Dear Lady Disdain. Paula Marshall
begun to snow again, and the wind had risen during the night, so that using the inadequate convenience was even more of a pennance than she had feared, but needs must. She pulled the blanket she had thrown about her shoulders more tightly around them before making her way back. With luck she would be in her bed again before anyone was up and stirring.
But the kitchen door opened even as she put a hand out to open it, and, of course, it was he who was up and about. He would be. Matt closed the door carefully behind him before he saw that she was there, and for a heart-stopping moment they stared at one another in silence.
She was right: he had been the lion-man. He was carrying a heavy greatcoat and his perfect boots, the only dandified thing about him. Otherwise he was, all things considered, lightly dressed, wearing only his shirt, unbuttoned almost to the waist, to show a tawny pelt extending from his neck to his middle, and his black breeches, with his legs and feet in black silk socks. If anything, he looked even larger and more massive than he did when he was fully dressed. And she had been right about him looking like a prize-fighter: he was fully as muscular as she had imagined him to be.
His firm jaw showed a light, tawny stubble, and a pang shot through her. She had a dreadful, insane desire to run her fingers along the strong line, to feel his growing beard’s roughness. His eyes, the most compelling thing about him, were on her, as avidly as hers were on him. Yes, this place was driving her mad to make her think such thoughts.
Matt Falconer, for his part, saw a transformed woman. The softness of sleep was written on Stacy’s face; all the stern lines, together with the strong set of her mouth, were quite gone. She looked like a woman ready to entertain her lover. Did she know, or was she quite unconscious of what she looked like when she wasn’t playing Lady Disdain? Her black hair had come loose during the night so that it was no longer strained away from her face, sharpening it, but tumbled in soft, curling waves almost to her waist, adding to the impression of soft abandon which the rest of her gave.
The stasis which held them both paralysed passed. Stacy said in a whisper, ‘You are out and about early, sir.’
Matt shrugged, replied prosaically, ‘Someone must look after and feed the horses.’
The horses! She had quite forgotten about the horses in worrying about everyone and everything else. Matt was now sitting down on a low stool which stood by the door and was beginning to pull his boots on. He was going to feed the horses. How odd. Why not Jeb, or one of the other menservants—Hal or John Coachman, for instance, or even the postilion? She could not think of one of the many men who had passed through her life, offering for her hand—no, for the Bank—who would have gone to the trouble of caring for and feeding the horses when there was a kitchen full of menservants who could be ordered to do so.
The wind struck her keenly and she began to shiver, with cold this time. ‘I ought to help you,’ she offered.
Matt, now booted, stood up and began to pull on his heavy many-caped coat. ‘No,’ he told her curtly. ‘Not that I couldn’t do with your assistance, but you are not properly dressed for the task. If it becomes too much for me I shall fetch that tall footman of yours, the one who is so keen to defend you, to help me. He will probably be awake by then. Now go indoors before you die of cold, and if you really want to be useful make up the fire and put water on to boil for the breakfast porridge.’
His coat was on and fully buttoned, and without further ado, and certainly without any of the usual empty politenesses with which gentlemen usually favoured ladies, he was gone, struggling through the driving snow to the stables. What a strange creature he was! One moment insulting her by talking so of Hal, the next off to save Hal and the others trouble, after speaking to her as though she were a servant!
Anger flooded Stacy as she made her way to the big kitchen fire, to find Cook there, already beginning to work, but grateful to the fine lady who insisted on helping. In the daylight she could see how large the kitchen was, and also that, over the years, it had been allowed to deteriorate. The walls were black, the copper pans were dull, overgrown with verdigris, and the tables looked as though they had not been scrubbed since the Domesday Book had been written.
Which was probably due, thought Stacy disgustedly, to Matt Falconer’s easy way with servants. No wonder he orders me about as though I were a kitchen maid if he is so willing to do the menial work himself—but how can he bear to live in such a pig-sty? This was a puzzle which occupied her until the next time she crossed swords with him.
Matt Falconer, feeding the horses, throwing extra blankets over them, was occupied in trying to solve another problem—that of Miss Anna Berriman, known to her companion and servants, when they weren’t thinking of what they were saying, as Miss Stacy.
He had met many women in the United States who carried themselves with a frankness usually reserved for men, and who often, out in the fields of Virginia in the poorer plantations, did the work of men. But Miss Berriman was another thing altogether. It was plain that all her people were, if not frightened of her, ever-ready to jump to her orders. She had an unconscious arrogance, giving her orders as though it were the only thing in life she existed to do. But she was, he was coming to see, much more than your usual domineering fine lady, who took her rank as carte blanche to be as unpleasant as she could to all around her while doing nothing herself.
She organised her affairs in a wholly practical way. There was nothing frivolous about her. And she was ready to do things herself. She had helped to feed Louisa and had bound up Polly’s wrist, and although she had bridled and tossed her head at his orders she had carried them out once she saw that her assistance was necessary if they were going to get through the night without undue distress.
And Hal, the young footman, once the ale had begun to work on him the night before, had roared belligerently at Jeb, who had said something deliberately provocative about Miss Anna Berriman, calling her ‘your typical idle fine lady’, and suggesting that she was more decorative than useful. ‘You just watch your manners, sithee. Miss Stacy ain’t no useless fine lady. Why, tonight she not only took the lead in getting us all out of the pickle we were in when the coach overturned, but she walked more than a mile through the snow herself, helping the postilion so that poor Polly, who was injured, could ride pillion with John Coachman, when by rights she ought to have been sitting there with him.’
Well, now, that was a surprise. Eager to discover more about this odd young woman, who annoyed him every time they met—and partly, he acknowledged, by not conforming to any of the expectations he had of women—Matt had commented sardonically, ‘And is that her sole claim to not being a fine lady? If so, it’s little enough.’
Hal had just been about to retort hotly, Well, she runs Blanchard’s Bank as well as any man, when he had belatedly remembered Miss Stacy’s injunction that no one was to reveal who she was until they reached York.
So he had consoled himself by sulking until Matt, still pushing at him, had asked, apparently inconsequentially, ‘And what is her real name, Hal? She says she is Miss Anna, and you and the rest sometimes call her that and sometimes Miss Stacy. Which is it?’
Hal had muttered sullenly into his ale, ‘Her pa used to call her Miss Stacy, and it stuck. Something to do with her ma, I think.’
‘Oh, and who and what was her pa when he was at home?’ asked Jeb, who, like Matt, found Miss Berriman intriguing as well as annoying.
‘A gentleman.’ Hal had enough sense left to be evasive. ‘His pa left him money, they say.’
One of the nouveaux riches created by the late wars, then, thought Matt. Which might explain the hauteur as a form of defence, in a society which tolerated rather than approved of them, although the explanation seemed thin. He wanted to ask, How much money? but he thought that any more questions and Hal would be waving his fists at him again, and the last thing he wanted, with the women sleeping at the other end of the kitchen, was a brawl.
Just before they finally retired for the night Jeb came up to him and muttered, so that the others couldn’t hear what they were saying, ‘Hot for her, are you?’
Matt drew back, almost assuming the aristocrat again. He stopped abruptly. He didn’t like