Page 23 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
“Today,” Willie grumbled, shoving the sack of potatoes onto a shelf.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Ye’ll vacate the master’s chamberstoday.” A snarling twist of a grimace crossed his face, catching in the otherwise flat line of his mouth. “It’s fortunate enough we are that the master thought to send ahead, so we’d know to be ready.”
Luke rifled through the bags still to be sorted, and began handing Willie items at random. A block of butter; a bundle of carrots; a small sack of salt. “He doesn’t usually?”
“He’s not been home often enough for me to speak tousually,” Willie groused. “Only been with the family for four years.” He held out a gnarled hand impatiently. “Flour next.”
Luke supposed that must be the largest of the sacks, with some weight behind it. He handed it over. “I can’t imagine they’re in a position to pay you terribly much,” he said.
“Don’t pay me at all,” Willie grunted.
“Then why stay? Surely you could—”
“No one’d have a man of my age, and that’s a fact.” His bony shoulders rose and fell in a long sigh. “The truth of it is, after my wife passed on, I wasn’t good for nothing.” A brief hesitation, followed by a low, regretful sound. “Matter of fact, I wasn’t good for nothing long before that, more’s the pity. Every village has got a drunk, and I was worse than the worst of ‘em all. Let the last of my money trickle through my fingers like ale down my throat, until I had nothing left but an empty bottle and an endless thirst. Got m’self tossed out into the street for it, since I couldn’t pay my rent.”
Mundane, Luke thought. One of the oldest vices in the world. He himself had found the bottom of a bottle on more occasions that it would be prudent to admit to. There’d been wholeweekshe hardly remembered—
“’Twas Miss Lizzie who found me,” Willie said. “When I was at my lowest, sleeping in the road, seeing as I hadn’t anywhere else to do it. She took me home with her, let me dry out. Let me stay on.” He gave a brief shake of his head. “Watch yerself, my lord, or ye’ll end up just the same. The fall is farther from a fancy London townhouse, I reckon—but a fall is a fall.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Willie gave a phlegmy cough into his hand. “Been there m’self,” he said. “Ye think I can’t see it clear enough in ye? Ye got the selfsame demon sittin’ upon yer shoulder—the one that pulls ye down to the bottom of every bottle ye come across. Take care it don’t end ye.”
“I’m not a damneddrunk.” And yet, the defensive words came out less certain than Luke would have preferred.
“No? Ye’re doin’ an admirable impression, then. I remember those shakes, my lord—the weakness, the sweatin’. Feels like ye’re plumb wrung out, eh? Like ye been put through a box mangle.”
“Your precious mistressshotme, I’ll remind you.” The guttural growl was meant to stymie the turn of the conversation.
Willie was unwilling to oblige. He scoffed and gritted out, “Aye, and another man might o’ thought that’s all it were. But we know better, ye and I, don’t we? Ye’re fightin’ on two fronts. A little nick to the arm ain’t enough to bring down a man like ye—not on its own. It’s the spirits what done ye in.”
A queer silence drew out. When it became obvious that Luke did not deign to respond to Willie’s accusation, at last the man shook his head and sighed. “Been staying with the family ever since,” he said. “Made something useful of myself. Made something worthwhile of myself.” And as he turned, hand out stretched for the next item, he fixed Luke with that clear-eyed, intent gaze, and it carried a challenge within it.
A challenge Luke neither wanted nor needed. “I’ll have you know,” he said, “I’m worth a great deal.”
“Are ye, then.” Willie’s appraising eye raked him up and down, and Luke had the distinct impression he’d fallen somewhat short of expectations. Measured and found wanting with so little care or ceremony that it was nearly offensive. “Miss Lizzie’s known for takin’ in strays,” he said. “What does it say of you that she didn’t want you?”
“That she’s got abominably poor judgment,” Luke muttered, and his hand clenched around a glass jar within the depths of the last bag, which he retracted and handed over.
Willie snatched the item out of his hand, held it up for Luke’s inspection. “I’d have to agree,” he said, displaying the jar of marmalade. “See now, shesacrificedfor this. Coulda put the coin toward an extra bit of meat. But yeaskedfor this, and she obliged.”
An uncomfortable sensation curdled in Luke’s gut. Guilt, he supposed. A feeling he was growing increasingly and uncomfortably familiar with.
Willie slid the jar neatly into a space upon the shelf. “So whatareye worth?” he asked. “Because if it weremycall…I wouldn’t have even have judged ye worth the marmalade.”
∞∞∞
“This is acloset.”
Lizzie ground her teeth together. “It has a window.”
“That means nothing. I’ve got closets that have windows in my residence. I’m certain of it.” Still the marquess had not set so much as a toe over the threshold of the small room, his face filled with undisguised disdain for what would be his new accommodations.
Lizzie would have put good money upon the probability that his exalted lordship had not once entered anything that might remotely been termed a closet in the whole of his life. “Do your closets often havebedsas well?”
“That isnota bed. I’m not certainwhatit is, mind you, but a bed it most certainly is not.”
