Chapter Eight
The next day, Helena was in the linen room, refolding a stack of pillowcases. She was just finishing when Mrs Ellis appeared with a tray.
"His lordship's asked for tea in the study," the housekeeper said.
"And specifically requested you bring it up yourself, Nell.
I can't imagine why he'd want the newest girl rather than someone who knows her way about a tray properly, but there it is.
Mind you don't spill anything on his lordship's carpets. "
Helena set off toward the study with the tea tray, her pulse climbing steadily the closer she came to the door.
She had spent the better part of the day turning over her agreement with Lord Rowan. She was relieved at the promise of extra wages, but she also felt uneasy at the prospect of spending her evenings alone with him.
What if he realises I am not a maid? She kept thinking.
What if he asked her a question and she said something to give herself away? She did not want to be sent away for deceiving him, which surely she would be.
Still, despite these fears, there was something about the Baron that could not seem to keep her away.
As she entered the room, he looked up from a stack of correspondence. Something in his expression eased at the sight of her, not quite a smile, but its quieter cousin.
"Nell. Thank you."
He watched her set the tray down, and she noticed that his knuckles looked much less inflamed.
"The hand's much improved, thanks to your balm. I'm obliged to you for it."
"I'm glad it helped, My Lord."
He was quiet for a moment.
Helena occupied herself arranging the tea things, aware of him watching her and uncertain what to do with the awareness beyond ignoring it.
"I've had an invitation," he said finally.
"To dine with some of the neighbouring landowners later this week.
I gather half the local gentry will attend, and I've no notion how to conduct myself at such a thing beyond making certain I don't put my elbows on the table.
I suspect that alone won't spare me from making a fool of myself. "
He set down the letter he'd been holding.
"Which brings us to our arrangement, I think, unless you've reconsidered it."
"I haven't, My Lord."
Helena straightened, folding her hands before her in the manner she had observed other servants adopt when addressing their employers on matters of substance.
"Though I think we ought to be careful how we go about it,” she said. “If the staff notice you keeping regular company with the newest housemaid of an evening, there will be talk, and talk of that kind could cost me my position rather quicker than any mistake with a mop."
He considered this a moment before nodding.
"You're right, of course. We'll wait until most of the household's retired, then. Late enough that no one's likely to notice you coming or going."
He paused.
"Will that trouble you? Staying up so late, on top of your regular duties?"
"I'll manage, My Lord."
It was, she reflected, likely to prove the least of her difficulties, though she saw no reason to say so aloud.
They settled, in the end, on meeting in the study each evening once the last of the servants had gone up.
***
Two nights later, long after the house had settled into its particular deep stillness, Helena arrived for their first proper lesson with an assortment of silverware borrowed from the sideboard clutched carefully against her apron.
"Dining first, I think," she said.
She began laying out the collection across the study's small table with the same careful precision she had once observed a footman use to set the table at Winford House for a formal dinner of twelve courses.
"It's the thing most likely to expose you before an entire room, and the rules are…" Her voice trailed off, searching for a word that would not betray too plainly how thoroughly she'd absorbed them herself. "Numerous."
Isaac stared at the spread of forks, knives, and spoons arranged before him with an expression of open disbelief.
"There's more cutlery here than I've owned in my whole life. What in God's name does a man need six forks for?"
"One for fish, one for meat, a smaller one for salad, one for dessert."
"And I'm meant to know which is which by looking at them?"
"You're meant to start from the outside and work inward with each course," Helena said, arranging the pieces to demonstrate.
"The outermost fork is for the first course, and so on, moving toward the plate as the meal progresses.
It sounds complicated, but it becomes instinctive enough once you've practised it a handful of times. "
Isaac picked up the outermost fork and examined it with deep suspicion, as though it might yet reveal some further hidden trap. "And if a man simply used whichever fork came to hand first?"
"Then every person at the table would know within a moment that he had never dined properly in polite company, and would likely spend the remainder of the evening discussing it in whispers behind their napkins."
Helena picked up a wine glass and held it by the stem, demonstrating.
"You'll want to hold your glass so, by the stem rather than the bowl.
Holding it by the bowl warms the wine, and marks you as unfamiliar with the custom besides.
And you must eat at a measured pace. Eating too quickly suggests a want of breeding, as though you feared the food might be taken from you before you'd finished. "
"As though a man oughtn't to enjoy his supper without some earl deciding he's done it too fast."
Isaac shook his head, turning the wine glass over in his scarred hands with evident scepticism.
"And I suppose there's some rule about when a man's allowed to actually begin eating, too?"
"There is, in fact. No guest begins until the highest-ranking person present has taken the first bite. If you begin before Lord Fenwick, or whoever holds precedence at the table, it will be noticed."
Isaac set the wine glass down and regarded her with an expression of genuine, weary bewilderment.
"Who invented such rules? What purpose could they possibly serve, beyond making certain a man spends half his supper watching another man's fork instead of eating from his own?"
"I couldn't say, My Lord. I imagine it developed over generations, each new rule added to distinguish those who knew it from those who didn't."
"Seems a poor use of a meal, if you ask me."
He picked up the innermost fork, turned it over once, and set it down again with an air of finality.
"A hungry farmer would have finished his whole supper and be halfway to bed before some earl had settled which of his six forks he meant to use first. I'd wager the farmer enjoys his meal a good deal more, besides, not having to worry whether he's holding his spoon at the correct angle for the soup. "
Helena laughed before she could stop herself. The sound of it surprised her nearly as much as it seemed to surprise him.
She could not, in fact, recall the last time she had laughed so entirely without calculation, without some part of her mind monitoring the sound for propriety. This realisation, arriving in the same instant as the laugh itself, only made her laugh harder.
Isaac was watching her with an expression of open, startled pleasure, as though her laughter were a discovery he had not anticipated making tonight.
"There," he said. "Now that's a sound I haven't heard from you before."
"Forgive me, My Lord, I don't mean to mock the lesson."
"Mock it all you like. God knows it deserves mocking."
He was smiling now, properly, the expression transforming his scarred, weathered face into something that made Helena's own smile linger.
"Go on, then. Tell me some other absurdity I'm meant to memorise before Thursday."
***
By the time the lesson finally ended, it was well past the hour either of them had likely intended.
Still, Helena found herself reluctant to gather the borrowed silverware and return to her small attic room, although she could not have said precisely why the reluctance troubled her as much as it did.
"Thank you," Isaac said, as she made to leave. "For this. I don't imagine you expected to spend your evenings teaching a former prizefighter which fork belongs to which course."
"I didn't expect a great many things, My Lord," Helena said, which was truer than she could safely explain.
"No," he agreed.
As she reached for the last of the silverware, Isaac did too, and their fingers touched. Helena's heart jumped, warmth rising in her cheeks..
"Oh," Helena breathed as she looked up, and their eyes met.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. As she stared into Isaac's green eyes, she could not help but notice the gold flecks around his irises and the thickness of his dark eyelashes. They were such tiny details, but enough to cause her heart to flutter against her ribs.
Then suddenly a door slammed from somewhere down the hallway, and the moment unravelled.
Helena quickly took a step back, heat rising in her face.
"Forgive me, My Lord," she said, bowing her head.
"There is nothing to forgive."
Her finger closed around the spoon and she managed a wobbly curtsey.
"Goodnight," she whispered.
Before he had the chance to reply, she turned and hurried from the room, making sure to keep her head bent so he could not see the colour of her face.
She returned to her attic room with her heart still racing. She undressed quickly and quietly, careful not to wake Peggy, who was already asleep.
In her nightdress, she climbed into bed and lay awake for some while
Closing her eyes, she did her best to push Isaac from her mind. After all, she had to be up early for work, and she worried that if she were tired or distracted, Mrs Ellis might wonder why and ask questions.
Work is what is most important, she reminded herself. You are here for work.
Forcing that thought to remain, Helena rolled onto her side. Sleep, however, when it finally came, did not bring rest.
She dreamed she was dancing, though the ballroom around her was hazy and indistinct, the music reaching her only as a faint, distant suggestion of melody rather than any tune she could have named.
Isaac's hand rested at her waist, warm even through the fabric of a gown, and he moved with a controlled, deliberate grace, unlike the raw physical power she had witnessed in the barn, guiding her across a floor that seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction, empty of every other soul.
The dream shifted, as dreams did, without warning or logic.
She was no longer dancing but standing close against him, his hand no longer merely at her waist but drawing her nearer, and when he lowered his head to kiss her, the sensation of it felt more vivid, more immediate, than anything her waking mind had ever conjured.
His mouth was warm against hers, his rough hands moving with a gentleness that felt entirely at odds with their strength, tracing a slow and reverent path that left heat blooming everywhere he touched.
Helena felt herself yielding to it, some part of her dreaming self astonished at how naturally her body seemed to answer his, how completely she wanted whatever this was, however unfamiliar and overwhelming the wanting felt.
And as Isaac's hands travelled beneath her skirts, she arched into him, his fingers finding their way between her thighs—
Helena woke abruptly, sitting upright in the narrow bed. Her heart was pounding and her skin was flushed, the attic room dark and silent around her. Peggy was still asleep and undisturbed in the bed beside hers.
For a long moment, Helena simply sat there, disoriented, the dream's sensations lingering with an intensity that left her both shaken and deeply, uncomfortably embarrassed.
She had never experienced anything remotely like it.
She had been raised with the strictest instruction regarding propriety and had spent twenty-four years learning precisely how a lady conducted herself—even in the privacy of her own thoughts.
Yet she could not account for why her sleeping mind had conjured such a vivid, unguarded fantasy, and certainly could not account for why the man occupying it had been Isaac Rowan.
She lay back down, pressing a hand to her still-racing heart and tried, with limited success, to reason her way toward some explanation that did not trouble her quite so thoroughly.
Exhaustion, she told herself.
The strangeness of her circumstances, the upheaval of the past fortnight, the sheer novelty of spending an evening in easy, unguarded laughter after so many weeks of fear and careful concealment.
Surely any of it might account for a dream so far outside her ordinary experience, without requiring her to examine too closely why her mind had chosen, of all the men she had ever known, to conjure this particular one in such intimate detail.
Yet even as Helena lay there, her head reasoning the dream away, she could not ignore the stirring between her legs that Isaac's imaginary touch had provoked. Nor could she refuse to acknowledge the desire that Isaac had awakened in her.
It was just a dream, she told herself. Just a dream.
But as the night continued into dawn, Helena didn’t fall back asleep. It was not because she wasn't tired, but rather because she was worried if she did fall asleep, she might dream of Isaac again.
And as much as Helena wished to convince herself that such dreams were improper, it was rather the disappointment of waking up from such a dream again that stopped her.