‘Go over to the kitchen when you’re ready to eat. There’ll be something. This is not what Lady Julia is used to, I imagine.’
‘Wouldn’t know about that, sir. We’ve only been in her employ a few days.’
Nothing to be gleaned there. Giles retrieved his saddlebag and went into the house through the kitchen door to find Mrs Smithers scurrying between larder, table and range.
‘What are the supplies of food like?’ he asked, stopping the harassed cook by the simple expedient of standing in front of her. The first thing you learned in the army—after the discovery that it was no use ducking in the face of artillery—was to secure the provisions. ‘The roads are deep in snow and more is falling. There’ll be no marketing done this side of Christmas unless we get a sudden thaw, and there’s eight mouths to feed for however long it takes.’
‘Hadn’t thought of that, sir.’ The cook sat down in the nearest chair and managed to compose herself. ‘I’d best take stock. There’s the mutton stew for tonight. We can eke that out with potatoes—we’ve sacks of them in store. Root vegetables in the garden clamp. Then there’s two full wheels of cheese. Dried apples and lots of flour. The butter will last a few days, then there’s lard. I’ve eggs in isinglass and the cow in the byre will stay in milk awhile longer. And game outside for the shooting. It’ll be plain fare, sir, but we won’t starve for a month. Her ladyship won’t like it, though. We never got no letter from the lawyer.’ She sniffed, on the verge of tears again.
‘Her ladyship can lump it,’ Giles said, making her gasp with laughter. ‘Do your best, Mrs Smithers, I’ll see what’s going on upstairs.’
He followed the sound of voices, or rather the series of thumps and flaps and one very clear voice issuing from a bedchamber. The hapless Smithers struggled to turn over a mattress while the Girl gathered up dustsheets and Lady Julia and her stepdaughter sorted linens.
‘Captain.’ She turned as he entered, still brisk, but he could hear the weariness under it and perhaps the relief that there was someone else to help cope. ‘The fire, if you please.’
He set a taper to it, then she had him tucking in sheets on one side of the bed before he could make his escape. ‘Tighter, Captain. Get some tension in it.’
She was certainly making him tense, most inappropriately. Giles wrestled the coverlet straight, then gathered up pillows in a strategic attempt to disguise just how tense.
He was handed a pile of pillowcases. ‘When you’ve done those we will be next door.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ It was tempting to tease her with a salute. Instead he admired the way her hips swayed as she strode out of the door. Giles stuffed pillows and told himself this was not some bivouac in the Spanish mountains and Lady Julia was not a camp follower.
The next chamber was smaller. He lit the fire, then went to help Miss Chalcott drag a heavy curtain across a window, but even with that in place the draught still stirred the bedraggled bed-hangings. The fire smoked foully. Giles kicked it out with a muttered oath. ‘I’ll take this chamber, I’m used to the cold. I’ll see if there’s another room with a clear chimney, otherwise you ladies will be better together in the first chamber.’
The army had certainly been good training for this house. He’d been in more comfortable tents in the snow before now, he mused as he followed Miss Chalcott into the next room along. The chimney there obliged by drawing steadily. It was a small room, but that made it easier to heat, he pointed out as he helped her make the bed.
‘Thank you, Captain.’ Her smile was enchanting, he thought, discovering that he was admiring her as he might an exquisite artwork, not a living woman.
On the other hand there was certainly one of those next door, judging by the sounds penetrating the wall. ‘Smithers, is there another mattress? Captain Markham cannot sleep on that—the mice have been in it.’
‘Lady Julia is obviously used to dealing with servants,’ he remarked as Miss Chalcott draped blankets over a chair in front of the fire.
She laughed. ‘She has had a great deal of practice.’
‘You had many servants?’ he asked, puzzled. A borrowed carriage, plain, sensible gowns, this frightful house her only legacy from her husband… Something did not add up.
‘Seventy, perhaps. Look at this fabric! Moths, I suppose, though by the size of the holes I would not like to meet one.’
‘Seventy?’
‘Oh, everyone in India has servants if they have any kind of a household at all. Inside servants, outside servants, the grooms, the gardeners, the sewing women and the laundry, my father’s business… It all adds up and it costs a fraction of what it does in England.’
‘Your father was a man of business, then?’
‘My husband was a merchant, a trader in many things.’ He had not heard Lady Julia’s approach. ‘But, despite the common misapprehension here, not every man who trades in India is a nabob, wealthy beyond compare. Or even wealthy at all.’
‘I beg your pardon, ma’am. I allowed the informality of our circumstances to lead me into curiosity.’ He really had been in the army, and in the wilds, too long if he had forgotten not to discuss money or trade. As an earl’s daughter Lady Julia’s marriage might have been deemed acceptable if sweetened by vast wealth, but a mere merchant would put her firmly on the wrong side of the social dividing line. Why had her family allowed it?
‘No matter. India makes everyone curious, I find.’ Lady Julia came further into the room and he saw how weary she was, for all the firm voice and straight back. Then she smiled and he realised something else. He had been quite out in placing her in her thirties. Surely she could not be more than twenty-five or six, at the most. And Miss Chalcott was, what? Twenty, twenty-one? Which meant her husband, unless he had been sowing his wild oats in India at a precocious age, must have been in his late forties at the very least when he married her.
An earl’s daughter marrying a not very successful India merchant twice her age. How had that come about? He felt the curiosity stir like the flick of a cat’s tail at the back of his mind and bit down on the question he had nearly allowed to escape.
She ran one hand over the draped blankets and wrinkled her nose. ‘This house had been in my husband’s family for years. I had no idea it had been so neglected.’
Considering that she had travelled thousands of miles to discover her expected security was a ramshackle house miles from anywhere, Lady Julia was showing remarkable resilience. Perhaps she was planning to go back to her family.
‘Mrs Smithers should have water heating, although I doubt it will run to a bath. I will have some sent up to your chamber, Captain. Until seven o’clock and dinner.’
‘I’ll see to the water myself.’ Giles almost told her to go and rest, then decided that telling any female that she looked weary was not tactful. ‘Until dinner time, ladies.’
* * *
Captain Markham had shaved, donned a clean, if rumpled, shirt and neckcloth, and made some improvement to the state of his breeches and boots. He also looked as though he had managed to snatch some sleep, which was more than Julia had, she thought resentfully as she regarded him across a dinner table much in need of polishing.
She had lain on the bed in her dusty, draughty chamber and willed herself to sleep, but oblivion would not come. What had kept her awake was the sickening realisation that she had allowed a sentimental memory of childhood Christmases to blind her to reality. She had set out on this journey in a temper, clinging to the belief that at the end of it would be a charming country house, complete with its charming staff. It would all be modest but comfortable, warm and safe.
Instead she and Miri were stranded in a cold, neglected house, miles from anywhere, with three nervous servants. Plus a turkey they couldn’t even eat. Plus