Chapter 5 #2
“I confess I did not expect that answer,” she finally said after she’d found her words, and looked as though she saw him in an entirely new light.
“So.” She cleared her throat. “We have strayed from the issue at hand. You have failed two questions, yet you have passed two, if we include the one you yourself posed regarding the governess. That makes it a pat. You could very well be an impostor, a very intelligent one, who is attempting to wheedle himself into Lady Evie’s life. ”
“Nonsense. My name has been proven. I merely went along with you because I find it amusing.” He could hardly believe that he’d wasted half an hour on something as ridiculous as this conversation. How had it come to this?
Once more she stared at him. “You are an odd sort of person, do you know? Not at all old and doddering.”
He blinked. “I am gratified to hear it.”
She shook her head as if shaking her thoughts away. “But now I must go and nurse Lady Evie.” She jumped up.
His hand shot out to push her down in the same manner that he’d pushed down Schneider earlier.
“Sit.” He was used to his orders being instantly obeyed, particularly when they were uttered in this biting, curt manner. His soldiers jumped to his command without question. This one disregarded him entirely, as if he’d never spoken.
Instead, she wrung her hands, clearly distressed. “I must help her get better.”
“Nonsense. There is nothing you can do.”
“But she will die. And it’s all my fault.” Her china-blue eyes welled up with tears, causing him to fidget in his chair.
She wasn’t about to cry, was she?
“You will fall ill,” he said slowly, as if to a child.
“And then we’ll have two of you down with the measles.
It might mar your—” he flicked his hand towards her cheek “—pretty complexion. And if you insist on walking in and out of the room, you will infect everyone else here who has not had the disease. And that would not be good.”
She tilted her head sideways. “Truly? You mean to say, everyone here might fall ill?” Her eyes seemed to grow rounder still and looked enormous in her narrow, elfin face.
“That would be rather harrowing, would it not?” Her voice had taken on a noticeable lisp.
“What on earth would we do if everyone here in the room dies? The innkeeper too? That would be uncommonly sad, would it not?”
Was she roasting him?
“You can take preventive measures by staying away from the sick room. The maid has had the illness, or the doctor would not have permitted her to remain. She will suffice.”
“But she will be so lonely up there.” Miss Honeywell pulled out a handkerchief. “Poor Lady Evie. Such terrible misfortune. Whatever on earth shall we do now?” She dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief and stifled a sob.
Georg repressed a groan. “Pray do not weep. I truly can’t abide it.”
She wept even harder, to the point that her shoulders shook. “But it is all so terribly s-sad!” Her voice was shaking. “Whatever on earth are we to do?”
Heaven help him. Fainting females were one thing.
Crying ones were another entirely… Fainting females he could handle.
Barely. One merely needed to shove hartshorn salt under their noses and find them a place to lie down.
The order of things was negotiable. But crying ones, particularly when they looked at him with huge, blue eyes like hers, swimming in tears…
Herrgott, that he could not handle. Female tears left him feeling helpless and trapped.
And there it was, stealing over him, that familiar feeling.
It was a softening, an urge to do something, anything at all to make her cease crying.
It was a sentiment he loathed with all his might. For it was dangerous.
Georg tugged at his cravat. “Pray compose yourself. Your tears won’t improve matters in the least. Instead of crying, I must ask you to provide me with intelligence.”
She lowered her handkerchief. Her tears seemed to have subsided quickly, for her face was quite dry. “Intelligence? What do you mean, intelligence? Why would I have intelligence? What sort of intelligence?” She looked left and right, then whispered, “Do you think I am a spy?”
“Information,” he ground out between gritted teeth, “as to why you are here. And where you are travelling.”
“Why?”
“Because it is a reasonable thing to inquire into given that your employer has fallen ill, and you are stranded in an inn in the middle of nowhere.”
She tilted her head the other way, and blinked. “Why?”
Georg felt like dashing his head against the table. “Truly, Miss Honeywell? You tell me. Why are you here, stranded in this miserable inn?”
“Oh, I can tell you that!” She looked at him happily.
“It is because an evil coach, instead of helping us, drove past us, right through a puddle, and splashed us from head to toe with puddle water. Though in all fairness, it was not the coach that was evil, but the driver. Or rather, the passengers the coachman was driving. Drove straight past us and splashed us from head to toe. That did not help in the least, you know, for we were already woefully stuck in a mud hole.” She paused to think.
“The carriage, that is. Our carriage. The wheel of the carriage was hopelessly stuck for hours! I daresay if the traveller in that other coach had been gentlemanly enough to assist us in our hour of need, instead of adding to our plight by ruining all our clothes, not only would we have arrived earlier, but Lady Evie might not have fallen so woefully ill, and she would not be on the brink of death now.”
After he had disentangled her garbled speech, it dawned on him that the coach they had passed on the way was Lady Evie’s.
It pained him to admit it, but the poppet had a point.
Georg looked away and felt a wave of shame creep up his neck.
It wasn’t his finest hour, not to have stopped for a coach in distress.
Even if he couldn’t have known it was hers.
“She would have already had the measles when you set out from Vienna,” he muttered, not feeling a whit better after having uttered it.
The innkeeper arrived and placed a dish in front of them.
Relieved to be able to fortify himself, for he sorely needed it, he picked up a fork and speared a potato.
The innkeeper placed the same plate in front of the girl, who promptly uttered a high-pitched shriek that could have shattered glass.
Startled, Georg dropped a potato into his beer mug. “Goodness, whatever is the matter?”
“What is this?” she pointed a shaking finger at her plate.
He fished the potato from his beer mug and set it down carefully. “It is called fish.”
She shuddered. “It has eyes!”
Georg regarded her with a level gaze. “Yes, fish commonly do, like most living creatures. And a mouth, with teeth. And some gills. And fish bones.”
The girl whimpered. “You do not understand. I hate fish. They terrify me.”
“Fish terrify you.” He had come across, in a lifetime of campaigning, quite a few eccentric individuals, but none surpassed that female who sat across from him, who appeared about to burst into tears because of a perfectly grilled plate of trout.
It had been grilled over the open fire, and seasoned with garlic and herbs. It smelled so divine, his mouth watered.
“You have no idea.” She shuddered again. “When those dead fish eyes look at you, into every nook of your soul, sucking up every inch of you…it is the stuff nightmares are made of.” Her face took on a pasty hue.
Georg looked at her sharply. There was something about her behaviour now that did not seem to be artifice. For some inexplicable reason, she seemed truly terrified of fish.
Well, he supposed it was possible. He’d known a corporal who was not at all squeamish about facing the Grande Armee on the battlefield, howitzers and all, looking death squarely in the face without blinking, yet was terrified to death of mice.
He’d squealed very much like the girl had, and climbed on top of a table, in his Hessian boots, because of a tiny mouse.
Another could not abide spiders and insisted on shaking out his boots every morning out of fear one had fallen in.
It had become an obsessive habit, somewhat inconvenient when they were in the thick of an engagement and he would suddenly order one of the infantrymen to help him pull off his boots to check for spiders.
It was a mystery how the man had survived five battles, but survive them he did.
He’d heard that some people were afraid of all sorts of things: tight spaces, vast spaces, heights, snakes, bees and what-not.
Some fears were irrational and made no particular sense, and yet there they were.
Just when her face took on a distinctly green hue, he set down his fork. “Are you afraid of potatoes as well?”
He had to repeat the question twice before she finally shook her head.
“Excellent. I propose the following. You detest fish. Well, I detest potatoes.” He did not. He adored potatoes, particularly when they were fried in the pan, in sizzling butter, seasoned with parsley just like the ones on their plates. “How about we conduct an exchange?”