“No, indeed! And as much as I regret the manner of his leaving, I cannot deny it will make my life a great deal more comfortable. He seems to regard me as his personal property, and although I don’t wish to hurt him, none of my attempts to hint him away have had the slightest effect!”
“Any man who can ignore ‘release me before I box your ears’ is incapable of being moved by hints,” Theo assured her. “But—at the risk of seeming impertinent, I must ask: what do you really know of Sir Valerian?”
“I know that he is standing for Parliament, of course, and that he has been painstakingly honest in his dealings with Mama, for he has paid her in advance for the use of the dining room for his meetings. Oh, are you thinking of what Mr. Potts said about ‘lecherous advances? It was nothing of the kind! He merely took my hand and—and tried to flirt with me. The merest nothing, really.” All the same, Daphne felt her face grow warm at the memory.
“But you said ‘meetings,’ in the plural. Is he holding another one, then?”
“Yes,” she said, fighting back a wholly irrational annoyance that he should find this information more compelling than the possibility that Sir Valerian might have been making unseemly advances to her. “Tomorrow night. Why? Do you want to attend?”
“I—I don’t know. Perhaps I should.”
Her fine dark eyes widened. “There’s nothing wrong with them, is there?”
“I don’t know,” he said again. “I only know that there seems to be some sort of—I suppose you could call it unrest—at the mill. I should hate for you and your mother to find yourselves in the middle of some unpleasantness.”
“Should I warn Mama, do you think? Perhaps she ought not to let him hold his meetings here.”
“Say nothing to your mother, at least for the nonce. It may prove to be a storm in a teacup. I can hear something of the proceedings through the chimney flue. Perhaps after tomorrow night I shall have a better idea of what’s going on.”
“Or you could just attend the meeting yourself,” she pointed out reasonably. “After all, they are for the mill workers—and you’re a mill worker.”
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “but until I have a better idea of their purpose, I’m reluctant to align myself with them.”
At that moment, a door opened at Theo’s end of the corridor, and a moment later old Mr. Nethercote emerged from his bedchamber, dressed for dinner in all the finery of a quarter-century earlier.
“Oh!” Daphne exclaimed. “Mama will be expecting me to help Cook, and I haven’t even changed my dress!”
“You may tell her it’s my fault, for keeping you chatting in the corridor,” Theo said gallantly.
And of all the excuses she might make, Daphne thought, that was the last one she would choose. Mama might excuse her dallying with Sir Valerian by the river, but lingering in the corridor to converse with, as Mr. Potts had said, a common laborer? Impossible. And on the subject of Mr. Potts . . .
“No matter how tardy I might be as a result, Mr. Tisdale, I cannot go without first thanking you for coming to my aid,” she said warmly, raising shining eyes to his. “I shall never forget it as long as I—” Suddenly conscious that she was saying too much, she broke off abruptly and ducked into her room quite as quickly as Mr. Potts had done.
She hastily divested herself of her second-best morning gown, donning instead a faded round gown of blue calico before hurrying down the stairs and through the baize door that led to the kitchens, as eager to avoid her mother’s censure as she was to escape the realization that, had it been Mr. Tisdale who had seized her in his arms and covered her face with kisses, her response might have been quite different.
“DAPHNE, MY LOVE, YOU have miscounted,” her mother chided, looking up from her own task of slicing bread to nod at the stack of plates Daphne carried. “You’re a plate short. Now, what can be the cause of this sudden absentmindedness, I wonder?”
Her mother’s coy manner and knowing look gave Daphne to understand that she was more than forgiven for her tardiness, so long as it was Sir Valerian who had been the cause of it. “There is no error in the number of plates, Mama. I—I believe Mr. Potts will not be dining with us.” In fact, she had hoped that Mr. Potts had broken the news to her mother while she had been changing her dress. Her heart sank at the realization that this task must fall to her. She recalled hearing the sounds of heavy footsteps on the stairs as she dressed, followed by the slamming of the front door, and only hoped Mr. Potts had remembered to settle his account, as he had promised.
“Oh?” Mrs. Drinkard asked. “Why not? Surely he is not ill! Perhaps a cup of broth in his room—”
“No, no,” Daphne assured her. “In fact, Mr. Potts intends to leave us. Indeed, I—I believe he may have done so already.”
“To leave us!” echoed Mrs. Drinkard, dismayed at the prospect of losing a boarder—or, more specifically, the rent money that boarder brought in. “But why, pray, should he? And with not a word of warning, too! It seems most unlike him.”
“He had—words—with Mr. Tisdale.”
“But he has been with us for two years, and Mr. Tisdale for hardly more than a fortnight! If one or the other of them must leave, it should be Mr. Tisdale!”
“You do not understand, Mama. Mr. Potts was clearly in the wrong. He made, um, unwelcome advances to me, and released me only when Mr. Tisdale intervened. It is a good thing he decided to leave on his own, and spared you the unpleasant task of insisting that he go.” Something in her mother’s expression suggested to Daphne
