect he would be much different.
Sunlight, sprinkled with sparkles of dust, fell on the dark brown curls of a man bent over a desk.
At ease in his home, he wore his hair pulled back in a queue and had hung his morning coat over the ladder back of his chair.
His waistcoat, plain linen in the back, hugged a strong chest and broad shoulders.
He’d rolled up the billowing sleeves of his white shirt to keep them free of ink as he jotted notes on papers spread over the desk.
He was left-handed, thus the need to keep his sleeves rolled and out of the fresh ink. That he would use his preferred hand in his own home told Inez he was the kind of man who might conform to outward convention to keep the peace, but in privacy, he could easily set convention aside.
His right hand he held splayed over the pages of the book he was reading, and Inez stared, struck by how a man’s hand could seem so strong and forceful at the end of a bared forearm, where the cord of a tendon stood in outline.
He had the same faint tint to his skin as Miss Amaranthe, not as brown as Inez, but not the pale milk of the other English.
He lifted his head to look out the window, a muttered word on his lips, and Inez paused with tray in the air at the sight of his profile. Then he turned his head to look at her, as if he had sensed her silent approach, and Inez couldn’t breathe.
She’d never been struck breathless by the sight of a man, not even when her father appeared after months or years abroad.
What she’d felt, she assumed later, must be fear and the nervous need to please.
He had a wide mouth that didn’t belong on a man and lips with a steep curve on top and bottom, a mesmerizing mouth.
A bold nose arrowed between jutting cheekbones, and his dark eyes were deep set beneath a prominent brow from which the dark curls fell away as if he’d been tugging his hands through them.
His direct gaze held hers, then shuttered with a slow blink, and Inez wondered—hoped, for a brief, wild moment—that he felt the same bedazzled sensation she did, as if she’d stepped from shadow into full sunlight.
“He’s done it,” the man said to Inez as if picking up a conversation they’d left off. “He’s made Hartley’s observations intelligible. Captured them quite brilliantly, in fact. Better than I could have done myself.”
“Who?” Inez stepped forward cautiously, testing that the floor beneath her feet wouldn’t tip or sway. She wasn’t certain she had recovered her balance.
“Joseph Priestley. Quite a grasp on natural philosophy, that one. I read his essay on different types of air a year or so ago. But this one is discussing Hartley’s theories of mind, and he describes the principle of association better than anyone else has.”
“Oh.” Inez didn’t understand a word of his speech, though she’d lived in Britain for ten years at that point and her English was fluent. She slid her tray onto a corner of his wide, sturdy desk. “Miss Amaranthe thought you’d like tea.”
She hovered, self-conscious as he studied her with that dark, unreadable gaze.
She resisted touching her linen cap to see if her hair was misbehaving again, or trying to rearrange the kerchief crossed over her bodice.
She didn’t want him to think she was trying to draw his attention to her breasts, though she was all of a sudden very aware of them.
Her entire body prickled, as if held to a fire, yet there was no coal in the small grate.
“Shall I pour for you?”
“Yes, please.” He watched as she tipped a bit of milk into the porcelain cup, then poured out the tea. “Just a bit of sugar, no bigger than your thumbnail. Thank you.”
His fingers touched hers as she handed him the cup, and Inez nearly jumped out of her skin. He wasn’t leering. He wasn’t aggressive. He looked like he’d been far away and she’d surprised him, and he was trying to orient himself to the physical world and her place in it.
“Are you new?” he asked suddenly.
“Yes, sir.” This time she couldn’t resist tugging at her linen apron, nervous she wouldn’t pass muster. “I’ve been here a week, sir.”
“That accent.” His eyes narrowed slightly in thought. “Spanish?”
“Portuguese.”
“Ah.” His sharply defined lips stretched into a smile, at least on one side of his mouth. Inez told herself to stop staring at his mouth.
“My mother’s family was from Portugal, long ago,” he remarked. His voice hummed in the air around her, rich, resonating.
Inez twisted a hand in her apron. This man made her feel her insides had been tied into knots. “Miss Amaranthe said as much.”
He turned back to his desk, the delicate cup dwarfed in his hands. Once again Inez found herself entranced by his long, strong fingers, the turn of his wrist and the lean muscle of his forearms, lightly dusted with hair. “What is your name?”
She swallowed hard. “Inez.”
“Well. Bem-vinda à minha casa, Inez.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said, and suddenly wanted to cry at his words of welcome. When had she ever been welcomed anywhere?
He said no more to her, caught up again in his book.
Inez already knew that Miss Amaranthe paid the rent on the house, though of course it was in her brother’s name, she being a woman.
She knew that Miss Amaranthe ordered her whole life around providing comfort and ease for her brother, and Inez understood.
She too felt the same inexplicable wish to ease the way for this man, to keep the space around him soft and quiet while his mind worked, for she sensed that his was extraordinary.
And because he never once looked at her with lust—was never other than scrupulously polite to her, when he noted her presence—Inez was nearly mad with the wish to make him see her.
She, who for years had worked and wished to make herself invisible to men. She, who had gratefully decided after she buried her husband that she need never notice a man again, had been hooked like a fish at her first sight of Joseph Illingworth and would never be able to forget him.
She’d never again meet a man whose mind worked like his, a swift and efficient machine, so stimulated by the world of ideas. She’d never meet a man whose character was so deeply sweet and untroubled, though he was stubborn and astonishingly dense in his understanding of people.
She’d never meet a man she so ached to touch, and be touched by. So much so that sometimes at night she lay on her narrow cot in the room that was once a dressing room, kept awake by the empty ache in her body, the longing that arrowed down to the bone.
So focused was Inez on the things she wouldn’t have that she forgot what she did have: the warning from Ceres that the lord she’d wronged was looking for her.
And so it was no fault but her own that she plunged without thinking through the servant’s door into the long hallway where the Vestals entertained and came face to face with a man emerging from one of the rooms.
She recognized him instantly: the Roman nose with the indent at the top as if he’d taken a blow there when the flesh was being formed.
The thin, leering lips and watery eyes. The pigtail of his wig lying over the shoulder of his coat, a lustrous and heavily embroidered silk lined with rows of heavy buttons.
“You!” The word leapt from him like an accusation, a feral snarl.
Inez, fingers frozen, dropped the tray. All she could think in that terrified moment was how Bessie’s chocolate would stain the carpet, but her body would barely leave an imprint once he’d strangled and left her for dead.