Ah, yes, it was so much better to think about him, even if she could only do so rather incoherently, zigzagging between scraps of recalled conversation, fragments of Bertie’s scathing commentary, and whole, long minutes of warm-cheeked euphoria.
Now that she put her mind to it, she realized that she knew quite a bit about Stuart Somerset, from Bertie and from the gossip she’d heard before she became Bertie’s mistress. Mr. Somerset’s mother had worked for Manchester’s premier modiste. In the spring of 1854, Sir Francis had summoned the said modiste to Fairleigh Park as a rather desperate enticement to lure his wife, who’d refused to leave her bed since her confinement three months before, out of her invalidity. The modiste brought with her dozens of the shop’s best bolts of fabric and two of her most capable seamstresses.
Lady Constance did not abandon her sickbed so easily. But Nelda Lamb, on the other hand, quite took leave of her good sense. Nearly ten years later, after Lady Constance was no more, Nelda Lamb returned to Fairleigh Park and brought with her the shameful result of her previous visit, a nine-year-old boy who was the spit and image of Sir Francis.
The boy, for all that he came from the gutters, quickly adapted to life at the mansion. Sir Francis raised brows when he sent the boy to Rugby, one of the nine great public schools singled out and named in the Public School Act of 1868. But the boy did not disappoint his father. He excelled at everything he did, quietly yet inexorably outshining his brother, who was a gifted athlete in his own right and no intellectual midget.
It’s as if he were some sort of automaton, Bertie had said more than once. A windup mechanism that kept marching in one direction and one direction only—toward greater brilliance and distinction.
Boring. Dry. Moralistic. Wouldn’t know how to have a good time if it rolled in crème anglaise and rubbed itself all over his lapels.
She’d giggled at this last. It had been a glorious day last summer. She’d made them a wonderful picnic, and they’d dined alfresco under a sky that was only a little less impossibly blue than her eyes—according to Bertie—and dotted with clouds of such pristine softness they could have been fluffs of eiderdown from God’s own duvet.
I think everybody is boring and dry and moralistic next to you, her besotted self had told Bertie, Bertie with his generous capacity for pleasure, his golden good looks, and his assured handling of all the responsibilities that had been thrust upon him at such a young age.
But Bertie would turn out to be a horse’s behind; and Stuart Somerset, not at all boring, dry, or moralistic. No, he was heroic, modest, discerning, perfectly behaved, and—her cheeks warmed again—not half so prudish as Bertie would have her believe.
If we must.
Would you like to find out?
Why had she said the name of the inn so loudly, enough to carry three streets over?
Because she desired him. She recognized all the signs of impending infatuation: the awe, the yearning, the gathering of hopes.
As if her personal history hadn’t yet taught her enough about hanging all her hopes on one man, she began to—driven by her mounting hunger—systematically imagine Mr. Somerset’s arrival at her door, this very moment, an enormous tray floating magically before him.
On the tray—and because it was a magic tray after all—was everything that Verity could possibly want to eat. A plate of cold cuts. Vol-au-vent with a garniture of creamed seafood. Paté baked in brioche. Fruits, both fresh from the orchard and incorporated into tarts, creams, and cakes.
Her mouth watered. Her stomach gnawed. From where she sat on the edge of the bed, her stockinged ankles crossed before her, she glanced at the door, unable to help herself.
Nothing.
She dropped her face into her hands and groaned at her hunger—she’d thought that by becoming a cook she’d at least never be hungry again—and at her untrammeled imagination—Mr. Somerset and the self-locomotive tray! What next, would he have a magic wand that made her clothes fly off too, so that she needn’t feel any responsibility for sleeping with him, since she really, really couldn’t help it?
Well, if her clothes had to fly off before a handsome stranger, tonight was not a bad time for it to happen: In her fluttered, disoriented state, she had yet to extract the sponge that she’d earlier lodged inside herself. She’d been mad to scheme on Mr. Somerset, but not so mad that she’d risk another pregnancy, no matter how remote the chance.
A knock came at her door. She looked up, almost sure it had been her mind playing tricks on her. The knock came again. This time every one of her muscles jumped at once.
“I’ve your tea, mum,” said a woman’s voice. The innkeeper’s wife.
She had not ordered tea. But now that tea was miraculously here, she certainly wasn’t about to turn it down. She scrambled off the bed, yanked her door open, and dropped her jaw in happy wonder.