Chapter 16 #2
“We might serve ourselves,” Joseph said to Inez, suddenly unable to bear the thought of her waiting on him.
Calling himself his housekeeper, of all things, as if she were no more than a maid he was amusing himself with, and not the woman he wanted seated across the table from him in his lady’s chair.
He wondered what Hoskyn would do if he invited Inez to join them.
“Sit,” she said gently, and Joseph dropped into his folding chair as if the air had been let out of him. What was he to do with her?
She was correct: He couldn’t masquerade her as his ward and trot her out for parlor conversations or strolls through the shops of Callington.
He’d never be able to hide what he felt for her, and ten minutes of conversation would establish for the small but elect sliver of genteel Cornish society that she was not gently born.
And he could not keep her here as his mistress.
One might take such liberties in London, where the sheer size and energy of the town overwhelmed decorum.
But rural societies tended to adhere more closely to the niceties, at least the ones he’d experienced, for the very fact of their remoteness from fashionable centers.
And if she were known to be a fallen woman, she’d be thoroughly shunned. It wouldn’t be fair to her.
Yet to pretend to being his housekeeper.
He glared at her across the small table, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes, instead cutting the pudding of baked pillas, the Cornish grain that Joseph had never seen grown anywhere else.
Once Hoskyn and everyone established that she was his servant, he couldn’t elevate her beyond that.
He wouldn’t be the first gentleman who had confused the roles of housekeeper and mistress, he knew that much. But gentlemen didn’t marry their housekeepers.
He understood her reasoning. She wanted a wage from him, fair and honest, so she couldn’t be caught whoring. But in so doing she’d erected a barrier thicker than the wall that had separated Pyramus and Thisbe.
Beautiful, proud, glorious, aggravating woman.
“You’ll quite stand out in these parts, a woman of your good looks,” Hoskyn said as Inez spooned pickles onto his plate. “Though there’s many another like you here and about and along the coasts. Falmouth especially, but Plymouth too, I believe.”
Inez looked up swiftly. “Like me?”
“Yes. Erm, that is to say.” Hoskyn waved his hand before his face. “Less…fair of complexion?”
“Oh.” Inez returned to the pudding, looking relieved; Hoskyn was referring to her skin color, not her erotic liaison.
Regret bit through Joseph’s skin. In London, there were any number of people like her, Blacks, Indians, visitors native to the Americas, the Moor who ran the bookshop Amaranthe frequented.
There was every shade of skin color on display.
But he’d brought her to Cornwall, where she was bound to stand out.
She’d known that, and so insisted he give her a position of respect. Being the upper servant of a great house was no small standing in a neighborhood like theirs; servants and tradesmen and land owners alike would recognize and defer to her status.
His clever, soft-hearted, beautiful Inez. It was impossible not to love her.
“How bad is it?” Joseph couldn’t wait until Thaker had finished spooning up the salad, buttered cabbage topped with roasted Cornish earlies, the new potatoes roasted in their skins and sticky with butter and parsley.
“Hmm. What’s that?” Hoskyn was watching Inez with interest, but Joseph also recognized the wariness of the profession.
“You can speak in front of them. Thaker doesn’t hear, and Inez is the soul of discretion.”
Drat it. He’d called her Inez.
“You may call me Mrs. Da Costa,” she said in her musical tone. Not chiding. Simply stating.
She did not wish to use her father’s name? Interesting.
“She is fully informed of my circumstances,” Joseph added, aware he was digging himself a hole. Was he trying to write a sign and place it around her neck, advertising to other men that she belonged to him?
Yes. Yes, he was.
Hoskyn sipped his wine and waited until Thaker and Inez had withdrawn before he turned to Joseph with a regretful air.
“I wish I had better news,” he said.
Much later, sodden with wine and despair, Joseph climbed the narrow servant’s stair to the second floor.
Inez was not on the ground floor, which held the kitchens and offices and a tiny room that doubled as a silver pantry and the housekeeper’s parlor. The kitchen fire was banked for the night, the tables and counters cleaned and scrubbed, the scullery empty.
Wenna had promised she would start looking for staff on the morrow; she vowed there would be likely hands for the indoor and outdoor work to be found in Haye and Trevigro, Frogwell or Kelly Bray, or down to Newbridge, if need be.
How he was to pay them, Joseph didn’t know, but he couldn’t leave two women to run this house by themselves. Inez would know what they needed.
She hadn’t taken a room on the first floor, with the family chambers, and his stomach turned and twisted like a stoat burrowing into a tree trunk. He wanted her nearby. He wanted her in his bed.
The rooms on the second floor were attics and servant quarters, tucked under the sloping roof, plain and small and tidy.
Her chamber did, as she’d noted, boast a window, and through it shone the moon, bright enough to light Hoskyn on his way.
Inez had offered the solicitor a room for the night, and Joseph knew she had spent their leisurely dinner readying a guest chamber for the man who was at the moment sealing Joseph’s doom with black wax.
But the solicitor declined, saying he had a sister in St. Ive who would put him up for the night, not caring what hour he knocked on her door, and Joseph did not argue to keep him.
Not when he knew Inez was waiting, though not like this, sitting in her chair mending something while the candle in its stick burned low on the small chest of drawers.
The shadows it drew over her face were loving and mysterious, hinting at the depths of this woman he might never know.
She yawned and put her mending atop the drawers. It appeared she was darning a stocking—one of his. “You should be in bed,” he reproved her.
“I meant to come help you undress.”
“Very well, then. I could use your assistance. And company.”
He swept her into his arms. She bit back a shriek as her feet left the floor, before she realized, like he did, there was no one to hear.
They were alone in the house. They were entirely, completely alone together, as they never had been before and might never be so again.
“I don’t— You’ll drop me,” she reproached him, though she didn’t struggle. Instead she linked her arms around his neck, trusting. He savored the warm weight of her, his lush, soft, woman.
“Bring the candle. I left mine in my room.” He swerved his arms so she could lift the stick and holder, holding it away from their bodies.
“Joseph. I can walk,” she said as he navigated back down the stairs, angling his body so he didn’t bump her head or feet on the walls.
“I want you in my arms. I want you in my arms at all times, as a matter of fact.”
“Bad news?” she asked softly.
“The worst.” He reached his room and paused beside a side table, where she set down the candlestick. “No, that’s not quite true.”
He set her on her feet but held her within his arms, resting his chin on the top of her head. She slipped her arms around his back, leaning against his chest, and everything stopped hurting.
“The worst would be to hear that my inheritance was a lie and the estate really belongs to someone else. Though that would save me a good deal of bother.” He pulled the cap from her hair, then began hunting out hairpins, collecting them carefully in his palm. Her hair was soft as silk thread.
“In actual fact, Reuben has left me several debts and not much money. He hasn’t done repairs to his buildings in quite some time. He owes his tenants several repairs, too.
“The land he lets has been planted for spring, but not the home farm, as there is no one but Thaker left. We have some animals, but the spring shearing hasn’t been done, so there is no wool to market, and no one to oversee the lambing.
“The stables are a shambles. My cousin had ambitions to cultivate a racehorse and so spent a stupid amount on that. I can sell the animal back, Hoskyn tells me, though it will only pay off part of the debts. And I’ve no notion how I’ve to support this house.
Or staff.” He buried his face in her neck, inhaling her scent. “Or you.”
“That is the way of it all over,” she murmured. “You live on credit until you are back on your feet.”
“All over, is it?” He rubbed his hands over her back, soothing himself with the quiet strength of her. Then he set to unpinning her bodice, freeing those lovely breasts.
She nodded, holding out her arms so he might undress her.
“Aboard ships, certainly. Captains take on their cargo and sail for months, sometimes years, before they see a profit.
Very often the crew have to wait to see their wages, too.
We never knew, when my father returned home, if he would have coin in his pocket to support us.
“And the great houses run the same way. All on credit, until the harvest comes in, and one sees how much of it one may pay off for the year.”
“You are far less worried about this than I am.” He set her bodice aside and began unlacing her leather stays, a process much impeded by his need to pause and slide his hands over her bosom. So warm. So soft. So obliging she was, her dark eyes lifted to his in trust and innocence.
Mirroring back what he felt for her: lost, utterly lost, in desire.
“We will manage, Joseph,” she whispered against his lips. Her stays opened and her breasts spilled into his hands, at long last, and he bent his face to kiss her.
“Hoskyn was kind but honest. I can keep the house if I am very, very frugal.”