“Don’t you want me to drive?”
“If necessary, in a bit.” He snapped Galahad into motion.
Mr. Whiskers stared them down the road.
“You don’t want that man to see me driving, is that it?”
“I don’t care what that man sees.” His hands were tight around the ribbons.
“Then, why—”
“The activity is useful, Miss Lucas. It provides me something upon which to concentrate.”
She turned her attention from the road onto his handsome face fraught with tension. “Is it that bad?”
A muscle in his jaw contracted. “It is that bad.”
Once back at the abbey, with Galahad unharnessed, he took the herbalist’s package and bottle, thanked her, and went into the house without awaiting her. She followed, but to the kitchen where she found Mrs. Polley sniffling over a pot of tea and a table spread with biscuit dough.
“It seems you’ve found sugar.” Diantha tucked her companion’s shawl tighter about her shoulders.
“The boy found it.” Mrs. Polley rolled out the dough. “He’s a wily one. I don’t like to know whose kitchen’s wanting now.”
“He stole the sugar from someone’s house?” She sat down beside the round little form of her companion. “Goodness, I’ve been gone from my friend’s home no more than a sennight and I’ve broken more laws than I can count.” And Mrs. Polley didn’t know the half of it, certainly not the laws of morality she’d broken. She picked at a corner of the dough, the tawny sugar crystals tempting. “I suppose I always knew I would come to no good end. My mother has.”
“Now, miss. You’ll find her and make it all right again.”
“You will have time to recuperate entirely from your chill, I think. We will be here longer than anticipated. And if the villagers begin to suspect where their sugar and chickens have gone, or if someone comes for the cow or recognized the gig we took to the village this morning, we will probably be arrested.”
“It’ll be no more than that man deserves.”
“Perhaps. And me. But not you.” Diantha took her companion’s thick little hands into her own, flour dust swirling about. “I don’t wish for you to come to grief because of me. But I cannot leave here without Mr. Yale. I fear, however, that he will not be able to leave for some days yet. He is quite unwell and I am terribly worried about him.”
Mrs. Polley pulled her hands away and set them to the pin again. “Elizabeth Polley isn’t one to desert her mistress at the drop of a hat.”
Diantha looked toward the doorway that went to the foyer and stairs that could take her to wherever in the house he now was. She curled her fingers around the edges of the bench, holding herself in place.
“I’m afraid it may come to be a great deal more uncomfortable than a hat dropping.”
Chapter 15
“She’s wanting to be milked, miss.”
“I seems so.” Diantha stood beside Owen, elbows propped on the stall’s half door, the cow’s mournful lowing filling the stable with misery. The poor creature’s udder certainly looked heavy. But Diantha didn’t know anything about cows. The situation might not be truly dire. “I don’t suppose you know how to milk a cow?”
“No, miss. Know a thing or two about tending sheep, though.”
“Not, I suppose, how to milk one?”
He cast her a peculiar look.
She folded her arms. The stable was heavy with moisture, the poor weather persisting as though it meant to rain and rain forever. Diantha’s gown and undergarments were soggy, her hair a horrid tangle of damp curls, and her slippers a travesty. Likewise, she had only the gown she’d worn when they traveled to the abbey and this one, and after only three nights she was tired of sleeping without a pillow or proper fire. Her entire world felt like it was in a bog.
“I suppose it is beyond hoping that Mrs. Polley knows how to milk a cow,” she mumbled.
“I’d suppose that too, miss.”
“Though she made those scrumptious biscuits yesterday, and with so few ingredients at hand, so we should be happy enough.”
“Should be, miss.”
“And the tasty porridge with the dried fruit this morning, even without milk.”
“Surely was a fine porridge, miss.”
“She says we will have greens for dinner today. Despite her cough, she went foraging and found them in the garden.”
“I do like a fine boiled green, miss.”
The cow groaned. The horses chomped at their hay. Diantha chewed on the edge of her lips. “Who will milk the cow, Owen?”
He set his hand on his chin like a man of great dignity and stroked as though stroking a beard. Diantha suppressed a giggle. But it felt good to want to giggle. She hadn’t seen Mr. Yale all day, though Owen said he’d taken Galahad riding just after dawn and she knew he had returned to the house. But if he wished for her company, he would surely seek it out.
“Miss,” the boy said, “we might ask the master.”
She chuckled. “Oh, Owen, he is a gentleman. With a London address, no less. Gentlemen with London addresses know how to waltz and play cards shockingly well.” And stand perfectly still pointing a pistol at another man, apparently. “They do not know how to do things like milk cows.”
Owen shrugged. “Like as not. But someone’s got to do it or she’ll sicken, and we’ll have to haul her into the village and the rig’ll be up.”
She slapped her hands against her skirts. “She will sicken. Though it is perhaps the silliest thing I’ve ever done, I will go ask him.” And see him. She wanted an excuse.
She went to the house and up the winding stairway to the parlor, eager as she hadn’t been since breakfast. He was not there. She went to the next door along the corridor. Much larger than the parlor, the drawing room seemed too grand to disturb and she hadn’t been in it since the first day. But she knocked and opened the door a crack.
Ramses’ shaggy nose appeared sniffing at the aperture. She pulled the panel wide.
Gray light filtered into the chamber, casting the white linens that covered furniture and paintings in a ghostly glow, everything except the man standing in silhouette at a dust-smeared window with his back to her.
“I really must ask Owen to wash these windows,” she said into the silence. “Or do it myself, I suppose. It is the least I can do for these people who don’t even—”
He turned to her. Diantha’s throat closed. Light glinted off the weapon dangling from his fingers.
“Wh-Wha—” she tried, but her words died again as he came toward her, her heartbeats filling her throat now, her gaze locked on the pistol.
He halted before her, so close she could see the dark circles beneath his eyes.
“What are you going to do with that?” she whispered.
He grasped her hand, pressed the pistol against her palm, and curled her fingers around it. The metal was heavy and cold, his large hand around hers scalding.
“Hide this.” His voice was very low, laced with tension.
She nodded, little jerks of her head. He reached into his coat pocket and upturned her other hand. Bullets jingled into her cupped palm.
“And these. But not together.” He released her. “And do remember where you have hidden them, Miss Lucas. I shall be needing them again.”
“Do you think,” she said shakily, “that given all, you might call me Diantha?”
“Remember where you have hidden them, Diantha. Now . . .” He drew a hard breath, fever glinting in his darkened eyes. “Leave me. And if by chance I should come for you and am not entirely myself . . . run.”
