He stopped with her outside the iron gate, looking dubious. “Does she … does she have patrolling watch dogs?” he asked.
Olive laughed out loud. “Hip deep in sea water and what else was that?”
“I don’t care for dogs,” he said. “Give me a cat any day.”
“I won’t tell Duke,” she teased as she pushed open the gate. “I’ll protect you.”
And she did, stepping in front of the surgeon when Lady Telford’s fat and waddling, thoroughly nondescript geriatric dog threw himself off the stoop and lumbered toward them, wheezing, his tongue hanging out. As the surgeon chuckled, the dog flopped on the walk at Olive’s feet and bared his stomach to her.
“Do you feed him, too, at Miss Grant’s Tearoom?” he asked, crouching down beside the brute to scratch his stomach.
“Upon occasion. He seems to know when cod is on the menu. Lady Telford calls him Xerxes.”
“That’s a heroic name,” Douglas said. “Perhaps overly ambitious. This is the kind of dog I like—too fat to run and too old to feel so inclined.”
Olive scratched Xerxes, too, which made him sigh in an almost human way. “The surgeon here is saying terrible things about you,” she told Xerxes, who belched loud and long.
Douglas leaned back and shook his head as though to clear it. “That fragrance would evacuate a room,” he said. “I suspect dental decay, but I will not make him a patient of mine. He couldn’t even pay me in butter or cream.”
Olive laughed out loud and let the surgeon help her to her feet. “Brave man,” she said. She mounted the steps and wielded the doorknocker. She listened for footsteps and stepped back.
“Maidie,” Olive said. “Is your mistress in?”
A plain, honest face grinned back at her. “Tha knowest t’auld biddy is in,” she whispered. “Who in Edgar is her equal to visit? But I’ll go look. C’mon in, Miss Grant.”
Olive glanced at Douglas, who was doing his dead level best not to laugh. His lips were pressed tight together, but his eyes were merry.
“Douglas, this is Maeve’s sister Maidie Gibson. We’ll wait in the hall.”
The maid put her hand to her mouth. “I keep forgetting.” She opened the door wider and drew herself up. “Wait right here, dearies.” She hurried off in a purposeful lock step as Xerxes waddled along behind.
“I gather it was hard for Lady Telford to get reliable staff to move to the wilds of Scotland?” the surgeon asked as soon as Maidie was out of sight.
“Rumor says that no one from an employment agency lasts more than two weeks,” Olive whispered.
She looked around the entranceway, wondering what Douglas Bowden thought of the homemade entry table flanked by two chairs carved to resemble Anubis, an Egyptian god.
He stared at the thin and menacing wooden dogs, then up at the barely dressed plaster nymphs in the ceiling. “Words fail me,” he said at last.
“Just as well,” Olive whispered back. “Lady Telford prefers that guests be seen and not heard.”
She could have said more, but here came the lady in question. Olive made a sufficiently deep curtsey, and the surgeon surprised her with an elegant bow. Impressed, she watched him, which meant she saw the sudden surprise on his face when he took a good look at Lady Telford.
“Mr. B … Bowden,” Olive stammered, wondering at the man’s wide eyes and sudden bloom of color from his neck up. “Do allow me to introduce Lady Telford.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Olive thought she saw a warning stare directed at Douglas Bowden from the baroness, followed by bland complacency.
What have we here?Olive asked herself.
Chapter 13
Douglas knew a warning glarewhen he saw one, however brief. He inclined his head again. “The pleasure is mine, Lady Telford,” he said smoothly.
And it was. Of all the scaff and raff from his decidedly lowbrow upbringing in a cooper’s shop in Walton, Norfolk, he never thought to lay eyes on Elsie Glump again. But there she stood, still about as round as she was tall, her hair covered in a hugely unflattering turban. He remembered her from Glump’s butcher shop, where she had held forth years ago, measuring out bits of beef with one finger on the scale, the old sneak.
The warning stare Elsie had leveled at him told him all he needed to know, and he was willing to play along. Why not? “Thank you so much for letting us occupy a few minutes of your time, my lady,” he told her.
She nodded and gestured most gracefully toward the sofa, where he and Olive sat. A glance at Olive suggested that her curiosity had been aroused, probably because there wasn’t anything Douglas could have done to stop the unruly flush that even now continued to heat his forehead.Better to see it through; he could explain later, if he wasn’t flopped out on the roadway, paralyzed by laughter.
