Chapter Seven
The frustration of the House of Lords did not leave Isaac in the days after returning to Rowan Hall. It sat heavy in his chest, the memory of polite condescension and poorly disguised laughter following him around and refusing to loosen its grip no matter how he tried.
That morning he sat at his desk in the study attempting to review the ledgers that Fletcher had left him. But he could not focus. Eventually, he gave up trying to work and made his way out of the house and toward the old training barn behind the stables.
He did not bother with gloves.
The leather sack absorbed the first blow with a dull, satisfying thud.
He followed it with another, then another, driving his fists into the worn leather with a force he had not allowed himself since the Coleman fight, letting the rhythm of it burn away thought entirely.
His knuckles split within the first quarter hour, old scars reopening beneath the strain, blood smearing thin and dark against the pale leather. He barely registered the sting of it.
Some part of his mind was grateful for this simple pain, pain it could understand. Nothing like the slow, corrosive ache of standing in a room full of men who had decided exactly what he was and precisely how little he was worth.
He fought until his shoulders burned and his breath came ragged, until the anger that had followed him home from Westminster had finally, mercifully, burned itself down to something manageable.
A pair of stable boys had gathered near the barn door at some point during the effort, drawn by the noise. Isaac was aware of them watching with the particular wide-eyed silence of boys witnessing something they knew, instinctively, they were not meant to interrupt.
They drifted away eventually, leaving him alone with the sack and his own laboured breathing.
It was only once the last of his fury had drained out through his fists that he finally stopped, hands throbbing, chest heaving, and allowed himself to feel, beneath the exhaustion, something close to calm.
He returned to the manor sometime past noon, exhausted in the particularly thorough way only real exertion produced.
After changing into fresh clothes, his knuckles wrapped hastily in linen he'd found in his rooms, he retreated once more to the estate office, hoping the afternoon might prove more productive than the morning had.
It did not.
The ledgers remained as reluctant to yield their meaning as before, and correspondence from three neighbouring landowners sat unanswered on the desk while his attention drifted, again and again, toward thoughts he had no wish to entertain.
A soft knock interrupted his thoughts, and he looked up to find the door opening on Nell, a tray balanced carefully before her.
"Your tea, My Lord."
She set it down on the corner of the desk with more care than the task strictly required, and when she straightened, her eyes settled on his hands.
"My Lord! Your hands."
"It's nothing."
He drew them back instinctively, tucking them from view with the same reflex he'd have used to hide a wound from an opponent who might exploit it. "Only some training. Looks worse than it is."
She studied him for a moment with an expression he could not read. Concern, certainly, though there was something more considered beneath it, as though she were weighing some private calculation before she spoke again.
"Would you object, My Lord, if I prepared something for the swelling? It would take only a little time."
Isaac blinked, genuinely surprised by the offer.
He could not recall the last time anyone had offered to tend an injury of his without being paid to do so, and certainly not a housemaid he had spoken to but twice.
Still, there seemed no particular harm in it, and something in her quiet earnestness made refusal feel unnecessarily churlish.
"If you like."
She disappeared without further comment, and returned ten minutes later with an assortment of herbs he assumed she had gathered from the kitchen gardens. She also carried a small block of beeswax and a jar of rendered fat.
Isaac watched as she set to work at the edge of the office fireplace, crushing the herbs together with the flat of a small knife before warming them gently with the fat and wax in a battered pan above a candle.
"You seem to know your way around this well enough," he observed, "for a girl who can't carry a bucket of water without soaking her skirts."
Something flickered across her face, though she recovered quickly.
"Different sorts of knowledge, My Lord. This isn't so very difficult, once you know what to look for."
She knelt beside his chair once the balm had cooled enough to handle and took his hand into both of hers with a gentleness that struck him as somehow more startling than any blow he'd taken that morning.
Her fingers were smooth despite the fresh blisters marking her palms, and she worked the balm carefully across his split knuckles with a light, practised touch.
In truth Isaac was not unfamiliar to a woman's touch, but the women he had known in the past, they were not like Nell.
There was something about her, something different.
And although he could not rightly explain what it was, Isaac could not ignore the stirring in his trousers caused by the very sight of her on her knees before him.
He grew hot behind the collar as he did his best to ignore such thoughts.
Silence settled between them as she worked.
But it was an oddly comfortable sort of silence, not the strained, careful type he had grown accustomed to since arriving at Rowan Hall, where servants, tenants and neighbouring gentry all watched him with varying degrees of wariness.
Instead, it was quieter and easier, the kind of silence that asked nothing of him at all.
"Where did you learn so much about herbs and remedies?" he asked, watching her work.
She did not look up.
"My mother knew a great many country remedies, My Lord. She helped nurse the neighbours when I was a girl. Fevers, cuts, the like. I suppose I absorbed more of it than I realised at the time."
He said nothing further, only watched as she finished her work.
A few moments later, when Nell stepped back to survey the results, her attention shifted, apparently without much thought, toward his throat.
"Forgive me, My Lord, but your cravat is…"
She stopped herself, visibly reconsidering whether the observation was hers to make.
"It's been tied incorrectly,” she finished at last. “The knot sits crooked, and rather too loose besides."
Isaac glanced down at the offending cravat with something between embarrassment and resignation.
"Wouldn't surprise me. I've spent my whole life tying work scarves, not whatever this is meant to be. Whitby's shown me the proper method twice now and I still can't make the thing sit right."
"May I?"
He considered refusing, some instinct warning him that this particular request carried more risk than the balm had, and he nodded regardless.
Nell stepped closer, close enough that he caught the faint scent of the crushed herbs still clinging to her hands. She reached up and began unknotting the cravat with quick, sure fingers, murmuring instructions as she did.
Isaac held still beneath her attention, acutely aware of her nearness in a way he had not quite anticipated.
His gaze drifted downward as she bent to adjust the fold at his collar, and he caught a glimpse of the soft curve of her throat and the pale skin just beyond it. At the same time, he felt something low and unbidden stir in him.
He looked away sharply, fixing his eyes instead on the middle distance beyond her shoulder until the moment passed and his own composure returned to him.
"There," she said, stepping back. "That's how it ought to sit."
"Thank you."
He cleared his throat, grateful for the excuse to look elsewhere while he recovered himself.
"You've a fair eye for these things, for a housemaid."
"I've worked in great houses before, My Lord. One picks up a great deal, watching how such things are properly done."
"Well then, I daresay you could teach me a good deal more than just the tying of a cravat," Isaac said.
"If it would be of use to you, My Lord," she replied. "I've seen enough of aristocratic ways to know the shape of them, at least."
Isaac studied her for a long moment.
He had spent the whole of the previous day surrounded by men who had made their contempt for his ignorance of such things abundantly, humiliatingly clear.
Yet, here stood a solution he had not thought to look for in his own household.
A servant who somehow possessed exactly the knowledge he most desperately lacked.
"I've no interest in becoming fashionable," he said slowly.
"Never will be, whatever coat Whitby puts me in.
But I'll admit I've no wish to make a fool of myself every time I'm made to stand in a room with the gentry, either.
If you're willing to help with that, teach me the customs, the manners, whatever's needed so I don't disgrace myself further than I already have, I'd be obliged to you for it.
I'll pay you extra for your time, on top of your wages. "
"You needn't pay me extra, My Lord, for a few evenings' conversation."
"I'll pay you regardless. A woman ought to earn for what she's giving, and you'd be earning this."
He held her gaze, wanting her to understand he meant it plainly, without complication.
"Only I'd ask that it stay between us. I've no wish for the rest of the household gossiping about the new baron needing lessons from a housemaid on how to hold his own fork."
She was quiet for a moment.
"I accept, My Lord," she said finally. "I'll help however I'm able."
"Good." Isaac nodded. "We'll start tomorrow evening, then.
"As you wish, My Lord," Nell said. "I should be getting back before Mrs Ellis wonders where I am."
Isaac watched as she gathered her things and walked back across the room to the door.
"Nell?"
She paused at the door, looking back.
"Thank you. For the hands, and the rest of it."
Something soft moved across her expression, there and gone too quickly for him to properly name it.
"Of course, My Lord. Goodnight."
She left him alone with his tea grown cold and his knuckles smelling faintly of crushed herbs and beeswax.
Isaac sat for a long while after she had gone, staring at the door she had closed behind her, turning over the strange, quiet ease of the last half hour against everything else the day had handed him.
He did not know what Nell was hiding. He was more certain than ever that she was hiding something.
But for the first time since Harrow had walked into that Hounslow tavern with his leather case and his careful documents, Isaac found himself looking forward to the following evening with something other than dread.