Chapter Five #2
Every task, it seemed, took her three times as long as it took Peggy or Bess or any of the other maids, and Helena spent the whole of that first day in a state of constant, quiet mortification, watching the other servants' movements with desperate attention and copying them as best she could.
She was terrified that her incompetence would betray her false history before she had completed even a single full day of work.
It was midway through the second day that Helena's mortification found an entirely new and unexpected direction.
She's been sent by Mrs Ellis to assist the stable hands and help organise supplies ahead of a delivery of horses expected that afternoon. As she walked to the stables, she made the same resolution she'd been making for two days.
I will try harder, watch more carefully, and somehow become the competent servant I need to be.
Just then, she heard something strange, and her attention was drawn toward an old storage barn set slightly apart from the main stable block.
The sound, a steady, rhythmic series of heavy impacts, was coming from inside.
Helena paused. And then, driven by both curiosity and the simple impulse to investigate, she slipped toward the barn's open door.
What she saw, framed in the doorway, stopped her in her tracks.
A man stood alone in the centre of the barn, stripped to trousers and boots, his shirt discarded across a nearby crate. He was striking a heavy leather sack that hung suspended from a beam overhead with blows so forceful the whole structure shuddered with each impact.
The man was larger than any man Helena had ever stood in a room with.
He was not merely tall, though he was that too, but built with a kind of dense, powerful muscularity she had never once observed in drawing rooms or ballrooms. Sweat gleamed across his back and shoulders in the pale morning light filtering through the barn's high windows.
His movements carried a controlled, economical power that seemed entirely at odds with his size. The movements were quick and precise, each strike landing with a force that spoke of long practice rather than mere brute strength.
Helena's eyes, before she could master them, traced the map of old scars and fresh bruises marking his skin. They were the kind of marks she had no framework for understanding beyond some vague sense that they told a history more violent than anything she had experienced in her own sheltered life.
She had seen gentlemen fence, on the rare occasions such demonstrations were arranged for ladies' entertainment.
She had watched them hunt, dance, ride to hounds with careful, cultivated grace.
But she had never seen anything remotely resembling this…
A man moving with such raw, unselfconscious physical power, his whole body given over to the work of it.
And she found herself standing frozen in the barn's doorway for several long moments, unable to look away, some part of her mind completely occupied with an interest she did not have the vocabulary to properly name.
He stopped abruptly, the leather sack still swinging behind him, and turned toward the doorway. Their eyes met.
Heat rose in her face with mortifying speed.
And in that moment of panic, she drew on instinct.
"There is work to be done this morning," she said, straightening and lifting her chin in a passable imitation of composure. "Everyone in this household is expected to contribute if the estate is to be properly run, and I hardly think idling in a barn qualifies as contributing to anything."
This particular authoritative briskness was something she had heard her father employ with servants a thousand times.
The man's eyebrows rose, and something flickered across his face.
It was not defensiveness, but something closer to open amusement. This struck Helena as an entirely inappropriate response from a man she had just, quite reasonably, reprimanded for shirking his duties.
He reached for a cloth draped over a nearby post and wiped his face with unhurried calm before approaching, closing the distance between them until he stood only a few feet away.
He was close enough that Helena had to tilt her head back to hold his gaze. Close enough that she became suddenly, uncomfortably aware of the sheer physical scale of him, and of her own considerably diminished authority in the face of it.
"And who might you be," he said, his voice low and rough with exertion, "to come telling me my business? I don't recall seeing you about the place before."
"I'm the newest maid employed in this household," Helena said, holding her ground despite every instinct urging her to retreat.
"And I should think it plain enough that everyone here has responsibilities, whatever position they hold.
I've spent the whole of this morning learning mine, however poorly, and I see no reason a stable hand ought to spend it sparring with a sack of leather while there's real work waiting. "
Something in his expression shifted further into unmistakable amusement, a faint smile pulling at one corner of his mouth. He studied her for a long moment with an attention that felt, uncomfortably, as though he were reading something in her face she had not intended to show.
"Is that so?" he muttered. "Well. I'm obliged to you for the reminder, seeing as how I've evidently been shirking."
He extended a hand.
"Isaac Rowan. Lord Rowan, if you'd prefer the whole of it."
Every drop of colour drained from Helena's face at once.
For a moment she could not speak. The whole of her carefully constructed composure collapsed beneath the weight of what she had just done.
She'd reprimanded the very man whose household now employed her.
Every lesson of her childhood rushed back at once, a lifetime of careful instruction on precisely how one addressed a peer of the realm, all of it arriving several moments too late to prevent the catastrophe she had already committed.
She dropped into a curtsy so hasty and ill-executed that she nearly stumbled, her borrowed skirts tangling briefly about her ankles.
"My Lord, forgive me, I had no notion… I believed you one of the stable hands, I would never have presumed to speak so if I had known."
"Evidently," he said.
Although his tone remained mild and faintly amused rather than angry, Helena could not bring herself to look up long enough to properly gauge his expression.
"I beg your forgiveness, My Lord. It was a terrible presumption, inexcusable, and I—"
She heard herself babbling, but was unable to stop, twenty-four years of etiquette collapsing into a single mortified stream of apology.
"I only meant, that is, I did not intend any disrespect, only I thought—"
"You thought I was a shirking stable hand," he said, "and told me so plainly. No great crime in that, so far as I can tell."
But Helena had already heard enough of her own humiliation and could not bear to remain in his presence a moment longer than necessary.
She rose from her ruined curtsy, murmured one final, barely coherent apology, and fled the barn without daring to look back.
She hurried across the courtyard toward the stables with her face burning and her heart hammering so violently she thought she might be ill.
She had escaped London. She had escaped her father's fury and Crawford's schemes and the ruin of everything her old life had promised her.
She had survived a week alone on the road with nothing but a handful of coins and a false name.
She had somehow, against every reasonable expectation, secured a position that offered her genuine safety for the first time since she'd fled Winford House.
And she had ruined it, within two days of arriving, by insulting her new employer to his face.
Helena was certain, as she finally reached the stables, that she would be dismissed before the day's end. She'd be turned out with nothing, her false history unravelling the moment Lord Rowan mentioned the incident to Mrs Ellis.