JANE AWOKE DISORIENTED EARLYthe following morning. There were none of the noises of drunken men bellowing and women shrieking and children crying and quarreling, none of the smells of stale cabbage and gin and worse to which she had grown almost accustomed. Only silence and warm blankets and the sweet smell of cleanliness.
She was at Dudley House on Grosvenor Square, she remembered almost immediately, and threw back the bedcovers to step out onto the luxury of a carpeted floor. After she had gone yesterday to give notice to her landlord and fetch her meager belongings, she had reported to the servants’ entrance of Dudley House, expecting to be put into an attic room with the housemaids. But the housekeeper had informed her that the house had its full complement of servants and there was not a bed available. His grace’s nurse would have to be placed in a guest room.
It was a small room, it was true, at the back of the house overlooking the garden, but it seemed luxurious to Jane after her recent experiences. At least it offered her some privacy. And comfort too.
She had not seen her new employer since yesterday morning, when she had so boldly—and so despairingly—demanded that he provide her with employment if he would not help her keep the job she already had. He had apparently taken a dose of laudanum after she and the physician had left, which the housekeeper had sneaked into a hot drink without his knowledge, and it had reacted with the enormous amount of alcohol in his system to make him violently sick before it plunged him into a deep sleep.
Jane guessed that the size of his headache this morning would be astronomical. Not to mention the pain in his leg. It was only through the skill of a superior physician, she knew, that he still had two legs today.
She washed in cold water, dressed quickly, and brushed out her hair before plaiting it with expert fingers and coiling it tightly at the back of her head. She pulled on one of the two white caps she had bought yesterday out of the wages she had earned at the milliner’s. She had gone back there officially to give her notice and explain that she would be working for the Duke of Tresham. Madame de Laurent had paid up, too surprised to do otherwise, Jane guessed.
She left her room and made her way down to the kitchen, where she hoped to have some breakfast before she was summoned to begin her work as nurse.
He would make her prefer starvation to her current employment, he had predicted yesterday. She had no doubt he would try his best to make her life uncomfortable. A more arrogant, bad-tempered, ill-mannered man it would be difficult to find. Of course, there had been extenuating circumstances yesterday. He had been in considerable pain, all of which he had borne stoically enough, except with his tongue.Thathad been allowed to run roughshod over everyone within earshot of it.
She wondered what her duties would be. Well, at least, she thought, entering the kitchen and discovering to her chagrin that she must be the last servant up, her working life was unlikely to be as monotonous as it had been at Madame Laurent’s. And she was earning twice the wages with board and room in addition.
Of course, it was to last for only three weeks.
HIS LEG WAS THROBBINGlike a mammoth toothache, Jocelyn discovered when he woke up. From the quality of the light in the room, he judged that it was either early morning or late dusk; he guessed the former. He had slept the evening and night away and yet had lived a lifetime of bizarre dreams in the process. He did not feel in any way refreshed. Quite the contrary.
It behooved him to concentrate on the mammoth toothache in his leg. He did not want even to think about the condition of his head, which felt at least a dozen times its usual size, every square inch of it throbbing as if some unseen hand were using it as a drum—from the inside. His stomach was best ignored altogether. His mouth felt as if it might be stuffed with foul-tasting cotton wool.
Perhaps the only positive note in an overwhelmingly negative situation was that if first impressions were anything to judge by, at least he was not feverish. It was the fever that killed after surgery more often than the effects of the wound itself.
Jocelyn jerked impatiently on the bell rope beside his bed and then vented his irritability on his valet, who had not brought his shaving water up.
“I thought you would wish to rest this morning, your grace,” he said.
“You thought! Do I pay you to think, Barnard?”
“No, your grace,” his man replied with long-suffering meekness.
“Then fetch my damned shaving water,” Jocelyn said. “I have bristles enough on my face to grate cheese.”
“Yes, your grace,” Barnard said. “Mr. Quincy wishes to know when he may wait upon you.”
“Quincy?” Jocelyn frowned. His secretary wished to wait upon him? “Here? In my bedchamber, do you mean? Why the devil would he expect me to receive him here?”
Barnard looked at his master with considerable unease. “Youwereadvised to stay off your leg for three weeks, your grace,” he said.
Jocelyn was speechless. His household actually expected him to remain in bed for three weeks? Had they taken collective leave of their senses? He informed his hapless valet with colorful eloquence what he thought of the advice and interference of physicians, valets, secretaries, and servants in general. He threw back the bedcovers and swung his legs over the side of the bed—and grimaced.
Then he remembered something else.
“Where is that damned woman?” he asked. “That interfering baggage whom I seem to remember employing as my nurse. Sleeping in the lap of luxury, I suppose? Expecting breakfast in bed, I suppose?”
“She is in the kitchen, your grace,” Barnard told him, “awaiting your orders.”
“To attend me here?” Jocelyn gave a short bark of laughter. “She thinks to be admitted here to ply my brow with her cool cloths and titillate my nerves with her sharp tongue, does she?”
His valet was wise enough to hold his tongue.
“Send her to the library,” Jocelyn said, “after I have retired there from the breakfast room. Now fetch my shaving water and wipe that disapproving frown from your face.”
Over the next half hour he washed and shaved, donned a shirt, and sat while Barnard arranged his neckcloth the way he liked it, neat and crisp without any of the silly artistry affected by the dandy set. But he was forced to concede that the wearing of breeches or pantaloons was going to be out of the question. If current fashion had not dictated that both those garments be worn skintight, perhaps matters might have been different. But one could not fight fashion altogether. He did not possess breeches that did not mold his legs like a second skin. He donned an ankle-length dressing gown of wine-colored brocaded silk instead, and slippers.
He submitted to being half carried downstairs by a hefty young footman, who did his best to look so impassive that he might almost have been inanimate. But Jocelyn felt all the humiliation of his helplessness. After he had sat through breakfast and read the papers, he had to be half carried again into the library, where he sat in a winged leather chair beside the fire rather than at his desk, as he usually did for an hour or so in the mornings.
