One of them was his wife. She was eagerly talking, gesticulating with her hands as she appeared to be directions to a group of women who held mops, buckets and brooms. Then they spread in all directions to their assigned places.
Heaven help him.
They were going to clean the place!
Higgins was entirely right. It was an invasion of the grossest sort.
He felt oddly helpless. She really was determined to settle down here, was she? She was going to clean up this place. Other than firmly locking his door and staying out of sight, there was nothing he could do about it unless he revealed himself.
Face a group of women?
He broke out in a sweat.
He’d rather face Boney’s firing squad.
He crept back to his room, feeling defeated.
It had been a satisfying day.
For the first time in a fortnight, Birdie finally had her bath.
She also had a maid, Ally, who helped her. She whispered when she talked, so Birdiehad to tell her to speak up several times. Ally was a shy girl who’d worked previously as a maid in a manor house near Edinburgh. When the lady of the house passed away, she was dismissed from her post, and she had travelled north to live with her sister and her family. She worked quietly, flitting from room to room like a shadow. She pressed, folded, and put away Birdie’s clothes, and mended tears and holes in her stockings. She also tamed Birdie’s unruly hair, deftly tying it into a bun that did not look too severe, teasing out some locks that stayed in shape.
Birdie now had a pretty new dress that Eilidh, with her nimble fingers, had quickly produced. Eilidh had spoken the truth when she’d said she knew how to sew. Birdie’s wardrobe was full of old dresses that were long out of fashion. Eilidh promised she would take them one by one and adjust them for her. That woman could sew a ball gown out of the dusty curtains without blinking if she told her to.
Birdie stroked the dark blue velvet material of her new dress. It was warm, and it matched the plaid shawl. She thought it looked good on her.
The new cook, Mrs Gowan, made traditional Scottish food. For supper tonight they’d have Cullen Skink, she’d announced. It turned out to be a creamy soup with smoked haddock, potatoes, onions, served with toasted bread. Birdie had never eaten anything so divine. Well, after her diet of porridge and sausage, anything would taste divine.
The duke, however, hadn’t come down for supper. He’d been notoriously absent the entire day. Birdie wondered what he was doing.
Later,she wandered into a room that must’ve been a study. It had mahogany shelves crammed with books. An oak writing table stood in the middle of the room. She assumed it was the old duke’s study, long since abandoned.
Birdie went to the table and opened the drawers. They were stuffed with papers, books, bills.
Sitting in the heavy leather chair, she emptied the drawers.
At the bottom were two leather books.
Ledgers. She flipped one open and studied the numbers. “Whoever did the accounting here must have had a horrid sense of numbers,” she said as she shook her head. Then she grabbed a quill and calculated.
After two hours, she rubbed her eyes. The candles were burning low. Was there any point in trying to decipher the ledgers further? She could make neither head nor tail of it. Either someone had badly tampered with the numbers, or she was simply too tired to calculate.
She tucked the ledgers under her arm and wandered into the drawing room, which looked quite comfortable now that the holland covers had been removed. The room had been cleaned, the carpets beaten, and the curtains and windows washed. It was a wood-panelled room with a threadbare old sofa and a pianoforte. She had taken little notice of the instrument before but now had a desire to try it out.
Birdie sat down on the stool and pressed a key. The piano was badly out of tune.
Regardless, she played a simple Mozart melody that she’d been taught at the seminary. Birdie was an indifferent player. She would never be as accomplished as her friend Arabella, who played piano to an almost professional level. She was out of practice and did not have the music sheets to help her along.
Sensing a presence behind her, she paused, her hands hovering above the keys.
“That was atrocious,” a voice behind her said.
She whirled around. Gabriel was leaning against the doorway, his arms crossed. A lock of black hair fell across his face, shadowing his injured side. He was in shirtsleeves, his shirt tucked in one side of his breeches and hanging loose on the other. He looked handsome, dangerous, wild.
Birdie’s pulse increased, and suddenly the room seemed too small.
“I thought I was doing rather well. Not a single mistake.” She hammered down on the keys again.
