Page 28 of A Merry Christmas
“Lord Bruton’s house has gone through sugar like sand this week,” said Bess, the other scullery maid, working a whisk with elegance. “Cook says their people fetched more from Cheltenham yesterday. There’s company.”
“Quality company,” Daisy breathed, arranging plates, “with a London sound to them. I heard it at noon in the yard—‘my lord’ this, ‘my lady’ that. The new lot came Monday night. Cousins maybe.”
“Not cousins,” said Tom, a footman, appearing with the coal scuttle and the air of a man who knows everything. “Lord Dunning and his daughter. Saw their coach myself. The arms were as plain as daylight—three ravens and a cross. That’s Dunning, sure enough.”
Merry took the first tray from the oven, then took the tin cutters—a star, a bell, and the angel—and pressed them down in neat lines. She lifted each shape to a waiting tin, spacing them with a care she hoped would keep her from bursting into tears for no good reason at all.
“Dunning?” Daisy repeated, blinking. “But Miss—what was her name? The one in the blue bonnet?—?”
Merry’s hands faltered over a bell-shaped biscuit. She set it down and picked up a star instead, as if changing the shape of the thing could change the words’ meaning.
“Lady Lydia Dunning,” Tom supplied with relish, as if he had memorized the syllables expressly to deliver them in a kitchen. “A tidy piece, by what I saw. Lord Dunning’s girl and neighbour in London toLord Bruton himself. Like as not the families dine together often when they’re in residence.”
Tremaine’s damsel was not a tenant’s chit, then.
“Lord Bruton wants a marriage made,” Tom went on, lowering his voice even as he swelled with the importance of knowing. “He wants it set up quick. His lordship’s boy has got wagers in half the houses from Bond Street to St. James’s, so they say, and he means to mend it with a wife who brings money.”
“Her father will be cautious,” Mrs. Dempsey observed, as though she had not just rebuked them. “A father with sense is always slow, more’s the pity for the foolish. He will have heard the talk.”
“He has,” Tom said, to his own satisfaction. “My cousin’s wife’s brother sells candles next to a coffee-house where the clerks all read the papers out loud and call it improving their minds. The talk there says Lord Dunning’s not easy. Says he dislikes Mr. Tremaine for his cards and fast ways. He won’t promise anything yet.”
“Out,” Mrs. Dempsey said, and flicked her towel at him. “You’ll drop ash in my dough when you get puffed up with knowing. Go on, tell the footmen they shall have sugared biscuits if they fetch baskets from the dairy without breaking the handles.”
Tom fled, grinning. The kitchen’s hum shifted into a higher key, like a pot reaching the boil. Merry stood very straight for a moment, biscuit cutter in hand, while the world arranged itself into a new, uglier sense.
Lydia Dunning. Barnaby had not lied about her name. He had only neglected to mention the little matter of her father’s title. A family friend, yes. A tenant, no. A neighbour in London, no less, which meant long acquaintance, easy habits, the same social sphere. No wonder Lydia Dunning had been sitting so close to him in the pew. No wonder Barnaby had looked indulgent, as if intimacy were familiar.
No wonder he had not introduced her. He had said—what had he said?—that he would present Merry to his father when the matter had been arranged. He had been eager to keep her secret. It struck herthen, as sharply as the edge of the tin star in her fingers, that secrets might be kept for more than one convenience at a time.
The biscuit she held broke under her hand. She stared at the jagged half-star and laughed, a sound that startled even her. She gathered the scrap, and ground it hard onto the table, hard, as if pressure could force the truth into a shape that suited.
Mrs. Dempsey came to stand at her shoulder, not intrusively, only near. “You are working that like it were the devil himself,” she said after a moment, her manner as mild as milk.
Merry eased her hands at once and blinked, brought back from the edge of something frayed and unhelpful. “Indeed I am,” she remarked, and softly set the broken biscuit down.
They laid two trays with neat shapes. Merry brushed them with milk and a dust of sugar until they shone.
In the cool minute between tasks, conversation resumed as conversation always does when work allows it—the soft domestic current that makes a house a village.
“I will take the next trays,” Merry said, reaching for the scraps and turning them without resentment now, because she had found a thing she could control. Her mind marched, however unwillingly, with what she had learned. Lord Bruton wanted Lydia Dunning. Lord Dunning was reluctant, but reluctance was not refusal. Barnaby Tremaine could be charming and was, in all likelihood, even now softening the Earl. It was clear what Lady Lydia wished for. Meanwhile Barnaby had engineered an engagement that lived in a little box with a ribbon around it and could be kept or put away as his prospects arranged themselves.
It was an ugly thought. Worse, indeed, was the fact it rang true.
“You’ll burn your fingers,” Daisy warned, passing with a rack. “Here—use the cloth.”
The aroma of warm chocolate rose richer by the minute, curling around the room. She was grateful to be distracted. For that span of time she belonged to the ordinary magic of turning a bowl of common things into a comfort.
Yet even comfort did not abolish thought. While she sifted a littleextra powdered sugar to fall upon the cooling biscuits, her mind churned.
No wonder he would not introduce her. No wonder he had asked for secrecy. No wonder he had looked through her in the churchyard as if she were a familiar piece of furniture he could claim when it suited him. If Lord Dunning could be persuaded, Merry’s fortune would become an alternative at best, to be applied if his other prospect failed.
Heat rose in her face at the insult of it. Then, just as quickly, shame followed—shame at being surprised. Had she not known some of this already? Had not Joshua—without words, without any ungenerous triumph—warned her? Barnaby’s words had been satin, but his actions were plain cloth. She was nothing to him but a last resort.
She placed three stars upon a plate and dusted them as if she were blessing them. She would not cry in a kitchen full of servants.
“Mama will want these for the tea-table,” she said, because she had to say something, “and the nursery must have their share or they will storm the larder.”
“They will storm the larder regardless,” Mrs. Dempsey said with a fond smile. “Why do you not take a plateful up, Miss Merry?”
