Worth Lord of Reckoning (2 page)

Jacaranda gestured to her little sofa. “Please have a seat, Mr. Simmons. You must not excite your heart.”

“Sound as the day I was born.” He thumped his bony chest with his fist, then fell more or less bottom first onto the sofa. This was his typical method of taking a seat, the referenced natal day being a good eighty years past. “Best ring for your hartshorn, dear lady. This might overset even you.”

A cat peeing in the servants’ hall was enough to overset Simmons, and Jacaranda had never owned a personal stock of hartshorn, not even when she’d made her come out.

“Have some tea, sir, and calm yourself.”

“We’re to be visited, Mrs. Wyeth.” He flourished the letter again. “Visited!”

She passed him his tea. “By whom?”

The vicar occasionally rattled out this way when he was in need of fresh air and a good game of chess. A weary traveler might stop at the kitchen door for a meal or a drink. They had visitors from time to time, of a sort.

“Himself!” Mr. Simmons waved the letter again. “Mr. K! In person! He’s coming to visit, here, at Trysting!”

News, indeed, for Mr. Kettering hadn’t graced his country estate with a visitation in the entire five years of Jacaranda’s tenure there. Good news, in fact, for Jacaranda would enjoy at least one occasion of tending to her employer before she left her post. “Does he say if we’re to make ready the family rooms?”

“Bedrooms are not a butler’s concern, Mrs. W. Here, if you must have details.” He passed her the letter.

“He says to prepare the family quarters.” Knowing the state of Simmons’s sight and the more significant of Simmons’s agendas, she read the entire note aloud, “‘Please ready the private family rooms, for I will be in residence starting the first of the week. Alert the staff and lay in appropriate stores for an extended stay.’”

“Well, madam.” Simmons set down his tea cup, having drained it in one swallow. “You’d best get busy.” He reached for one of the three tea cakes Jacaranda had set out on her own plate, revealing a second and no less familiar reason for disturbing her morning break.

“Busy, Mr. Simmons?”

“Preparing the bedrooms, dusting the parlors, cleaning the windows, turning the sheets, polishing the silver, whatever it is you do.”

“That’s all done regularly, Mr. Simmons. You know the routine here.”

He looked disgruntled, as if somebody had stolen his mug of grog.

“The andirons might need blacking,” she offered. “Though that falls to the footmen, and they are strictly your province. I’ve no doubt you already have your fellows dusting the library and the estate office, cleaning the outside of the windows, and sanding and beating the rugs?”

He spoke around a mouthful of tea cake. “Of course, of course. Don’t suppose you could make me a list? In the excitement, a detail or two might slip from their lazy minds.”

She jotted him a list—in a large, printed hand—and made him finish another cup of tea before he tottered off with his list in one hand and a second tea cake in the other.

She would miss even Simmons when she left Trysting. Simmons was a dear, and no doubt a contemporary of old Mr. Kettering, whom she envisioned toiling away in the damp and chilly confines of the Inns of Court, a muffler around his neck even in high summer.

Surely Mr. Kettering had seen at least his three-score and ten years. Why else would such an otherwise modern estate sport an octogenarian butler?

* * *

“Such wretched, wretched news!” Mama set Jacaranda’s latest epistle aside and dabbed at the corners of her eyes with a lacy handkerchief.

“Is Jacaranda ill?” Daisy asked, though Jacaranda was something of a geological formation in human guise. She never took ill, never flew into hysterics, never hesitated once she’d made up her mind.

While Mama never enjoyed consistent good health.

Or a pleasant mood.

“The dratted girl reports that she’s quite in the pink, but she has put off her return home to spend her summer dusting a lot of chandeliers and counting drawers full of tarnished silver. Her employer is leaving Town to ruralize at Trysting, and nothing will do but she must remain in Surrey to ready the house for him. Again, she disappoints me, and for what—to sweep mouse droppings from some old man’s pantry!”

Readying the house was what a housekeeper generally did. Jacaranda probably even enjoyed doing it, and no mouse would dare set a paw in any pantry of hers.

“Would you like to hold the baby, Mama?”

Her ladyship rose, tucking the handkerchief into her bodice. “Keep that infant away from me. Children harbor illness, and my nerves are delicate right now. If Jacaranda won’t come home, I simply do not know what I will do.”

Daisy knew: Her ladyship would lament the disloyalty of a girl whom she’d raised
like one of her own
, ignore the requirements of a household much in need of a woman’s civilizing influence, and expect Daisy to sympathize by the hour.

While all Daisy wanted was a nap.

“You could mention this letter to Grey,” Daisy said, though her brother would wring her neck for that suggestion. “He misses Jacaranda, too.”

They all did, even Daisy. Maybe Daisy most of all.

“Perhaps I shall do that very thing,” her ladyship said, pausing in her pacing to inspect her reflection in the mirror over the parlor’s fireplace. She was tall, had a fine, sturdy bone-structure, and dealt ruthlessly with any dark hairs attempting to turn gray. “No one will believe I could be a grandmother, much less three times over. I bear up remarkably well amid the chaos and strife of your brother’s household, don’t you think?”

“You are a marvel, Mama.” Daisy had married five years ago and since saying her vows had presented her husband with two sons and a daughter. Mama had borne the late earl six children in nine years, which, as far as Daisy was concerned, qualified the countess for
marvel
status, at least.

“I must be going.” Mama swept up to Daisy’s seat and presented a smooth cheek for Daisy to kiss. “I vow this situation with your sister requires a resolution before I’m prostrate with nerves. Five years is far too long to indulge Jacaranda, and your brother will agree with me on this.”

Daisy rose, the baby feeling as if she weighed five stone in her arms, for all the child was only a few months old. “I’ll see you to the door, Mama. Please give my regards to the boys.”

“Hermione Swift asked after you in her last letter. She still hasn’t married off her youngest.”

Mama struck the perfect balance between commiseration and gloating, as the hordes of women with whom she corresponded probably did about poor, dear Francine’s step-daughter.

That headstrong Jacaranda, gone for a housekeeper, of all things!

“You must have a care for your appearance,” Mama said, as the butler held her ladyship’s cloak for her. “You are a bit pale, my dear, and that will never do. Eric deserves to find a pretty wife waiting for him when he comes home from his labors at the end of the day, not some drudge with”—she peered at Daisy’s sleeve—“preserves on her cuffs. Pray for me, dearest. My nerves are not strong. If Jacaranda must waste what remains of her youth counting silver, she should at least count ours. We are her family, after all.”

Another kiss, and Mama was off, the butler closing the door silently in her wake.

Daisy nuzzled the baby’s crown and started up the steps. “We’ll take a nap,” she whispered to the child. “We’ll dream sweet dreams and say a prayer for your Auntie Jack, because I may have just unleashed the press-gangs on her.”

* * *

The difficulty with having a household of elderly retainers was that one had to do many jobs without appearing to overstep the post for which one was hired. Jacaranda could point out to Cook that raspberries had a very short season and if not picked when ripe, the entire year’s opportunity for jam and pies was gone.

That way lay at least a week of cold soup, runny eggs, and weak tea.

So Jacaranda suggested the maids might enjoy a day outside and intimated that she herself would delight in the outing as well. Thus, she earned hours in the heat, keeping a half-dozen giggling, romance-obsessed girls at the task of picking berries.

Come winter, the raspberry jam would be worth the effort. At present, though, harvesting raspberries was a hot, buggy, thankless job, one that would tempt a devout Methodist out of her stays.

Jacaranda was neither Methodist nor especially devout, though on Sundays she was known to be sociable in the churchyard.

“I think that’s the lot of it,” the oldest of the housemaids said. “We’re for a swim now, Mrs. Wyeth. You promised.”

“I did promise, but keep quiet. You know the fellows will try to peek.”

“So tell old Simmons to give the good-looking ones a half-day.”

The women flounced off, teasing and laughing, and Jacaranda let them go without a scold. The day was broiling, and they’d picked a prodigious amount of fruit in a few hours. They’d done so, of course, because they’d been given an incentive for making haste.

With the maids off to splash about in the farm pond, Jacaranda hitched the pony grazing in the shade into the traces of the cart. She’d have to walk the little beast more than a mile to the manor house, a pony trot being a sure means of bruising fruit. The raspberries would be put up that afternoon, for even half a day in the pantry would see them mold.

Thus, Jacaranda spent the afternoon pretending she enjoyed helping with the preserves, pretending her step-mother had always made a day of such things, when in truth Step-Mama ventured no closer to making jam than when she applied preserves to her perfectly toasted bread each morning.

“Step-Mama is no fool,” Jacaranda muttered when the jam was made and she could finally take off her apron. Evening had fallen, the long, soft hours of gloaming when the sun had set but the earth held on to the light.

“Your back troubling ye?” Cook asked. She’d been in Surrey for decades, but the broad vowels of the north abided in her speech.

“A twinge,” Jacaranda allowed. “Putting up the fruit makes for long days.”

“Raspberries is the worst for spoiling,” Cook replied. “Good to have it done. Apples and pears is more forgiving. Even the cherries ain’t so finicky.”

“Raspberries are fragile, but we’ll have preserves to put in everybody’s basket at Yule.”

“And shortbread.” The gleam in Cook’s eyes was particularly satisfied, because she’d conspired with Jacaranda to have their dairyman stagger the breeding of the heifers so they didn’t all freshen at once. Staggering the herd meant Mr. Morse didn’t get three months off with no milking, but it also meant the estate always had fresh milk and butter without having to buy from the neighbors.

“Did I smell shortbread baking this very morning?”

Cook’s wide face split into a smile. “That you did, in anticipation of the blessed event.”

“He isn’t supposed to arrive for another day or two. The house hardly needed much attention to be ready to receive him.”

She stated a simple fact, though Simmons’s footmen had been putting in long days, indeed.

“Maybe not on your end.” Cook retrieved a plate of shortbread from the pantry. “I haven’t cooked for the Quality for going on five years. The larder needed attention, and I’ve yet to work out my menus past the first meal.”

Jacaranda accepted a piece of shortbread, only one, though Cook had cut pieces sized to appeal to hungry footmen, bless her. “I don’t suppose you’d show me what stores are on hand?”

“Put the kettle on, Mrs. Wyeth.” Cook popped a bite of shortbread into her mouth. “This might take a cup or two of tea.”

By the time Jacaranda had a week’s worth of summer menus planned with Cook, full darkness had fallen and bed beckoned. The moon was up, though, and rather than make the tired staff lug a tub and water up to her room, Jacaranda threw towels and soap into a wicker hamper, along with a dressing gown and summer-length chemise.

The pond nearest the house wasn’t merely ornamental. With a pump, cistern and an elaborate set of pipes, it served the stables, the laundry, and several other outbuildings. The pond was, however, relatively private, being ringed by tall hardwoods and fringed with rhododendrons on three sides.

On the fourth side was a grassy embankment, and there Jacaranda settled with her hamper. She’d done this before, usually on nights when she couldn’t sleep.

On nights without a moon.

On nights when dreams were something to avoid.

Tonight, even tired as she was, sleep wasn’t yet close at hand. She was ready for Mr. Kettering’s arrival, but others at the house were excited, as if some handsome prince had kissed the entire staff awake. Their anticipation was like that of unruly children—impossible to ignore—and resulted in an excitement foreign to Trysting’s usually placid demeanor.

Jacaranda resolved to swim away the staff’s vicarious nerves, get clean, and enjoy a little privacy.

Her dress came off, then her shift and stays, then sabots, leaving her naked in the moonlight and comfortable for the first time in a long, hot day. She dove in from the rock God had positioned for that purpose and made a long, slow circuit of the pond. When she’d done her lap, she put the soap to its intended use and prepared to leave the water.

Hoof beats interrupted her consideration of the next day’s list of things to do.