“I was wondering…” Oh dear, how to put it? She licked lips gone dry. “I was wondering…”
Alerted by her hesitation, he emerged from the box and glanced over.
“Did you find something?”
“Not exactly,” she hedged.
Rising, he brushed his dusty hands on his dusty coat. “What do you mean by ‘not exactly’? What are you hiding, imp?”
“I’m not hiding anything,” she said automatically. “Not exactly…Well, I am, to be honest, but it hasn’t anything to do with my uncle or a counterfeiting operation, or—”
“I don’t much care what it’s about. I just want to know what it is.”
Damn and blast.
“Oh, all right.” She blew out a hard breath, only a little bit because she felt she needed to, but mostly just to stall. “I was trying…that is, I was attempting to reach something, you see, something stuck and…well, I hadn’t realized…”
“Out with it, imp.”
Resigned, miserable, she pulled her hand out from behind her back and held it up in front of her. She wanted, very badly at that moment, to hang her head in an aggravating mix of shame and apology, but pride kept her from dropping her chin. It might have shifted—along with her eyes—a little to the side in an effort to avoid eye contact, but that couldn’t be helped.
He didn’t react at first except to blink, clasp his hands behind his back, and run his tongue slowly over his teeth.
“I see,” he finally said.
“It won’t budge,” she grumbled, still unable to meet his eyes.
“Yes, I assumed that was why it was there.”
“And I can’t very well go back out there like this.”
“You certainly can’t.”
Annoyed by his continuing lack of reaction she dropped her hand and huffed. “Aren’t you going to laugh at me?”
“I certainly will.”
“Well, do you think you might trouble yourself to get on with it, so we can move on to the matter of—?” She wagged her bottle-hand at him.
“In good time. I want to be able to properly appreciate the moment. And this room—and our being in it together—place certain constrictions on the volume and length of that appreciation.”
“Would you please just fetch some soap and water, Whit?”
“Of course,” he replied, his lips twitching. “Wait here.”
“Where else would I go like this?” she muttered, as he left.
It seemed to take forever for him to return again—long enough, in fact, for her to give serious consideration to wrapping her hand in an old shirt and seeking him out. If she could have come up with a single reasonable explanation for having her hand wrapped in a shirt, should one of the servants notice and inquire after it, she would have done it.
“Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find soap in this house?” Whit demanded when he finally returned carrying a bar of soap and a small basin of water.
“Some,” she answered. “As I’ve been waiting here like this while you searched.”
“I assumed there’d be some in one of the closets on the servants’ floor, but I couldn’t find a single one that wasn’t filled to the ceiling with other things…tools and books and old clothes and nearly everything but what really ought to be in those closets.”
“Like soap.”
“Like soap,” he agreed, as he knelt to set his burden at her feet. “And brooms and the usual cleaning supplies. Where do they keep all that?”
“They don’t, mostly, though some of it can be found in the kitchen.” She motioned with her free hand. “Where did you find that?”
“I had to go to my room. Sit on the trunk and let me see your hand.”
She considered telling him she could do it herself, but then realized with only one free hand, she probably couldn’t. Not as quickly as he could, and speed was of the essence when one’s hand was stuck in a bottle.
She sat on the trunk. “Did anyone see you or ask what you were doing poking into closets?”
“Nary a soul. I heard snoring coming from several of the servants’ quarters, however. Why does your uncle keep them on?”
She shrugged and watched him lather the soap. “No one else will work for him.”
“Ah.” He reached for her elbow and held her arm out as he ran the soap around her wrist.
“Whit?”
“Hmm?”
“I was wondering…”
“Wondering what?”
“I wanted to ask you before, but, between this, that, and the other—”
He looked up from his task. “What is it you want to know?”
“What is it you do, exactly, for William Fletcher? And how did you come to be doing…what ever it is you do?”
He went back to soaping her wrist. “You shouldn’t know anything about it.”
“A little late for that,” she reminded him. “I answered your questions last night. And it wasn’t something I cared to do.”
He was quiet for a long moment, until Mirabelle began to think he wasn’t going to respond at all, but then he set the soap down and began to use his fingers to rub the soap into her skin.