Chapter Six
Isaac woke early, as he generally did, and lay for a moment in the unfamiliar comfort of his new bed.
As he lay there, he replayed, against his own better judgment, the memory of the previous morning's encounter in the barn.
He had been struck across the face, cut, bruised, and once nearly blinded in fifteen years of prizefighting, and had absorbed all of it with something approaching equanimity.
Yet, he could not recall the last time anyone had spoken to him the way that girl had.
She could not have been more than five and a half feet, slight as a reed, and still she had planted herself in that doorway and scolded the new Baron Rowan as though he were a stable boy caught napping in the hay.
He did not know whether to call it bravery or foolishness.
Perhaps, he thought, climbing out of bed and reaching for his shirt, it was some measure of both.
The thought of her followed him all the way to the breakfast room where Tom was already waiting.
"You're smiling," his friend observed, waving a bacon-laden fork in his direction. Isaac stepped inside and walked over to his seat at the head of the table.
"Haven't seen that particular expression on you since you put Coleman on the canvas. What's amused you so early in the morning, My Lord?"
"Nothing."
"That's your nothing face, is it? Interesting. I'll have to learn the difference." Tom studied him with open curiosity over the rim of his teacup. "Go on, then. Out with it."
Isaac considered denying it further, but then decided the effort wasn't worth the trouble, and recounted the incident briefly.
"She ordered you back to work?" Tom said, wiping the tears of laughter from his eyes. "The new Baron Rowan, master of this whole great estate, told off by a housemaid half his size for shirking his own duties. God, I'd have paid good money to see that. What did you do?"
"Told her my name."
"And?"
"She went the colour of milk and near fell over her own curtsy apologising."
Isaac smiled again despite his best effort at composure and reached for his tea.
"Strangest girl I've come across in some time. Spoke to me plain as day until she knew who I was, and then couldn't stop apologising long enough to breathe."
"Well," Tom said, still grinning, "I like her already, whoever she is. Anyone brave enough, or foolish enough, to scold you to your face deserves some credit for it. Most people in this county can't decide whether to bow or run the other way."
The lightness of the morning did not survive long past breakfast.
Isaac and Tom set out for London within the hour, answering the letter that had summoned him to take his seat at the House of Lords.
***
The three days of travel that followed left Isaac with ample opportunity to regret ever having accepted Harrow's papers in the first place.
By the time their hired carriage finally rattled into Westminster on the third evening, both men were road-weary and glad enough to find a modest inn where they might sleep before the following morning's proceedings.
It was there, in a cramped room smelling of tallow and damp plaster, that Whitby's foresight proved its worth.
The old butler had insisted, before they left Yorkshire, on packing a coat of dark blue superfine wool that Isaac understood, with a faint discomfort he could not quite name, as belonging to the late baron's wardrobe.
"Your own garments have not yet arrived from the tailor in York, My Lord," Whitby had said, laying the coat carefully into their trunk along with an assortment of linen, waistcoats, and boots polished to a mirror shine, "and I thought it best you not appear before the House of Lords in travelling clothes.
The late baron was near enough your height, though I confess the shoulders may want some alteration. "
Isaac studied the coat for a long moment before working his way into it with Tom's clumsy assistance.
The wool was fine beyond anything he had ever worn, the cut precise in a way that felt less like clothing and more like a costume assembled for a role he had not yet learned his lines for.
When Tom finally stepped back and allowed him to view the result in the inn's small, spotted looking glass, Isaac stood for a long moment simply staring.
The man in the mirror looked, at first glance, respectable. Dressed in a dark coat, crisp linen, boots polished to a fine gloss, every outward mark of a gentleman of consequence.
But beneath the fine wool, Isaac could see the same broad shoulders that had carried him through prize rings, the same crooked nose, the same scar across his eyebrow that no amount of fine tailoring could disguise.
***
The next day Tom accompanied him as far as the entrance to the House of Lords, though he was obliged to remain outside.
"You'll do fine," Tom said, clapping him once on the shoulder before he climbed the steps alone. "Just don't hit anyone, whatever they say to you. Might be frowned upon in there."
Isaac managed something that was almost a laugh, and then he was moving up the steps and through the great doors. As he stepped inside, whatever levity Tom's parting words had briefly summoned dissolved immediately.
In their place was cold attentiveness that had already decided what it thought of him before he'd spoken a single word.
He was, technically, entitled to every courtesy the chamber extended to any peer of the realm. And technically, that is what he received. Bows offered at the correct depth, his name spoken with correct formality, every outward requirement of custom observed with scrupulous precision.
But Isaac had spent fifteen years learning to read a room before the first blow was ever thrown, and he read this one without difficulty. Conversations paused as he passed and resumed, in lowered tones, once he had gone by.
Several lords greeted him with the bare minimum courtesy required and turned away before he had finished responding. A cluster of younger men near one of the tall windows made no particular effort to disguise their amusement, glancing toward him and exchanging looks that required no translation.
The older peers, at least, seemed inclined toward curiosity rather than open contempt, studying him with the frank interest of men encountering something genuinely novel in a chamber that had seen very little novelty in several generations.
It was, Isaac reflected, the closest thing to a kindness the day offered him, though even curiosity carried its own particular discomfort, the sense of being examined as a specimen rather than greeted as a colleague.
The worst of it came during the formalities of registration, when Isaac was required to remove his gloves to sign the roll.
His hands, scarred and permanently swollen across the knuckles from fifteen years of connecting with other men's jaws, drew exactly the attention he had feared they might.
From the corner of his eye, he caught two young viscounts exchanging a look of open astonishment at the sight of them, quickly and imperfectly disguised behind polite expressions the moment they realised he had noticed.
"Lord Rowan."
An elderly peer approached as Isaac withdrew his hand from the register, offering a bow of genuine correctness that Isaac had begun, by this point, to recognise as increasingly rare.
"Allow me to congratulate you on your inheritance. Remarkable business, the whole affair, genealogy is a strange science, is it not, throwing up surprises after so many years. The House has certainly become more diverse of late, I must say."
The comment was delivered with perfect courtesy, and Isaac understood, with total clarity, exactly what lay beneath it.
"Thank you, My Lord," he said.
"Tell me," another gentleman put in. "Does prizefighting prepare a man for parliamentary debate? I understand the two arts share certain, shall we say, fundamentals. The art of landing a decisive blow, and so forth."
Laughter followed, restrained enough to preserve the appearance of civility and unrestrained in its actual meaning.
Isaac held the man's gaze for a moment longer than was strictly comfortable, long enough that the gentleman's smile faltered just slightly.
"I imagine debate requires rather more patience than a fight does, My Lord. A fight's generally over faster."
Isaac took what small satisfaction he could from the exchange and spent the remainder of the session saying as little as possible, observing the chamber's unfamiliar customs with careful attention, fulfilling every formal obligation required of a peer taking his seat for the first time, and departing at the earliest moment propriety allowed.
Tom was waiting on the steps outside, and took one look at Isaac's face before deciding, with unusual tact, to postpone whatever jokes he had evidently prepared for the occasion.
"That bad?"
"Let's just get out of London."
They set out for Yorkshire that same afternoon, and the three days of hard travel that followed did little to soften what Isaac had carried out of Westminster with him.
He spent long stretches of the journey staring out at the passing countryside in silence.
"You need to put them out of your mind," Tom said eventually.
"I am trying," Isaac sighed.
"Half of them looked soft as fresh bread," Tom offered. "I'd wager not one in ten could survive thirty seconds against a proper fighter. All that sneering, and not a man among them's ever had to earn a single thing he owns."
"Doesn't matter, Tom." Isaac did not look away from the window.
"They don't need to earn anything. That's rather the point.
I could put every man in that chamber on the ground inside a minute, and it wouldn't change a thing they think of me, because what they think has nothing to do with what I can do with my fists.
It's about where I was born, and what my hands look like, and the fact that everyone in that room knew, the moment I walked in, exactly what I used to be. "
He exhaled slowly.
"I keep thinking I only need to prove myself, and I'll be accepted eventually. I'm starting to wonder whether that's even possible. Whether there's any proving my worth to them.”
Tom had no answer for that, which was, in itself, an answer of a kind.
Because it was the first time since Harrow's papers had arrived in that Hounslow tavern that Isaac's oldest friend had not immediately found some confident, cheerful rebuttal to offer.
The silence that followed felt honest, perhaps more so than any reassurance Tom might have manufactured in its place.
By the time they reached Rowan Hall, night had fully settled over the estate, and the household had largely retired for the evening, only a few lamps left burning to light Isaac's way through the quiet corridors.
He bid Tom goodnight near the stairs and continued alone toward his rooms, still turning over the day's indignities with a restlessness that made sleep feel, for the moment, out of reach.
It was in the entrance hall, crossing toward the main staircase, that he noticed movement near the base of the stairs and paused.
The new maid, the one from the day before, knelt on the marble floor with a bucket and mop, working through what was evidently meant to be the evening's cleaning, though the results suggested the effort was proceeding rather badly.
She had used what looked like an entire cake of soap, thick streaks of it foaming across the stone in a pattern that would leave, once it dried, a hazy film rather than any genuine cleanliness.
She struggled with the mop, her movements awkward and inefficient, clearly a woman entirely unfamiliar with the particular technique the task required.
As Isaac watched, she nearly lost her footing on a patch already gone dangerously slick beneath the excess soap.
"You'll want less of that," he said, and watched her startle so violently she nearly dropped the mop.
She turned, and he saw recognition arrive on her face along with something that looked distinctly like dread.
"My Lord! I didn't hear you come in. Forgive me, I'll have this finished right away—"
"Sweep the floor when it is dry first," Isaac said, ignoring the apology and crossing closer to study the mess she had made of the marble.
"Then wash it with only a little water and hardly any soap at all.
What you've done here will dry into a film that'll have someone breaking their neck on it by morning. "
"Of course, My Lord. I only thought, that is, I believed more soap would clean it more thoroughly, and I…"
Her voice trailed off, evidently hearing the thinness of her own explanation even as she offered it. Isaac watched her flounder for a moment before falling silent altogether.
He studied her for a long moment in the lamplight and could not help but notice, one after another, a series of small details that did not quite fit together into any story he recognised.
Her voice, for one, was carefully plain, but with an underlying precision to her vowels that no amount of effort at simplification could disguise. It was the kind of speech he associated with drawing rooms rather than sculleries.
Her hands, when she shifted her grip on the mop, were smooth and unmarked beneath the fresh redness that a day's labour brought. There were no callouses, no signs of a life spent mopping floors and carrying buckets.
"What's your name?" he asked.
She lowered her eyes. "Nell, My Lord."
He nodded slowly, and said nothing further, though the curiosity did not fully leave him even as he turned back toward the staircase.
There was something about the girl that sat oddly against everything else in the household. In fact, her whole manner suggested a woman playing a part she had not fully learned rather than living a life she had always known.
But he had a barony he barely understood, a chamber full of noblemen who had made their contempt for him abundantly clear, tenant farms requiring his attention, and a title he was still uncertain he deserved to hold.
Whatever secrets a single housemaid happened to be keeping seemed, weighed against all of that, a matter beneath his notice.
He climbed the stairs without looking back, telling himself, with more conviction than he felt, that the strange new maid currently ruining his marble floor was none of his concern.