“I can’t abide mumbling.”
Silas flinched. He’d heard those words from the mouth of his own father so many times that for an instant it felt like he was back home, defending himself from an interrogation on his progress over the dinner table.Sit up straight, boy. Speak up. How do you expect anyone to take you seriously if you skulk about like a thief?
He hadn’t even been mumbling; he was just thinking.
Silas tried to catch Hannah’s eye. Surely she could see how uncomfortable her father was making everyone—not least of all himself. Why had she been so eager to wait until he came to town, anyway? She couldn’t have expected this meeting to go well. The man was the type to never be satisfied. Silas knew his kind.
Did she want me to fail?
The notion crept into his mind like a spider, the brush of its arrival sending a shiver down his back.
Of course she wanted him to fail. That had always been their agreement. But Silas hadn’t known that it would feel like this, with a demanding parent picking apart his every move. He wanted to signal Hannah somehow, to warn her this was a bad idea.
It all feltwrongsuddenly. He didn’t want to make an ass of himself in front of her family, not even for two hundred pounds. He wanted Hannah to take him aside and say the whole plan was off. That she’d changed her mind.
But she wasn’t paying any attention to him. Her eyes were fixed on her father. “Papa, why don’t you tell me what your wedding was like? All these plans for my wedding got me to thinking, I don’t even know the story.”
Across the table, her brothers exchanged a glance. It looked like Silas wasn’t the only one who found this train of thought a bit odd.
“Oh.” The question seemed to throw Mr. Williams off-balance as well. He coughed and took a long swallow of his wine. “It was so long ago, I hardly remember now. We were married in the parish church. I suppose your grandparents and your Aunt Catherine were there. It was just like any other wedding.”
Hannah was obviously dissatisfied with this summary. “I’m sure Mama was a beautiful bride,” she prompted.
No matter how ill-tempered he was, Mr. Williams didn’t seemprepared to contradict this openly. His response was a vague sound that could have been an assent or a harrumph.
Silas should have held his tongue, but he was feeling petty this evening. “I beg your pardon, sir, but what did you say? I think you were mumbling.”
Hannah shot him a furious look, which he returned with equal vigor. Why was she acting this way? Why didn’t she ever see fit to tell him her plans before he was in the middle of them?
The answer was obvious.
Because you aren’t her equal; you’re hired help.Silas had been so fixated on impressing Hannah that he’d forgotten what he was here for. Had he thought that learning to dance would turn him into a real suitor?
Mr. Williams opened his mouth—no doubt intending to issue a stern rebuke—but Eli Williams cut in before he could accomplish it.
“Has anyone been to Kew Gardens this season? I’ve heard the magnolias are in bloom.” Silas was too irritable by this point to be able to appreciate the attempt to help. It was only Williams doing what he always did, rescuing Silas from his own missteps.
Hannah, for her part, didn’t seem to appreciate the change in subject any more than he had. “What about after the wedding?” she persisted. Her gaze traveled between her parents, inviting her mother into the conversation. “What was it like in the first few years you were married?”
What on earth is she doing?The questions seemed designed to prompt some tender sentiments, but anyone could see that Mr. and Mrs. Williams had none. Did Hannah think that she could paper over the tension in the room with a few forced memories? It would have been better to stick to a neutral subject, as her brother had tried to do.
Mrs. Williams seemed to feel more obligation to keep upappearances than her husband, for she was the first to reply. “I was very busy in those days learning to manage a household, just as you will be soon.” Her strained smile encompassed both Hannah and Silas. The poor woman had no idea how wrong she was. “Your grandmother Williams was still alive then and lived with us, of course.”
“Nowsheknew how to run a house,” Mr. Williams smiled wistfully. “We had the most wonderful cook when my mother was alive. What was her name, now? Ah, I can’t remember. She was a great, tall woman. Made the best fish soup you’d ever tasted.”
He finished off the last spoonful of his own fish soup here, and motioned impatiently for the maid to take it away.
Even when he was thinking of something he liked, he managed to slip in an insult. Silas might almost have believed it to be unconscious, except that his barbs hit their targets too perfectly for it to be an accident. His own father had been the same. There was always some small complaint to be tossed out, whether it was aimed at his children or his wife. Each one was too insignificant on its own to warrant comment, but together they added up to an unending deluge.
I think I might hate this man nearly as much as his wife does.
“My mother passed in ’17, and our cook the next winter”—Mr. Williams continued reminiscing as he cut into a lamb chop—“and we never had a cook like her again. Who was that first one you hired, Mrs. Williams? That skinny woman from the next village. Miss Young, was it? Didn’t last a month. I felt ill after every meal. I can’t imagine what you were thinking.”
Silas clenched his hand around his fork until the metal bit into his palm. The desire to punch this man in the nose had grown overpowering.
“She was all I could find on such short notice.” As she replied to her husband in a tired voice, Mrs. Williams was a far cry from the imposing matriarch who’d harped on Silas’s manners these past fewdays. She seemed to have shrunk by half. “You will recall poor Cook passed very suddenly.”
Mr. Williams frowned, as if to cast doubt on this explanation. “None of the cooks you hired after were much good. It takes a firm hand to run a house properly, I’ve always said. You simply didn’t have the skill for it.”
