Curious, that he called her just “Gardiner” as though she were a man. “Man of all work?” I wondered, collecting a chipped mug from beside the sink. Aside from the kitchen it didn’t seem like much work was done around this house.
He rummaged in the icebox and came out with eggs, bacon, mushrooms, half a loaf of bread. “Did you got a good gander at her hands?”
“. . . yes.” The tea was strong and dark, just the way I liked it.
“How much do you think she can do with hands like that?”
I gave a little bark of a laugh. “From what I saw last night, she can cock a pistol and uncork the whiskey just fine.”
“She manages those two things. For the rest, she hires me. I run her errands. I collect her post. I drive her when she goes out. I cook a wee bit. Though she won’t let me tidy up anything more than the kitchen.” He added rashers of bacon to the pan one by one. He was tall, rangy, moving with a casual loose-jointed grace. Perhaps twenty-nine or thirty, with a dark sheen of stubble in need of a razor, and rumpled dark hair that came to his collar and badly needed a barber. “What are you doing here, miss?”
I hesitated. My mother would have said it was highly improper for a man of all work to be asking questions of a guest. But I wasn’t much of a guest, and he had more right to be in this kitchen than I did. “Charlie St. Clair,” I said, and as I sipped my tea I gave him an edited version of why I’d landed on Eve’s doorstep (and her couch). Without things like the screaming and the pistol pressed between my eyes. Not for the first time, I wondered just how my life had turned so thoroughly upside-down in barely twenty-four hours.
Because you followed a ghost all the way from Southampton, Rose whispered. Because you are a little bit crazy.
Not crazy, I shot back. I want to save you. That doesn’t make me crazy.
You want to save everyone, Charlie my love. Me, James, every stray dog you ever saw in the street when we were little—
James. I flinched, and the nasty inner voice of my conscience whispered, Didn’t do such a good job of saving him, did you?
I cut that thought off before the inevitable surge of guilt hit, and waited for Eve’s man to ask questions because my story was, frankly, bizarre. But he stood silent over the pan, adding mushrooms and a can of beans. I’d never seen a man cook before; my father never so much as spread butter on toast. That was for my mother and me to do. But the Scotsman stood there stirring beans and crisping bacon perfectly deftly, not seeming to mind when the grease leaped out and sizzled on his forearms.
“How long have you worked for Eve, Mr. Kilgore?”
“Four months.” He started slicing the half loaf of bread.
“And before that?”
His knife hesitated. “Royal Artillery, 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment.”
“And then to work for Eve; that’s a switch.” I wondered why he’d paused. Maybe he was ashamed, going from soldiering against Nazis to doing housework for a pistol-wielding madwoman. “How is she . . .”
I trailed off, unsure where my question was going. How was she to work for? How did she get this way? “How did she injure her hands?” I asked finally.
“She’s never told me.” He cracked eggs into the pan one by one. My stomach rumbled. “But I could take a guess.”
“What would you guess?”
“That she had every joint of every finger systematically smashed.”
I shivered. “What kind of accident could do that?”
Finn Kilgore looked me in the eye for the first time. He had dark eyes under straight black brows, both watchful and remote. “Who says it was an accident?”
I wrapped my (whole, unbroken) fingers around my mug. The tea suddenly seemed cold.
“English breakfast.” He lifted the hot pan off the stove, setting it next to the sliced bread. “I’ve got a leaky pipe to look at, but help yourself. Just leave plenty for Gardiner. She’ll come down with a foul headache, and a one-pan breakfast is the best hangover cure in the Isles. Eat it all, and she really will shoot you.”
He sloped out without another glance. I took a plate and went to the sizzling pan, mouth watering. But as I stared into the delicious mess of eggs and bacon, beans and mushrooms, my stomach suddenly revolted. I clapped a hand over my mouth and turned away from the stove before I vomited all over the best hangover cure in the Isles.
I knew what this was, even if I’d never experienced it before. I was still starving, but my stomach was rolling and heaving so hard I couldn’t have taken a bite if I’d had Eve’s Luger pointed at my head again. This was morning sickness. For the first time, my Little Problem had decided to make itself known.
I felt sick, in more ways than a rolling stomach. My breath came short and my palms started to sweat. The Little Problem was three months along, but it had never seemed like more than a vague idea—I couldn’t feel it, couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t see any signs of it. It was just something that had barreled down the center of my life like a train. After my parents got involved it was simply a problem to be x’ed out like a bad equation. One Little Problem plus one trip to Swizerland equaled zero, zero, zero. Very simple.
But now it felt like a lot more than a Little Problem, and not simple at all.
“What am I going to do?” I said quietly. It was the first time I’d thought about that question in a long time. Not what was I going to do about Rose, or my parents, or going back to school—but what was I going to do about me?
I don’t know how long I stood there before an acerbic voice broke my statue pose. “The American invasion is still here, I see.”
I turned. Eve stood in the doorway in the same print housedress she’d worn last night, her graying hair loose and wild, and her eyes bloodshot. I braced myself, but maybe Mr. Kilgore was right about her forgetting her threats of the previous night, because she seemed less interested in me than in massaging her own temples.
“I’ve got the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse going hammer and tongs in my skull,” she said, “and my mouth tastes like a urinal in Chepstow. Tell me that goddamn Scotsman made b-breakfast.”
I waved my hand, stomach still rolling sickly. “The one-pan miracle.”
“Bless him.” Eve fished a fork out of a drawer and began eating straight out of the pan. “So, you’ve met Finn. He’s a dish, isn’t he? If I weren’t older than dirt and ugly as sin, I’d climb that like a French alp.”
I pushed away from the stove. “I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry I forced my way in. I’ll just go—” What? Crawl back to my mother, face her fury, take the boat for my Appointment? What else was there? I felt the cotton-thick surge of numbness creeping back over me. I wanted to put my head on Rose’s shoulder and close my eyes; I wanted to curl over a toilet and vomit my insides out. I felt so sick, and so helpless.
Eve mopped up a glob of egg yolk with a hunk of bread. “Sit d-down, Yank.”
That raspy voice had authority, stammer or not. I sat.