Fool Me Twice (13 page)

A small commotion broke his reverie: a thud, a gasp. He glanced up and caught the blond maid righting a vase. She froze in his sights like a fox in the crosshair.

“Go on, Muriel.” His housekeeper issued this directive from the bedroom doorway, where she stood with her hands folded at her waist, supervising.

Annoyed, he laid down the paper. This woman had the peculiar ability to radiate an authority that she did not, in fact, possess. “Mrs. Johnson. Tell me something.”

She turned toward him, smiling serenely. Had she looked in the mirror? Her skin was lineless, smooth and flush and freckled like a child’s. Was she aware of her age? She had ample cause to fear him. God knew she had
seen him in states that—he could not bring himself to think on it. She was only a domestic; what did it matter?

She had thought him on the edge of
suicide.

He gritted his teeth. She was only a domestic.
It did not matter.
What irked him was the leisurely quality to her movements, as though she could not be surprised or intimidated by anyone—even he. Her confidence made no sense. Was she even twenty-five? What had Jones been thinking? It wasn’t seemly to have a housekeeper so young. Her hair was as bright and vivid as a flag. It was bloody ridiculous, in fact. Artificial, surely.

He needed to have a word with Jones. Get to the bottom of this absurd hiring decision.

“I wonder,” he said icily, “that my staff cannot pursue their duties without your supervision.” She was always underfoot. “Have you no other duties to attend?”

She shrugged. “I am happy to make time for Your Grace’s comforts.”

Against his express wishes. Yes, he had noticed. Why he continued to tolerate her, he did not know. Boredom, no doubt. Perverse amazement at her lunacy. She had the softest skin he’d ever touched.

He shifted in his seat, disliking that last thought extremely. “I did not speak of myself,” he said cuttingly. “I spoke of the staff. If they do not know their roles well enough to perform them without your guidance, then I suggest you rectify
that.
”

She nodded immediately. “A fine plan, Your Grace. In fact, I have already begun to do so. It is human nature to wish to please one’s master, is it not? And I have arranged this opportunity for it.” She beamed. “I fear it has been sorely lacking of late.”

He sat back, astonished. How dared she rebuke him?

She offered him another beatific smile.

He scowled and averted his gaze to the newspaper. He did not like her smile. Until she smiled, she was inoffensively plain. Overly young, but with an air of intelligence—ha! A very deceptive air, no doubt owed to her spectacles and her oddly refined accent.

Her smile, however, broke the illusion that her face was a perfect square. It brought a dimple into her cheek. It drew one’s attention to her mouth, which was full lipped, but only on the bottom. Her upper lip was . . .

Not his concern. And if she was, by some very gymnastic stretch of the imagination,
pretty,
then that was another flaw. Housekeepers were not pretty. Properly, they were too aged to be recognizably female.

“How old are you?” he asked, his eyes on the paper.

“Old enough, Your Grace, to appreciate the boons of cleanliness. I predict you will greatly enjoy the results of our efforts.”

He glared at the headline. He should dress her down for this cheek. He should sack her.
Again.
God damn it, why was she still here?

He took a deep breath. It stopped his next words. By God. The air was taking on a clean, crisp scent that struck him as . . . agreeable.

The vixen was right. These rooms had been overdue for scrubbing.

“Mind your tongue,” he bit out, and snapped the newspaper taut. Jones had done a poor job of ironing. The man should know better.

After a moment, her silence began to irk him. He had rebuked her. She should offer an apology. It set a bad example for the maids.

He looked up to say something sharp—and found
her assisting one of the girls. The maid had discovered a pile of letters sitting unopened on his sideboard. She’d begun to carry them away in bunches with her bare hands. Mrs. Johnson was whispering to her: “On a silver salver, Muriel. You know this.”

“But there’s so many!”

Mrs. Johnson glanced up and found him watching. “Your Grace, how shall we sort your mail? Would an alphabetical organization suit you?”

How in God’s name would that help? “Just leave it there.”

“To properly clean the sideboard—”

“I said, leave it!”

Her lips pressed into a mulish line. The heightening color on her face brought her freckles into livid clarity. Freckles were not fashionable; so many freckles might be counted a disfigurement. How was it that they all clustered on the roses of her cheeks?

Scowling at himself, he once again turned to the newspaper.

“Perhaps,” she said, “if I were to sort them by the postmark—”

“No.” The very thought of all those letters made his chest tighten. The pile grew and grew. One would imagine, with no reply, his correspondents might realize he did not wish to hear from them. But they simply kept
writing
. Christ God. Open one and he would have to open them all. Answer one and he would have to discover what the rest of them wanted. “Burn the lot.”

Silence.

He glared at the newsprint. It might as well have been in Egyptian.

“Perhaps it would be easier,” she said tentatively, “if
someone opened them, and sorted them by degree of urgency—”

He slammed down the paper. Four women froze as one. A strange feeling ghosted over him, ancient, barely recognizable: embarrassment.

He took a deep breath. “I do not wish to read them.” His voice remained level; that was something. “I do not care what’s in them. I will not answer them. Burn them, Mrs. Johnson.”

Her face made a curiously transparent screen for her thoughts. He could see, in the faint twitch of her brow, how deeply she disapproved of his order. And then, in the back-and-forth tick of her jaw, the ridiculous, thoroughly out-of-line impulse surfacing in her. She was going to
argue.

“But what if . . .” she began, and then trailed off.

As he waited, her blush deepened. She cleared her throat and looked away; glanced back at him, and then quickly away again.

He realized he was staring. There was something . . .
interesting
 . . . about her face. How easily he read it. How long had it been since he had really seen anyone? How long since he had paid attention to the small details, the nuances of expression?

Why, he could remember no images from the last year. Nothing visual at all, save the garden. The garden that was dead now. But he remembered it in full bloom this summer. That was all. Nothing else. As though his revelation, how blind he had been to Margaret’s nature, had blinded him to almost everything . . .

He did not even remember who had attended the funeral. He remembered nothing but the grave, which he had visited weeks afterward.
Who were you?
That had
been the only thought he’d felt capable of holding.
Who lies here? Who were you, really?

But even that had been blindness in a sense, a massive self-deceit. It was not Margaret he’d been marveling at, but his own ignorance, the immense space of all the things he had not guessed and never suspected. He, who had prided himself on foreseeing everything.

“Wait,” he heard Mrs. Johnson say. One of the maids had moved to toss the letters into the fire.
That
girl was an obedient servant. “Your Grace,” his housekeeper said. She moved into his line of vision; he saw, in the resolute tilt of her chin, that she had recovered her courage. Such a small observation, to reveal so much. Once, he had been very good at reading faces. Once he could have read a lie from thirty paces. “I cannot think you truly wish to burn all this mail,” she was saying. “What if—”

“Yes,” he said scathingly. “God forbid I should miss an invitation to a charity ball.”

She frowned but made no retort. His brain supplied it for her:
There are countless important matters that might be addressed in those letters.

“I could read them,” said Mrs. Johnson.

He laid down the paper. “You,” he said flatly. “
You
propose to read my private correspondence.”

Even the maids were gawking at her. He noted that with vicious satisfaction. They thought her as mad as he did.

“Well . . .” Her jaw squared. “If it’s fit for burning, I suppose it’s fit for my eyes as well. Unless you have a secretary?”

He snorted. “No.” O’Leary had been called home to Dublin several weeks—no, he realized with a shock, several months ago. “No secretary.”

“Well, then—”

“I sacked him.” This was not true. “He kept insisting on looking through my mail.”

She laughed.

He felt his brow knit into a frown, which he directed at the breakfast tray. Had he been joking? God’s blood, but his head was addled. It felt full of cotton. Bat wings and spiders and nails. How long since his brain had truly worked?

His attention drifted to the headline.

“Well?” asked the termagant. Her own word. He could not fault her self-knowledge.

What was she nattering on about? He couldn’t quite recall. BERTRAM A BOON. He thought of the pistol, tucked away in his bedroom. His old life was dead. He could take it back, no doubt. But that wasn’t what he wanted.

What he wanted was to wreak bloody havoc.
Let loose the hounds of war.

“Your Grace—”

“
Yes,
” he snapped, just to shut her up.

“Thank you.” He heard the swishing of her skirts as she approached. God above! Could she not leave well enough alone? “There is another thing I wished to ask you,” she said as she sat across from him—sat down in his presence without so much as a by-your-leave. Now,
this
deserved a sharp word. He opened his mouth, but she beat him to it, leaning across the chiffonier to whisper, “By any chance, did you consume five pounds of truffles last week?”

What in God’s name? “No.”

“I thought not.” She plucked off her eyeglasses, revealing eyes a startling shade of light blue. He abruptly
forgot what he’d been about to say. She was polishing the lenses with her sleeve as she continued to speak. The words might as well have been gibberish.

Her eyes were the precise shade of the sky over his garden this past summer. On the cloudless days, when the sun shone brightest,
this
had been the shade of the sky. It had glowered at him like a taunt.
Not for you. None of this is for you anymore.

She replaced the spectacles on her nose, the glare of her lenses masking the miracles behind them.

Housekeepers did not possess such eyes.

“And I will look through your letters,” she finished solemnly. She rose and walked away, leaving him . . . confused. He took a testing breath. Yes, it wasn’t his imagination: she left the faint scent of roses behind her.

Was that perfume? How had he not noticed it before? It was precisely as he had imagined the scent of the garden. But he had never allowed himself to open the window, for fear of being disappointed.

God damn it.

He inhaled again as the door closed behind her.

His housekeeper smelled like the summer.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Get on your way!”

Olivia, seated at the desk in the duke’s study, tilted her head to listen. That had been Polly just now, out in the hall.

“Oh, come on now, don’t pretend to be cross.”

And that was Vickers. With a sigh, Olivia laid down the letter—the fourteenth she had opened today that was addressed to the duke. For a fortnight she had been going through these letters, making annotated lists that Marwick received without comment and, so she suspected, never bothered to read.

In other times, other places, she might have been frustrated at her work being so summarily ignored. But the list of his correspondents read like the index in a book of modern history. Reading these letters felt as pleasurable as eavesdropping in a palace. It was not seemly for a secretary to take such private and personal interest in her work.

Then again, she wasn’t a secretary, was she? She was a housekeeper, which meant the argument in the
hall—now growing progressively shriller—was her business to squash.

As she started for the door, she heard Vickers say, “I saw how you looked when Muriel came up to me before. A bit green at the gills! Jealousy, what?”

“Ha! You think I care if a trollop and a dunce—hey! Get your hands off me or I’ll pop you.”

Olivia opened the door. Vickers had Polly crowded up against the wall, sandwiched between the suit of armor and a hip-high Chinese vase. “Mr. Vickers,” she said sharply.

The valet sprang around. “Here now!” He gave a sheepish rub to his bald spot. “I was looking for you, ma’am. Cook wants your approval on the next week’s meals—”

“My foot you were looking.” Polly gave him a hard shove, and he stumbled toward Olivia, who sidestepped him neatly. He spilled onto his knees.