Page 20 of The Wallflower Manifesto
CHAPTER 8
Abe hadn’t lingered for much longer in the Wharton house gardens. What he’d observed through the windows had been enough to update Freddy on his mother’s doings, and to be frank, he was feeling a little too silly to do investigative work after his encounter with Miss Millie Yardley.
He had practically floated home, whistling to himself all the while. He didn’t think he’d been quite so giddy over a woman since his doomed two-year infatuation with Elspeth MacElroy from the ages of twelve to fourteen.
It wasn’t that he didn’t have a roving eye and an appreciation for the ladies. Abe prided himself on being able to draw a giggle out of all sorts of women in all manner of situations. It was a good bit of fun, and of course he generally enjoyed what followed.
This felt a little different. Perhaps it was because she was the one who had drawn out the giggling tonight and because he only seemed to make her roll her pretty brown eyes. But he didn’t think it was that. No, it was nothing so base and common as wanting what he couldn’t have.
She had flirted back. She’d reacted to his nearness.
He couldn’t define it, and that didn’t much surprise him. He’d never been much of a poet. But he liked it. A lot.
Next time, he meant to kiss her, and perhaps, if he was truly lucky, he might get his hands on that lovely, soft figure for a moment.
He sighed all the way into bed and enjoyed the direction his dreams took for those few lucid moments before total oblivion.
Waking up was not half so pleasant.
“Ruined it! You ruined my best cast iron!” shouted a shrill, female voice from the ground floor. “Oh, and the ceiling! Look what you’ve done!”
Abe stumbled out of bed and down the stairs with his dressing gown half on, blinking away bleariness as the muffled sounds of Freddy sputtering and their housekeeper crying soaked into the walls.
“What in the absolute hell …?” Abe rounded the corner into the kitchen to find a scene that looked much like it sounded.
“I didn’t think it would catch fire!” Freddy was telling the distraught older woman, his fingers dug into his blond hair and his expression panicked. “And when I threw water on it, it shot up into the air like I’d used gunpowder! I had no choice!”
“You threw water on it?!” the housekeeper wailed, aghast. The poor thing sank her face into her hands, likely questioning why she’d ever agreed to work for them at all. “Water!”
“I fished it out to scrub clean afterward with soap, but there’s a hole—”
“Youscrubbedmycast iron?!” she shrieked. “Withsoap?!”
“Freddy, you feckless insect of a man,” Abe barked, drawing the attention of both of them for a brief and glorious moment of silence. “What have you done now?”
Freddy dropped his hands at his sides, leaving his hair in a ridiculous shape from his anxious tugging. “I tried to fry an egg,” he said with a defeated sigh. “It caught fire.”
“You tried to fry an egg,” Abe repeated, certain he must still be dreaming.
Freddy’s face contorted into something between juvenile frustration and indignation. “Well, I had to abandon my breakfast yesterday morning, didn’t I? I came home and tried to make my own. The grease caught fire, and I tried to put it out. It didn’t go out!”
“No, I can see that it didn’t,” Abe replied, glancing up at the layer of grimy residue that was currently adorning their kitchen ceiling, just above the stovetop. “You can’t use water on a grease fire.”
Or soap on a cast iron, apparently.
“Well, how exactly was I to know that?!” Freddy whinged. “What do you put it out with? Wind and prayers? I took the flaming, bloody thing outside and threw it in the canal. Little fires popped up even after it had sunk, and floated off like water was nothing but a jest to them!”
The recounting of events seemed to spark a realization in Freddy. “By God, I could have been burnt horribly running out with that tinderbox, spitting flames in my face as it was. It’s a miracle I wasn’t harmed.”
“Christ and all his disciples,” Abe grumbled, rubbing his eyes so hard, he could see spots.
The offending pan was propped in the sink, light shining through the tiny hole that had formed at the crease. Apparently, after sinking the thing, Freddy had fished it back out again for good measure.
Abe wondered if he’d waded all the way in or just bent over and thrown his top half under the water to find it again.
“I tried to clean up the char too!” Freddy added, though his tone was already deflating.
It was true. Upon raising his eyes, Abe could see whirling cloth marks in the blackened stain on the ceiling, as though the idiot had climbed up onto the stovetop and slapped a dry rag at it in his panic.
