“Hullo, Norah,” she said happily. “I beat you!”
Norah quickly regained her self-control, looking at them both with supreme arrogance. “So you did. I didn’t really care, anyway. So, what are you going to do with our giant now that you’ve plucked him from the gutter? Next thing we know, you’ll be wanting to reform him.”
“And why not?” Georgie shot back. “Mother has her good works, why can’t I? We bring baskets to the poor, don’t we? I think that Mr. Rafferty simply needs a chance in life, someone to believe in him, and he can become a respected member of society.”
He controlled his instinctive shiver of horror at such an idea. “I’ll be taking my leave now...” he said, edging away, but Georgie immediately grabbed him by the arm, holding him fiercely.
“No, you don’t. Norah is absolutely right, you’re my project! I’m going to reform you, make you happy...”
“I’m fine as I am,” he said uneasily, trying to free himself from her grasp. He couldn’t, not without hurting her.
“No, you’re not,” she said. “I’m going to see you’re gainfully employed. We need a butler—our last one took off yesterday, and we can’t afford a new one. But you’ll work cheaply, won’t you, given that it’s your first job?”
He looked down at her, into her shining eyes, about to tell her where she could stick her butler, when the beauty of the situation struck him. He’d spent long, endless nights looking for a way to get into the Manning household. Now it was being offered to him on a silver platter.
Norah was back to squawking her outrage like a chicken, and Georgie was looking determined.
“You want me to be your butler?” he said slowly.
She nodded, told her apoplectic sister to shut up, and then nodded some more. “Will you? Please?”
It was the please that did him in. That and the fact that it was the chance of a lifetime. Still, he’d be mad to do it. This was too good to be true.
He opened his mouth to tell her no when he caught sight of Norah’s mute fury. “Yes,” he said. “I will.”
Chapter Two
Georgie Manning smiled up at the unkempt Mr. Rafferty. “Excellent!” she announced to no one in particular. “I’ll reform you! You’ll learn a trade, you’ll have a purpose in life, and you won’t need to sleep inside doorways anymore. I don’t exactly know where the butler sleeps, but I would expect he’d have his own room in the servants’ quarters. Not that that there are any servants, really, except Bertha, who cooks for us, and there’s a girl who cleans, but it never seems to be the same one, and Mama said the last one took some of the silver, which is a shame, because the Manning silver is very old and very famous, but most of it was too big for her to cart away with her, thank heavens.” She was talking too much, and she knew it, but she couldn’t help herself. She always prattled when she was nervous.
The man towering over her made a noncommittal noise. “If you have all that silver, why don’t you sell it?”
She made a face. “Oh, it’s entailed, like the country house. It’s considered a national treasure. The best we could do is donate it to the crown, and that wouldn’t do us any good. Father is a baronet—he doesn’t need to be a viscount or an earl, and that’s about the only reward we could expect.”
The man nodded, saying nothing as she herded him back out the door and down the broad steps. For such a crowded venue, they were able to pass with relative ease, and she realized that all the guests were giving them a wide berth.
“You seem to terrorize the guests,” she said. “Everyone moves out of my way. It must be because you’re so fearsome.”
“I doubt it,” said her companion. “They just don’t want to mix with the dregs of society.”
She frowned at that. “Well, we’ll show them. They’ll have to mix with you when you’re our butler.”
“Not exactly.”
They’d reached the carriage, and she waved old Edgars back to his perch as she reached up high for the doorhandle. Instead, an arm reached across hers, as Mr. Rafferty easily opened the door and let down the steps before taking her arm and assisting her up into the carriage. She had the impression of strength, and then he followed her in, the coach sagging beneath his weight. Her father really would need a new coach sometime soon, she thought with that nagging bit of worry in her stomach. Her father was going to need a great many things that were out of reach, but at least she’d provided him with a butler.
“Well, people have to be polite to the butler,” she continued her argument. “What would the world come to, if people refused to converse with other people’s butler?”
“Society, as we know it, would collapse,” he said wryly.
She cast him a quick glance. He had a sense of humor—most servants were dreadfully serious. But then, this man was no ordinary servant. “Well, that might be a good thing.” She sat back on her seat, surveying him. It was dark, of course, and he was nothing more than a very large, dangerous-looking shape. “Mother is always telling me I rush into things without thinking them through, and I expect she’s right, but I really do think you’re an excellent idea, unless you’re a criminal and a murderer, in which case it’s not so clever of me, but I trust my judgment and I can sense you’re a good man.”
“Completely harmless,” he answered in his deep, slow voice, and she could see the white of his teeth as he smiled beneath the shaggy beard. “Do you always talk so much?”
“Only when I’m nervous.”
“Do I make you nervous?”
She didn’t want to answer that. “You’re going to have to shave, I expect,” she said suddenly. “And bathe. And I suppose I’ll need to find clothes for you—you really don’t dress like a butler. It’s a shame you’re so awfully tall. We’ve never had anyone in service as big as you are, so we have no livery that would fit.”
