“God above.” The housekeeper exhaled. “Surely Polly would take up sculpting could she see you thus.”

What an odd remark for a housekeeper to make about a cook. She offered no further explanation, just turned and left with a single shake of her head.

Two

“I’ll see you to your room.” Sara made the offer out of civility. Mr. Haddonfield had been gracious over dinner and afterward had patiently explained whist to Allie, even going so far as to partner the child for a few rounds.

That did not mean Sara liked him.

“I should tell you your escort isn’t needed,” Mr. Haddonfield said. “However, because the house is unlit and I’m dead on my feet, it probably is very necessary.” He winged his arm at her as he spoke, which surprised Sara into outright staring at him, then she gingerly placed her fingers on his sleeve.

Excellent manners were no reason to like a man either—Reynard had had excellent manners, when it suited him.

“What time would you like us to bring you your tea in the morning?” she asked as they traveled the cold, dark hallways and stairs.

“That won’t be necessary. I can find my way to the kitchen the same as the rest of the household no doubt does. I’m a seasoned traveler, and I know how to make shift.”

“We do break our fast in the kitchen, but Polly, Allie, and I have an apartment right off the kitchen, and it’s warm and close to the larder.”

“And where does the estimable Mr. North lay his weary head?”

“Gabriel has a room in the south wing,” she said, though it was none of the gracious, considerate, polite Mr. Haddonfield’s business, and if he was going to suggest that any impropriety at all—

“Good. I would not want ladies to be without protection in the dark of night this far from any town or village. This is my room?”

Maybe she did like him, just a penny’s worth.

“Next door down.” Sara reached forward to open his door then jumped aside, a shriek escaping her as a black-and-white cannonball of fur rocketed past her skirts. In that single instant, several things happened at once.

Heifer yowled his indignation as he shot down the corridor with uncharacteristic speed.

Sara’s candle tipped off its holder when she jumped out of the cat’s path.

She tried to grab the candle as it fell, only to yelp in pain and lose her balance without catching the candle.

The candle winked out as it rolled over her knuckles and hit the floor, leaving a stygian darkness in the hallway.

“Steady.” Mr. Haddonfield’s arms caught her when she would have overbalanced, but Sara’s momentum was such that she pitched into his chest and would have fallen to her hands and knees had he not kept a firm grip on her upper arms. “Take a moment,” he urged, his voice a rumble in the inky darkness.

Up close, he smelled as good as he had in the stables, only more so for having soaked, washed his hair, and shaved. Sara wanted to die of mortification, but in the complete darkness, her balance was hard to regain, so she savored the simple, long-forgotten pleasure of being held by a man.

“I’m all right,” she insisted, except the words came out shaky and unconvincing, even to her own ears.

“Take small breaths.” His thumbs moved against her shoulders in slow circles. “You’ve had a fright. Give yourself a minute.”

She should pull away, Sara knew that, but he wasn’t taking advantage; he was being everything that was gentlemanly, almost brotherly, and she simply lacked the strength of will to stand on her own two feet.

“That’s better. Did you get burned?” He reached around and opened the door to his sitting room, letting a dim light leak into the hallway. “Let’s have a look, shall we?” His arm slipped around Sara’s shoulders as he shepherded her into the sitting room. Maudie, the maid-of-all-work, had left candles lit on the sideboard, and from the bedroom, more weak light came through the door. His rooms weren’t exactly warm, but neither did they bear the bone-chilling cold of the unheated corridor.

“There’s better light in here.” He escorted her to the bedroom, as if waltzing along with housekeepers was a common pastime for him. “I thought the candle might have struck your hand.”

“Not the candle, the wax. It’s nothing, really.”

He towed her over to the fire and examined her hand, using his thumbnail to scrape a drop of warm wax off her knuckle.

“At least the wax,” he said, pulling out his handkerchief. He crossed the room and dipped the linen in a pitcher of drinking water on his night table. “This might take a little of the sting out.”

He wrapped a startlingly cold cloth around Sara’s hand, and it did indeed take the sting out.

“Sit you down.” He pulled out the chair from his escritoire then leaned a hip on the desk, causing the wood to groan, but letting him keep hold of Sara’s hand as she took the chair. “It will likely blister, as red as it is. Have you any aloe?”

“Aloe?” Sara looked at his hand, wrapped around hers. When was the last time she’d held hands with anybody save her daughter or her sister?

“It’s a medicinal plant,” he said, his grip firm and impersonal. “I spent a summer in Virginia a few years ago, right after the hostilities with the Americans concluded, and they’ve a number of plants we don’t find here. I sent as many as I could back to my father for study and propagation.”

“What were you doing in Virginia?” Sara asked out of sheer desperation. The continued grip of his hand around hers was making her insides unsettled, and while she might like him a very little bit, she did not like being unsettled. She’d seen this man in all his naked, Greek-god glory, and now he was holding her hand in dimly lit private quarters.

Though Mr. Haddonfield himself seemed oblivious to every one of those facts.

“My stated task was to assess the viability of investing in tobacco on behalf of my father’s earldom.” He let go of her hand, unwrapped it, peered at it, frowned, and soaked the cloth in cold water again. “I really ought to get you some ointment for this.”

Tending to minor hurts was the housekeeper’s province—her exclusive province. “You really ought not. Is your father raising tobacco now?”

“He is not.” He let her scold go unremarked as he wrapped her hand once again, “Tobacco is profitable. It becomes a habit, and those who indulge in it are loyal to their habit, but it’s hard on the land.”

“Is that why the plantations are so large? Because they have to fallow a lot of acreage?”

“Everything in America is large. We think Cornwall is far from civilization, but consider that the distance from Penzance to London—not quite three hundred miles—might be little over a tenth the distance from Atlantic to Pacific coasts, and the Americans intend to lay claim to it all.”

“One tenth? That is incomprehensible.”

“Not to them. It takes half-savage people to deal with so much wilderness, and they will deal with it, inevitably.”

“But you decided not to invest there. Why not?”

“The government isn’t stable, for one thing.” He let go of her hand to soak the handkerchief yet again. “Americans are terminally wary of kings and despots, elected or otherwise, and so they are miserly with their own government, haggling over every tax and tithe, clutching every little power tightly away from their own leaders. Then too, British enterprises are not regarded fondly in the current American climate, and finally, there is the issue of slavery.”

That he would discuss his foreign travels with her was oddly flattering. Maybe she liked him two pennies’ worth. “So no tobacco farming.”

“No tobacco, but I did bring back a number of medicinal plants, some trees, and a few wildflowers to see if they might be grown profitably here.”

“Enterprising of you,” Sara murmured, watching as he unwrapped her hand again.

“It doesn’t look as angry,” he decided. “I’d still feel better if you put something on it.”

Sara took back her hand. “Then I will, when I get to the kitchen. I see Maudie turned down your sheets. The warmer for your sheets is by the hearth, and your wash water is in that ewer.”

He smiled at her, making it even more imperative that Sara get herself down to the kitchen. “And my eyes grow heavier by the second. Good night, Mrs. Hunt, and my thanks for a pleasant welcome to Three Springs.”

“Good night, Mr. Haddonfield, sleep well.”

* * *

Beckman watched the formidable Mrs. Hunt take her leave, watched the graceful way she reached up to appropriate the candle on his mantel. Did she realize she’d lost her cap in the scuffle with the cat?

Her hair was a glorious, vibrant red, though she’d caught it back in a severe bun. The sight of that hair had evoked a sense of déjà vu, the peculiar and unfounded certainty that he’d seen Sara Hunt somewhere else, her hair uncovered and the grace of her hands in evidence.

Which made no sense. She put him in mind of nothing so much as home, bearing about her person the scents of lavender, lemon oil, laundry starch, and other domestic fragrances. Then too, she had hands that were both feminine and competent, not the hands of a debutante but the hands of a grown woman.

His hands had developed an itch to take down that hair and stroke it free and loose down her back. He recognized it as a remnant of the sailor’s reaction to making port after a long, hard voyage, hardly an apt analogy for a little jaunt over the Downs. If he were lusting after a skittish, widowed—albeit pretty and curvaceous—housekeeper, then deprivation and fatigue were making him as indiscriminately randy as his older brother, Nicholas.

* * *

“That was the last of the wine.” Sara let her head rest against the back of the armchair nearest the fire in her tiny sitting room. To call the space where she, Allie, and Polly dwelled an apartment was generous. They had three very small rooms and a sleeping alcove for Allie, though they’d shared far worse on the Continent and been grateful for it.

“She’s asleep,” Polly reported, peeking behind the curtain that provided Allie’s bed a bit of privacy. “I’m surprised you were able to save a bottle so long—it was from Lady Warne’s basket at Christmas, wasn’t it?”

“It was, so unless we’re willing to raid the strong spirits, we’re officially an abstaining household hereafter. The occasional chocolate mousse will do much to console us, though. Whatever possessed you?”

“Winter megrims.” Polly took the other rocking chair, settling in with a sigh that was too weighty for such a young woman.

Part of that sigh, Sara well knew, was because the strain of megrim plaguing Polly had to do with Mr. Gabriel North, who would come home very late to find his favorite treat awaiting him.

Polly set the chair to rocking with a slow, rhythmic creak on the pitch of about… high G. “We need some sweetness in this life, you know? How straitened are we?”

Sara gave the same answer she’d been giving for months. “Desperately, though with the first of the month, we’ll have another quarter’s funds, and that’s just next week.”

“If Lady Warne remembers. Why don’t you tell Mr. Haddonfield there is no money and there hasn’t been enough for the entire time we’ve worked here?”

That Polly assumed Sara would decide what to say to whom rankled, but they knew no other way to go on.

“Lady Warne is elderly. One doesn’t want to offend her, and in all likelihood, she’s grown a bit forgetful. I will impart to Mr. Haddonfield what information is necessary, Polly, but not before it’s necessary. He’s a man, son of an earl, wealthy, and if we just humor him long enough, he’ll likely go whistling on his way as soon as the Season starts up in earnest.”

This was sound reasoning, except it had little basis so far in fact or observation.

“He’d better do more than just make work for us,” Polly threatened darkly. “The household finances are tight, but I think the situation with the estate proper has grown unsalvageable, Sara. Gabriel won’t say, but how does he expect to manage planting with only one team, and the one too old to truly do much?”

“That is Gabriel’s puzzle to solve, and he hasn’t failed Three Springs yet. We each tend to our own concerns, and we do that best on a good night’s sleep.”

Unfortunately for Sara, a good night’s sleep was a necessity she frequently did without. Usually, it was the finances keeping her awake as she figured out ways to squeeze a spare farthing out of each penny or debated how to be more direct with Lady Warne.