The Proposition (10 page)

And taking it off would not make him more a gent, that was sure. Bloody hell, the Prince of Wales had one. Miss Bollash didn't want it off for that.

Standing there at the window, scratching Magic, it came to him: She wanted it off for herself.

He couldn't think why. But, well, well, well, he thought. It made him smile. She still couldn't have it off. But wasn't that just the most interesting thing now?

* * *

Down the hall, Edwina awakened with a lurch, her mind filling with consciousness and the day's worries simultaneously, like water down a slough. Before the day was even in focus before her eyes, she already had a pounding sense of everything to do and no time to do it. A normal morning. It was her habit, to gain control of her daily panic, to lay in bed and make lists, organize her concerns, tame them if she could with a plan—often an overambitious, overwhelming plan but nonetheless something to go by.

This morning, though, she lay there trying to dredge up the worry that had disturbed her sleep. What was it? Something new, something she hadn't thought of until her sleeping mind had hit upon it. What? What? She racked her brain.

Mr. Tremore. All her worst fears revolved around him, surely. What about him? She reviewed the worst that lay ahead. (Ignoring staunchly what worry of him that lay behind in a dim midnight hallway.) Changing
his sound,
his accent itself, was going to be the hardest work, though it could be changed; in time he could do it. His grammar and diction would be easier, though only slightly. Beyond these, he required regular coaching in acceptable upper-class social behavior, and they had to come up with a plausible background for him: enough detail to be convincing if anyone asked, to make him fit in, yet without filling in enough that people could verify specifics.

The new problem suddenly came to her. "O-o-oh," she groaned, throwing her arm up over her eyes. "Crumbs, crumbs, crumbs."

No matter what she did, no matter how well she coached him, after dinner on the night of the ball, the ladies would retire to the drawing room while the men had their port and cigars. She could offer him no help when it came to how gentlemen behaved on their own.

She didn't know. He was going to have to invent his way along himself for as long as forty-five minutes.

* * *

Edwina was at the top of the upstairs landing when she first heard the laughter. It was faint but coming from below her in her own house. A laugh she had never heard before, though the voice in it sounded somehow familiar.

By the bottom of the stairs, she knew who it was. Her day-help who came to cook and clean, Monday through Friday: Mrs. Reed. The woman was laughing herself silly. The sound was coming from the serving kitchen off the dining room, a little half-kitchen where breakfast was prepared and served and where, years ago, banquets had been kept hot, course at a time. The laughter now was infectious, so round and rippling and from-the-belly it made Edwina's own mouth draw up as she imagined what might be the cause.

When she opened the door, though, she expected anything but what she saw: Mr. Tremore stealing a sausage over Mrs. Reed's head from her skillet. He complained it was hot,
yike,
as he popped it into his mouth, while the woman did battle for her sausages with a spatula. Mrs. Reed was wiping her eyes from laughing so hard. Mr. Tremore took another, letting out a triumphant crow, then bent, swooping the woman up, taking her into his arms.

"Oh, sir," the cook said in reprimand, though it was a reprimand that relished itself. He danced Mrs. Reed away from the stove, his cheek pressed to hers—which was saying something, since he had to bend down a good foot and a half to get it there. The cook was enjoying herself as Edwina had never imagined the woman could—Mrs. Reed was always so quiet with her.

Edwina stood there in the doorway, watching an alien merriment—nothing like she'd ever seen in her father's house, nothing that had ever existed in her own. While the source of it—an unexpectedly good dancer, if a person liked a two-step jig—led a woman around the kitchen to the rhythm of his own humming. Mr. Tremore's deep voice carried a clear tune. He moved well, guiding Mrs. Reed confidently, round and round, with her fussing with him to stop, as she laughed and rushed her feet after his to keep up.

Edwina frowned. The game seemed to be an ongoing invention of Mr. Tremore's. Part of her wanted to stop it; part of her was oh-so-curious to watch.

To stop it, of course, would make her the spoiler, and she already felt dour enough standing on the fringe. So the part of her that was curious watched and listened to laughter as it filled the close room. It made the little serving kitchen alive in a way she'd never have predicted. Its warming ovens, closed and dark, its bare shelves empty of the huge serving dishes they had once held—neither looked the worse today for disuse. The room's double window was thrown open, the flower box outside bursting with color, red and pink and yellow and coral coming over the sill. And there was Mr. Tremore dancing in the window's wide beam of sunlight.

The back of his vest, a silvery green, was bowed so could he wrap his long, white-shirted arm around the waist of a woman who was head-and-shoulders shorter and several feet wider, not to mention more than twice his age. His black hair shone silky and soft in the light, sharp against the white of his collar.

His clothes from Henley's had arrived apparently. Everything fit. All was new and better in quality than what her butler had found for him last night. And all quite suited Mr. Tremore. She could have believed, standing here watching him, that he was perhaps an easygoing country gentleman—there were such things. Men who remained in their native counties, landowners who talked like the locals—she knew because she occasionally trained their daughters to speak more like the
ton
if they wished to go a Season in London.

Mr. Tremore saw Edwina and slowed.

Mrs. Reed caught on and looked over her shoulder. In the end, Edwina didn't have to say a thing. Her presence alone was enough to end the amusement. Her cook and houseguest let go of each other, parting, straightening. Mrs. Reed began to make apologies, clearing her throat. She set the spatula down and adjusted her apron.

"It's all right," Edwina said, though she couldn't decide how she felt about what she'd witnessed. It was silliness, foolish enough that they were both embarrassed to be caught at it. It was nothing. It accomplished nothing. Yet she envied their lighthearted good time.

She wished she could think of anything to say but what she felt she must: "Mr. Tremore should have his meals in the dining room, all the proper silver set out. We'll do full service, at least until he catches on and is comfortable with it. Could you ask Milton to serve, please, Mrs. Reed?"

"Yes, miss."

A positively stupid thought came to mind as Mrs. Reed waddled out to get Milton: Mr. Tremore had kissed the woman. Not out of passion or lust, God forbid. No, but a bussed cheek, a peck; either was possible. Even likely. And both were aggravating somehow to envision. This overly curious, probably dishonest Cockney-Cornish ratcatcher certainly liked the ladies. Inside of twenty-four hours, with only two women under the same roof, the odds were he'd kissed them both. The skinny spinster and the heavyset cook.

He wasn't very particular, Edwina thought.

Mr. Tremore said nothing as she led him out into the dining room. "You sit here," she said, touching the high-backed chair opposite hers. When he went to sit in it though, she added, "After you hold my chair for me."

He came around. As she sat, he murmured from behind, "We was just havin' fun."

"I know."

He went back around a table more than twenty feet long. Once it had held a line of elaborate candelabra, bowls of
flowers, platters of food. Once the dozen
chairs on his side, the other dozen on hers, had been filled regularly with guests. Mr. Tremore sat opposite her, into one of the empty chairs, and eyed her.

He explained further, "She don't understand what I
say every time. You be the only one here who does."

"So you had to dance with her?"

"She knew stealing sausages. I was telling her I
liked the smell of her cooking."

"I see." She tried to. Yet there seemed any number of other ways to convey one's appreciation. She didn't dance with people over sausage, no matter how delicious it was.

They said nothing more till the porridge arrived, then he
picked up the wrong spoon.

"The larger one," she said.

He frowned down at the mass of silverware surrounding the plate, as if it were a riddle of metal and shape. Good, she thought, for no explicable reason. He found the porridge spoon,
picked it
up.

"No," she said. He held it wrong. She got up from the table, came around, and took it out of his fist.

Frowning, he gave his fingers up to her, relaxing them completely into her ministration. She found herself in sudden, disconcerting possession of a man's
willing hand. Large, warm, heavy. Smooth-fingered. A
strong hand with neat joints. That hadn't the first idea how to balance a spoon. She quickly put the instrument into his correct grasp.

As she sat down again, she pressed her palms once—they'd grown damp—onto the starchy-dry linen of her napkin in her lap, then she looked across the table.

He was still holding the spoon out, staring at how she'd wrapped his fingers around it, a look of distress on his face.

After this, breakfast was silent.

* * *

Mr. Tremore picked up a corner of leftover toast from his plate. Porridge had been followed by eggs, tomatoes, and sausages with fried bread. He'd eaten a good bit, though Edwina had the feeling he'd have eaten more if getting the food into his mouth hadn't been such an ordeal. The utensils had proved frustrating.

By the end, Edwina had let him be. Better he had half a lesson and ate something.

She only wished she could make him more realistic. When she mentioned her fear regarding his being alone with the gentlemen after dinner on the night of the ball, he said, "Won't be a problem." With the toast he mopped up the remnants of eggs and tomato as efficiently as if no one would wash the plate between here and dinner. "I'll listen," he said, "and see what all the other blokes get 'emselves into."

"Nothing," she said. "Gentlemen don't get themselves into anything. That's what makes them gentlemen."

He was going to argue, but, as if he thought better of it, he picked up his knife from his plate. He reached for the jam—

"No, the spoon."

He exchanged the knife for the spoon, then used it to scoop out jam, after which he flipped the spoon over to spread jam with the back. "Then I won't say anything either."

"Well, they talk about
something.
Put the spoon down—you use the knife to spread it."

He shot her a contrary frown, as if she were inventing all this just to confound him. He answered, "Whatever they do, I'll do."

"They may ask you questions."

"I'll answer 'em."

"No, no." She shook her head. He didn't take her concern as seriously as he should, acting as if it were little more than a few details he'd pull together when the time came. "It's a time when men relax," she tried to explain. "They drink brandy and smoke cigars and, oh—" What did they do exactly? She didn't know. They behaved like men. With frustration, she said, "You're liable to answer like a—a ratcatcher—"

He laughed. "It be fact that I will. But I'll talk pretty, as pretty as you show me, and no one'll know the difference. Gents ain't as smart as all that, truth be known. And you got rats."

"Excuse me?" Edwina frowned at him.

"You got rats," he repeated. "In your house or
nearby."

"I do not."

"Yes, you do. Not many, not a problem yet—not so you see them unless you know what to look for. But you got a hole in a corner baseboard over there, and you got sounds under the floorboards. I be tellin' you: There be a nest of them somewhere."

"Oh, fine," she said, tossing her napkin onto her plate. The gentlemen she knew were all easily smart enough to pick out a ratcatcher among them if he started talking about noises under the floorboards. "You have to stop thinking—talking—like a
ratcatcher
, Mr. Tremore."

She felt unappreciated—keen to improve him, while he seemed to dispute her changes were even improvements. She told him, "This is more than an adventure; more than a month of sporting about in fine clothes. It
could change your life forever, make it better."

"It could make it different," he contradicted.
"Maybe better, maybe not." He lifted his chin enough that his eyes came out of the shadow of his brow.

Fair, level eyes. It made her nervous to meet them. She glanced down, focusing on the table as he reached for the jam again. He mounded more on his last corner of toast—he did it just right, the spoon, then the knife.

His hands were surprisingly graceful. They weren't calloused as one might have expected, though his left was scared, the marks of a bite. They were aesthetic hands, attractive, with long, straight fingers. Unlike her own funny digits that thickened at the joints and turned slightly up at the tips. She stared at her hands in her lap.