Chapter 15 #2
“Me luv and I are the only uns as stayed. I’m Wenna.
Ee’s Thaker. We’ve two young’uns, a boy and a cheel, so if the sir don’t like ee’s people with cheldern, best we know now.
An me Thaker don’t hear, so if you speech at’un, ee’ll only nod and give thee a grin.
” Wenna smiled fondly. “Ee sees t’ the stables and the animals, now, though ee can’t do for all’en. I cook.”
Inez surveyed the parlor. The style was not old, but the dark, dull colors seemed inharmonious somehow, and the furniture ought to have been under covers. “Housekeeper? Maids?”
Wenna shook her head. “Himself, the old Baronet, we couldn’t keep a maid about, ee’d ’ave at ’er if ee could. Mrs. Wadge was fusty as they come, but when the Baronet took ill and stopped paying wages, she skuppered off to another post. Took the footman an hall boy with her.”
“You can’t be looking after all this yourself.” Inez peered into a smaller parlor set off the larger, this one lined with windows. It overlooked a lovely stone patio and the green swales beyond.
If she were the lady of Penwellen, she wouldn’t use the dark, drab parlors but would sit on this sunny porch, taking her tea and catching up on correspondence, chatting with callers and planning with the housekeeper for dinners and holidays and small parties now and again for her and the baronet, to provide amusement and keep good relations with their neighbors.
But Penwellen did not have a lady. Nor a proper staff, from the looks of things, and had not in some time, if this lovely room had been given over to storage.
Four bedrooms occupied the upper floor, one suite with a large powder room useful for dressing, and a nursery with a small cupboard off the side with a bed for a nurse. Inez denied the pang that shot from her heart to her belly at the sight.
She had never longed for a child, never imagined herself with one. But the thought of Joseph’s children asleep in this room, their brown curly hair spilling over these pillows, coals in the grate as their mother rocked in the chair and read to them—
She turned away. “The kitchens?”
The kitchens sat empty, the tables bare and waiting. The great hearth smoked quietly with a smothered fire, banked and ready to be stirred to life. Wenna set the broomstick in the scullery and wiped her hands in her apron as she looked around.
“I suppose the new sir will want his supper,” she said, “and it’s I and Old Jupe to make it. Just as well, as the stores’ll be going pindy soon if we don’t use ’em.”
“I’ll help.” The words popped out before Inez could consider their wisdom.
Wenna raised an eyebrow. “You being—?”
She’d done it before, hadn’t she? Worked her way onto his staff to be under his nose and look after him. Watched and longed for him from afar while he went about his Joseph-like ways, not seeing more than an inch of the way before him.
There was something, too, about the dignity of the woman beside her, confiding in Inez as if she were the overseer of the house already. Inez wanted to be her confidante. Her equal.
This was the way to fix her position here.
“I am his housekeeper,” Inez said.
“You are not my housekeeper.” Joseph faced the dressing mirror with a frown and flipped his neckcloth a different way.
“Then what am I?” She focused on folding the stack of white linen she’d unpacked from his valise.
Inez and Wenna had spent an hour earlier preparing the master’s chambers for Joseph.
Together they’d aired the drawers of the cupboard, tugged the embroidered coverlet off the bed, turned the goose down tick and beat it to a light airiness.
Wenna knocked the dust from the rich brocade canopy that hung atop the four posters, catching what fell in her apron.
Inez swept the rug and did her best to polish the windows.
The dressing room was broad and airy with a window of its own and a writing desk, the flap tipped up and locked.
“Gad, I can’t even do this right!” Joseph tugged at the band of linen and threw it on the desk.
“Let me.”
She stepped close with a fresh length of linen in hand.
Hiring a valet would be a necessity if he wanted to live the life of a country gentleman, but there was a whole host of things the house needed first. His meeting with the solicitor tonight would better reveal the state of things, for good or for ill, and Joseph was nervous as a cat on hot bricks about it.
He didn’t answer her question, only studied her face as she twined the cloth gently about his neck, arranging the folds as he liked them. “You cannot pretend you are my housekeeper,” he said at last, his voice low.
He was close enough that she could rise on her toes and press her lips to his. She wanted to. His mouth was pressed in the firm, worried expression he had worn since his first survey of the house and grounds with Thaker, and the report on the animals from Jock.
She wanted back the delighted, rumpled Joseph she’d found in her bed the last two nights, the one who grinned at her with brown curls tumbling across his brow, his eyes dancing with mischief, his mouth moist from kissing her.
An ache traveled through her breasts and belly, a pain she feared would be her constant companion now.
The former Baronet had been a vain man, and mirrors stood all over the dressing room. Inez saw herself reflected back, so close to being in Joseph’s arms, yet not held. Not bound by oaths or duty, only mutual desire.
She’d found the only way she could to hold him to her, to keep from being sent back to London with Jock. Would he allow her to stay?
“You’ve need of a housekeeper,” she reminded him. “Mrs. Wadge didn’t keep the place up as she ought have done, Wenna says.”
“I am not going to behave as if you are a servant.”
Then what was she to him? Why could he not say?
She twisted the ends of the neckcloth and tucked them among the ruffles of his shirt, then smoothed the deep lapels of his waistcoat.
The heat of his skin, his neck, his strong chin, curled around her fingertips.
She’d shaved him that morning, an office she’d performed for her husband and knew how to do well.
Hours later, the stubble shadowed his splendid jaw, accenting rather than hiding the arrogant shape.
She wanted to follow the line of that jaw with her lips.
“You mean to advertise me as your mistress, then?”
His thick eyebrows drew together. Had he not given this any thought? They’d had days on the road together. Had he truly brought her all the way to Cornwall with no notion of what to do with her when they arrived?
Her heart stumbled in her chest. Perhaps he’d had the same notion from the beginning. Send her back.
She wouldn’t go. There was nothing for her in London without Joseph there. There was nothing for her anywhere, without him.
And damn him for becoming so absolutely necessary to her happiness. Making her stoop to being his servant again, which she swore she would not do, simply so she might be near him.
“I don’t suppose it’s the done thing, even in the country, to lodge one’s mistress under one’s own roof.
Still, you are the Baronet now, and by all accounts your cousin Reuben kept his light o’ loves within doors as well.
” A quick intake of breath said she’d hit a mark with that barb.
She shook out the velvet of his best dinner coat and held it up, giving him a false, forced smile.
“I could put my things in the room opposite yours,” she prattled as he slid his arms into the sleeves.
How far could she goad him before he broke?
“Fancy me then, setting myself up as the lady of the house. What shall I say to your callers, though? Am I to receive the gentry of the neighborhood and say I am your ward? They’ll see through that in an instant, as fast as Mrs. Truckle from the George.
I’m of an age to sign my own contracts.” Briskly she buttoned his coat, wondering what lay in his heart beneath all these layers, such a mystery to her.
“Such an arrangement won’t put you in good standing with the vicar, that’s certain. He’ll fear you’ll begin a new fashion for the neighborhood, keeping one’s ladybird under one’s roof. But more expensive still to house me elsewhere, unless you choose one of the cottages.”
“I am not going to put you in one of the cottages.” His scowl darkened, and he fairly spit out the words. He seemed stumbling to find speech.
The cottages were comfortable, not fancy by any means, but warm and snug.
Inez had gone with Wenna to fetch the one she called Old Jupe, a stretched-thin stick of a woman, a widow of ancient years, who minded the babes while Wenna worked.
And such sweet babes they were, a young boy of about three and a girl half that age, toddling about on unsteady legs after her brother, who explained everything to her with the authority of the elder sibling.
With nothing else to do with them for the nonce they’d brought the babes to the kitchen and put them to work, the boy mashing boiled potatoes, the bonny girl sifting flour.
In the dim reaches of her memory, Inez recalled helping her mother in much the same manner, starting at small tasks even as a young child.
She knew how to keep a house well enough, with a score of years for practice. Only when might she have a house of her own?
“True, I’ve no need for a cottage,” she said around the clump of despair in her throat.
“There’s a room in the attics that will do well enough for me, with a window to catch the air come summer.
” She buttoned his coat, taking her sweet time about it, enjoying the hard stretch of his chest beneath her fingers.
“I won’t ruin you by flaunting you as my mistress, and you are certainly not part of my staff.” His temper was rising again. He yanked at the hem of his coat, straightening the seam across his shoulders.