Page 10 of Miss Dignified
One’s labor bore immediate and useful results.
A clean house had a certain freshness. The air was more breathable, the light more in evidence. Conscientious housekeeping meant beeswax and lemon oil, fresh flowers, and scented sachets subdued London’s pervasive coal-smoke stink.
A clean house was safer than its neglected counterpart, between good lighting, conscientiously trimmed wicks, and proper ventilation.
A clean house required hard, hard work, which meant every night, Lydia dropped off to sleep rather than fret away the dark hours with worries and what-ifs.
Thanks to that hard work, windows, sconces, and mirrors gleamed, though Lydia was still surprised every time she caught sight of herself in a looking glass. When had she become so severe and serious?
Much to her consternation, housekeeping gave her more freedom than she’d ever enjoyed previously. She came and went from Captain Powell’s household as she pleased. She ate meals she enjoyed and ate them when she was hungry, not when the kitchen rang the bell. She wore comfortable clothing rather than expensive creations intended to exhibit more of her flesh than she preferred.
Shedecided whether to start the day with polishing silver, dusting, or a trip to market, andshedecided if and how to spend her wages.
All those delicious decisions, and yards and acres of privacy to go with them. No lady’s maid snooping through her correspondence, no footmen or chambermaids reporting her whereabouts at every hour. No grooms trailing four yards behind everywhere she rode—not that she’d been on horseback since coming to London.
Best of all, no half-soused uncle making constant references to Marcus’s absence or Lydia’s advancing age. No interminable political dinners watching Mama play the gracious hostess, knowing all the while that political dinners gave Mama megrims.
“Good morning, Mrs. Lovelace.” Captain Powell, still in his riding attire, strode into the breakfast parlor. “It’s menu day, if I’m not mistaken.”
He’d caught her without her cap—again—which explained the smile lurking in his eyes. Fortunately, the sideboard was in readiness for his morning sortie.
“You’re up early, sir.”
“The days are getting longer, so the sun is up earlier, and a proper London gentleman hacks out at dawn. Please do have a seat, and let me fix you a plate. Where has our patient got off to?”
Lydia and her employer played a game, which she always won. She wasn’t sure what, precisely, the captain sought to prove by offering her one courtesy after another, but he was nothing if not tenacious. She invariably refused his mannerly overtures, because housekeepers were not due anything other than civility, and he allowed her to refuse.
Perhaps that was the point. Sheenjoyedrebuffing him, and as watchful as he was, he might sense that. Sheenjoyedscolding him for midnight raids on the kitchen and for the merest scrape of mud on her floors.
“I ate in the kitchen, sir. A cup of tea will do. As for Mr. Brook, he ate in the kitchen as well and mentioned something about going in search of his brother. I asked him to report his findings to you before nightfall and made sure he had two meat pasties and some shortbread to take with him.”
Captain Powell held the chair to the right of the head of the table. Lydia permitted him that much, because she’d made her point by refusing to share breakfast with him. His eyes, a startling blue amid slightly weathered features, nonetheless bore a hint of mischief as she took her seat.
She would not have seen that mischief when she’d first taken her post, but she was learning the terrain, and for all his seriousness, her employer did have a sense of humor.
“We have more to discuss than menus,” Captain Powell said, taking the place at the head of the table. “I am maneuvering my cannon in place for when the sororal regiment arrives.”
This again. Perhaps, despite his unshakable outward calm, the prospect of a visit from family worried the captain.
“The guest rooms are always kept in readiness, sir.” Lydia did not look forward to the prospect of visitors, particularly not the young ladies. Ladies knew things. They knew of young earls gone missing, and they would know if the young earl’s sister was rumored to have disappeared from the family seat. Then too, the captain, for all his stoicism in the face of battle, apparently did not look forward to hosting his siblings.
He would not complain, of course, but his gaze became bleak when he read the many letters penned by his sisters.
“I would never criticize your efforts, Mrs. Lovelace, but my sisters are not the sort to limit themselves to sniffing the wardrobes. They will be in the attics. They will examine the potted spices growing on the back stoop and pop out to the mews to interrogate my groom. They will be hopelessly disrespectful of my privacy, not only to ensure you are taking good care of me, but also because they are afflicted with curious natures generally.”
As was Lydia. “AmI taking good care of you, Captain?”
He poured them each a cup of tea, good, strong China black, exactly as Lydia preferred it. “Fishing for a compliment, Mrs. Lovelace?”
Lydia fixed her own tea, adding a dollop of cream—the captain preferred cream at breakfast—and a half teaspoon of honey.
“You never complain about my work,” she said. “An absence of complaints doesn’t mean an absence of reasons to complain.” And she needed this post for the foreseeable future, because she needed him.
The captain dealt with his own tea, and Lydia realized he would not take his meal while she had only a cup of tea. The overt victories were hers in the battle to maintain proper boundaries, but he managed to subtly gain territory too.
“You do an excellent job, but I don’t dare compliment you,” he said, letting the honey drizzle into his tea in a golden skein. “If I thank you for the fresh flowers in my study, you rebuke me by telling me how cheaply you bought them. If I mention that I delight to walk into my bedroom and find that even the bed hangings have been washed, you explain that hangings should be washed quarterly. You are never pleased to hear my compliments, thus I hesitate to commend you in my dispatches.”
He took a sip of his tea, and the quiet in the parlor was disturbed by the mad chirping of some lovesick robin.
