“Yes, Your Grace,” Dunreave said hastily. “Mrs. Yorke’s doing. Joseph Poole repaired the furnace in the orangery, and she has managed to coax some of the struggling old flowers within to bloom.”
Of course she had. He was beginning to think Mrs. Yorke possessed some manner of magic, and that she had cast a spell on all of Blackwell Abbey. His domestics were filled with cheer. They were efficient, prompt, and happy. There was not a speck of dust to be found anywhere, nor a mouse either. The floors were scrubbed and gleaming. Everything that had been broken was being fixed. His meals were the finest they had ever been. And each time he spied the latest improvement upon his home,a servant was always at hand to merrily inform him that Mrs. Yorke had been responsible for it.
Even Quint had changed during her time at Blackwell Abbey. His moods were no longer quite so black. He curiously found himself lingering in the rooms she had seen decorated, admiring her eye for aesthetics. He wasn’t even upset about the impending arrival of his mother, who had sent a telegraph warning him she would soon venture to the northern wilderness he chose to call home in honor of the Christmas season.
“Please tell Mrs. Yorke that she did well in selecting them,” he said to Dunreave, shaking himself from his thoughts before thinking better. “Never mind, Dunreave. I’ll tell her myself. Do you know where she is?”
“I believe she is in the gardens, Your Grace, fretting with the wreaths.”
“In the gardens? With such a chill in the air?” He frowned, not liking the idea of her toiling in the wintry outdoors. “What can she be thinking?”
“I believe she wished to finish them before Her Grace arrives,” Dunreave offered.
Quint was already striding to the door that led to the sadly overgrown Blackwell Abbey gardens. Strange that he hadn’t bothered to notice how derelict they were until Mrs. Yorke had arrived. But then, he had to admit that there were a great many things he hadn’t taken notice of until she had come.
He found her adding ribbon to a circular assortment of fir boughs, bent over her task at one of the wrought-iron tables that were likely older than he was. Small bits of snow were falling from the sky, and the ground was sufficiently cold that they landed in a silvery crust on the gravel. She melded well with the landscape, her black housekeeper’s weeds in contrast to the white of the snow, the gray sky beyond ornamented by barren tree branches clawing upward in supplication, punctuated hereand there by the occasional snarl of overgrown rosebushes. She was talking to herself, a charming habit he had inadvertently discovered she possessed.
Over the last week, Quint had found himself lingering in halls and walking quietly into rooms and around corners, hoping he might eavesdrop on Mrs. Yorke having a spirited conversation with herself. Why, he couldn’t say.
Perhaps the spell she had cast upon his entire household extended to him as well these days.
“No, no,” she was murmuring to herself now. “That shall never do. The bow is terribly askew.”
The bow looked well enough to him, or at least what little he could see of it from his vantage point over her shoulder. He had halted a measure away from her, content to watch for a few, stolen moments. There was another quality he had noticed his housekeeper possessed. She moved with the natural grace of poetry. Something as simple as the way she smoothed her apron with a lone hand or her brilliant smile of sheer delight when something had gone according to plan—small moments, tiny fragments of her daily toils, and yet each one was laden with such innate beauty and meaning that it robbed him of breath.
To look at Mrs. Yorke was to feel as if one were privy to a grand secret. Quint was reasonably certain his entire household was halfway in love with her in some fashion or another. Watching her in action, he had understood all too clearly how a young beauty of five-and-twenty had ascended the ranks of domestics with such haste.
“Oh, drat,” she muttered to herself as the ribbon she had just untied slipped from her grasp and landed on the thin, powdery layer at her feet.
She sank to her knees to retrieve it, her serviceable skirts pooling around her like ink on ivory, and that sight at last jolted Quint into motion. Three more purposeful strides, and hereached her, bending down to retrieve the fallen ribbon, their fingers brushing over one another. His covered in leather, hers marked by the years she’d spent in servitude. Although she didn’t know it, his were far more ravaged than hers could ever be.
She gasped, eyes going wide, her polite mask falling into place. “Your Grace. What are you doing in the snow? And look at you, wearing nothing more than your tweed coat. You’ll catch a lung infection out here if you don’t take care.”
“I could say the same of you, Mrs. Yorke,” he said pointedly. “Here you are with nary a wrap to keep yourself warm, and you so recently arrived from London to our northern clime.”
She tilted her head at him, rather in the fashion of an inquisitive bird. “I was in the kitchens earlier with Cook, and I was quite overheated. I scarcely feel the cold.”
But as she said the words, a shiver passed over her.
He frowned, not liking to see her discomfort and not knowing when in the bloody hell the condition of his housekeeper had come to mean so much to him. It merely did.
“You are chilled,” he said.
And found himself absurdly mesmerized by a snowflake that had landed on the delicate bridge of her nose. By God, she wasn’t even wearing a hat. He had been so starved for the sight of her that he had failed to take note.
The realization was as sobering as it was alarming.
“I’ve almost finished this wreath,” she said with the smile he had come to look forward to each day, the one that made her green eyes sparkle and rendered her loveliness sharper and more acute, almost like a painting coming to life.
She tugged the ribbon from his grasp and stood, continuing with her task quite as if he weren’t there at all, on bended knee, one of which was now growing thoroughly soaked from the thin blanket of snow on the gravel. He stood, feeling foolishand awkward and somehow as if their roles had reversed in this enchanted, snow-bedecked world.
He coughed lightly into his gloved hand to cover his discomfit. “Nonetheless, you’ll take a chill, madam. I insist you take my coat to warm you.”
He shrugged out of the thick country tweed before she could protest.
Her eyes were wide on him, flurries gilding her dark, extravagant eyelashes. “I couldn’t, Your Grace.”
He placed the garment around her small shoulders despite her words to the contrary. “You mustn’t refuse. I insist.”
