Page 8 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
If porridge and beef tea was all she would serve him, then it was porridge and beef tea he would eat—simply because he had no other option at present. With an answering scowl of his own, he reached once more for the tray.
“As I thought,” the manservant sneered. “And I would remind ye, sir, lest ye speak more of hanging Miss Lizzie—shewas the only one of us what gave a damn if ye lived or died. Ye owe her for yer very life.”
“She damn near killed me herself!”
“Yes,” came the dry response, “and ye hung upon her conscience like a millstone, when anyone could see she oughtn’t to have bothered herself none over it. Seems to me ye oughta be showin’ her ye were worth saving.”
∞∞∞
“Why is there a man in Papa’s bed?”
Lizzie paused, her head bent over the makings of the stew they would have for dinner. “Don’t trouble yourself about it, Georgie,” she said, setting down the knife long enough to ruffle her brother’s bright blond curls. “He’s very ill, and we had no other place to put him.”
That was true enough. Every other bed in the house had been spoken for. There had been nowhere to put the marquessbutthe master’s chambers, though by the occasional bellows that issued from the room and the startling amount of demands he was making, she suspected that even the best room in the house fell far short of his expectations.
“Imogen said you shot him. Is he going to die?” The note of worry that threaded through Georgie’s voice shook her to the depths of her soul.
Lizzie did her best to keep her voice light and teasing. “If he can shout like that, then no, he’s not going to die.”
“But youdidshoot him.”
“It was an accident.” Mostly. Not that it mattered. She doubted a court of law cared much about her intentions—not when a peer’s life had been jeopardized. Not when she’dabductedhim.
“Are you going to prison, then?” Georgie’s voice gave a precarious wobble, and Lizzie abandoned the potatoes she’d been chopping entirely to sling an arm over his thin shoulders.
“Oh, Georgie. This is not for you to worry about. Let the adults handle adult business, yes?” She lifted the corner of her apron and swabbed at his damp eyes. “But, no—I’m not going to prison.” Prison was for lesser crimes.Shewas going to hang. But there was nothing that could prevent it, and so there was nothing worth worrying Georgie about. “Help me set the table, now.”
Reassured—however temporarily—Georgie firmed his quivering lip and headed for the drawer in which the utensils were kept, making a short business of laying them out upon the scarred surface of the table. Once upon a time, they’d had a much finer one, and a precious cloth to cover it woven with pretty gold thread. Now, everything was old and ragged; a dinner table full of disparate, mismatched parts scavenged from other parts of the house.
Their once-fine house was falling down about their ears, and she couldn’t save it. Georgie and Jo were growing up with so muchlessthan she had had, than Imogen had had—however briefly. Georgie should have been off at school already, except that they couldn’t afford the fees.
It broke her heart a little more every day.
Lizzie swallowed back the hard lump that had risen in her throat and turned her attention back toward the potatoes. The steady thumpof the knife shearing through them, dicing the vegetables into cubes, soothed her battered composure. At least until Imogen swanned into the kitchen a few moments later, looking cross. But then, she had looked cross a great deal lately.
“Oh, good,” Imogen said, heaving a sigh of relief. “You’ve already begun dinner. I’m starving.”
“You could have started it yourself at any time,” Lizzie muttered, only a little shocked at the sullen, surly tone with which she had inflected her words.
“Me?” Imogen said, aghast. “For God’s sake, Lizzie, I’m not a servant!” She tossed herself into a chair in a flair of the dramatics that Lizzie had come to expect of her. “Cooking, cleaning, mending—I should have ruined my hands!”
The petulance in Imogen’s voice sheared clean through Lizzie’s patience. She glanced down at her own hands, which were rough and callused.Ruined, in Imogen’s estimation, by the work she did, day in and day out. With the flat of the blade, she scraped the potatoes from the countertop and plunked the lot into the pot bubbling upon the stove.
“But it’s just fine, then,” she said, striving to keep the heat from her voice, “formyhands to be ruined.”
Imogen blinked, her lips parting in a moue of bewilderment. “Well, there’s no reason for mine to be ruined as well, is there?”
No reason at all, except that Lizzie labored every minute of every day to feed their family, to clothe them, to educate them, to keep them safe and comfortable. At least as comfortable as she could in a home that had been rotting around them for years. What was it that Imogen did all day, while Lizzie was occupied with caring for Georgie and Jo, while Lizzie cooked and cleaned and mended?
She dozed in bed until noon. She visited with her friends. And she met her lover in secret. And Lizzie hadallowedit with her inattention, with her doting, with her cosseting and pampering. Imogen had simply come to expect these things as her due. She had never once questioned her right to be cared for and fussed over, had never volunteered to alleviate the burden borne upon Lizzie’s shoulders.
Instead she played happily at lady of the manor, blithely ignoring anything but her own comfort, her own desires—even those that could have disastrous consequences for the rest of them.
The knife slid through a particularly gristly cut of mutton in smooth swipes, as Lizzie gritted her teeth and willed the roiling frustration to settle down deep in her stomach before it could come pouring out her mouth.
Imogen thrust her lower lip out into a pout. “Mutton stew again? I shan’t eat it. We should have chicken at least. Or duck.”
But the truth was that Imogen would eat anything that was put before her and more—the babe made her a great deal hungrier than usual, and she had not even the slightest inkling of how low their funds had dwindled. How much more difficult it had become to feed only themselves, much lessanothermouth—two, if one included the marquess. Shehadnoticed how very thin their dinners had become; how in the last years there had been less and less meat and more and more vegetables. But that was not to say that she had ever examined the reason; she had onlycomplainedof it.
