“There!” he pronounced, returning the key to his housemate before setting off in the direction of the staircase.
“Hair?” Mr. Nethercote echoed, putting a hand to his wig as he watched the younger man go. “Haven’t worn my own hair in fifty years!” Shaking his head over the vagaries of the younger generation, he entered his room and closed the door behind him.
Theodore, meanwhile, went down the stairs to the ground floor of the house and glanced about for any sign of Miss Drinkard or her mother. Finding neither, he had no choice but to try and find the kitchen on his own. Fortunately, this was not difficult; having grown up in one of the stately homes of England, he had a very good idea of the general arrangement of such houses. It was only a matter of locating the green baize door that led from the house proper down to the servants’ domain below. Having accomplished this, he had only to follow the clamor that indicated dinner preparations were in full swing.
He peered around the door whence most of the noises seemed to emanate. Sure enough, a mouthwatering aroma wafted from a large pot suspended over the fire from one of several cranes built into the fireplace for that purpose. At a stout deal table nearby, a squat middle-aged woman in a voluminous apron and mobcap dismembered a chicken by means of a carving knife wielded with one beefy arm as she simultaneously barked orders at two serving girls. No, Theodore amended mentally, one serving girl. The other apron-clad female was Miss Drinkard, stirring something in an earthenware bowl with a wooden spoon. Her cheeks were flushed with heat from the great fireplace, and wisps of brown hair escaped their pins to curl riotously about her temples and the nape of her neck.
“Er, excuse me,” Theodore began tentatively.
“Oh! Mr. Tisdale!” exclaimed Miss Drinkard. If it were possible, her cheeks grew still redder. “What—? How may I—?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said, unaccountably embarrassed at having discovered the daughter of the house engaged in a task better suited to the lowliest kitchen maid. “It’s only—I was told that—I need hot water, you see, and Mr. Nethercote said—”
“Of course,” she said quickly, abandoning her spoon in order to take the empty pitcher from him. “I should have told you when I showed you to your room. Water is kept on the hob all day, so you may fill your pitcher any time you have need of it.”
She took a ladle from its hook by the fireplace and filled the pitcher with hot water from a large black cauldron. Theodore took careful note of her actions, reserving the knowledge against the following morning, when he would be expected to perform this task for himself. Finally, he took the pitcher from her, begged pardon once more for interrupting the meal preparations, and retreated up the two flights of stairs to his room. The pitcher was considerably heavier now, and he took care not to spill its contents onto the carpet even as he acknowledged that this could certainly do with a thorough cleaning.
In truth, the coming dinner gave him cause for considerable perturbation of spirits. A curate, Miss Drinkard had said, and a lawyer’s apprentice, along with a couple of old people no doubt gentle of birth, but with pockets to let. He’d met Mr. Nethercote, and had been relieved to find that gentleman, at least, a total stranger. A curate, however, might well be cause for concern, as this young clergyman would no doubt have been educated at Oxford—where Theodore himself had matriculated, although not even the most charitable of his tutors there could have called his scholastic career anything but mediocre. A lawyer’s apprentice was another possibility, although a somewhat less likely one. Then, too, there was Mrs. Jennings. How old was she, and was it possible that she had known his parents in their younger days? His memories of his mother were dim, as the duchess had died while he was still quite young, but he was said to resemble her, in temperament as well as countenance.
He began to wish he’d made a greater effort to disguise his true identity. He’d taken his title—his former title, rather—as his surname, thinking there might be people who would, quite correctly, connect the family name of Radney with his sister’s name before her marriage. But what if this curate fellow, or fledgling lawyer, recognized plain “Mr. Tisdale” as the erstwhile “Lord Tisdale,” having known him at school? Perhaps he would have done better to have concocted a name from whole cloth. He had considered it, but thought it not worth the risk of forgetting, and failing to answer to his own name.
For much the same reason, he’d chosen not to imitate the speech of his native Devon, although as a child he’d picked it up easily enough from the stable hands—had got a thrashing for it, too, he recollected with a grin, when he’d elected to demonstrate this talent for the edification of his father’s dinner guests. But he’d thought it would be too hard to keep up such a pretense, remembering the peculiarities of the dialect while at the same time performing whatever unfamiliar tasks might be assigned to him at the mill.
He’d decided instead to adopt the persona of a gentleman who had suffered a reversal of fortune, deducing that this disguise had the advantage of allowing him to adhere, as nearly as possible, to the truth; it had been a favorite aphorism of his nursery governess that telling one lie always led to a network of further lies in order to maintain the first, until the whole thing
