“Six, actually,” said Griffin as Nat opened his eyes and looked at him expectantly. “Now, have you seen a deck of cards with a blue backing?”
“No, sir.”
“That is too bad. Neither have I, and I was most particularly fond of them.” He dipped the point of his toast into the yolk of his soft-boiled egg. “Miss Cole?”
“They are in your desk drawer. I put them away.”
Griffin sent Nat a look that put them on the same side against the sole female in the room. “You see? She has put them away. It is an annoyance, but one that must be occasionally suffered if one wants—”
“Wants?” Olivia asked pointedly when Griffin suddenly fell silent. “Wants what, exactly?”
“Harmony,” said Griffin, inspired to respond in this fashion by Olivia’s look, as well as the tines of the fork she was pressing into his thigh. “There are certain advantages to harmony, Nat.”
“Does it hurt, sir?”
“Harmony? Why, no, it is—” He stopped this time because Nat was shaking his head. “Oh, you are referring to the fork in my leg.”
“Yes, sir.”
Olivia removed the fork and stabbed a thin slice of ham with it. “How did you know?” she asked Nat. “I am not always so easily caught out.”
Nat was uncertain he could explain it. He’d seen it in their faces—one pained, but more as a pretense than fact, and one grim, but slyly so. There was also the matter of a missing fork and the hand that had held it, as well as the exchange they’d made in which no word passed between them. It was not easily explained when he understood almost none of it. He’d simply said what came to his mind.
“It just seemed you might be moved to take a poke at him,” Nat said. “I think he meant to push you to it.”
“Sometimes his lordship doesn’t require a push. He just steps into it. I acquit him of cruel intent.”
“You are too kind,” Griffin said dryly. He glanced at Nat. “Miss Cole tells me you won twenty-three farthings from her yesterday.”
“Yes, sir. It was her money.”
Griffin considered that. “Yours now, though I understand what you mean. Would you like to have some money of your own? Like it enough to earn it?”
Surprised, Nat still did not hesitate. “Yes, sir.”
“We had a boy here, a few years older than you. Beetle. Do you recall seeing him about?” When Nat shook his head, Griffin went on, remembering how the child had rarely left his mother’s side. “He’s gone now, moved away with his family. There are things he did for me that you could do.”
“Griffin,” Olivia said softly.
Griffin did not give any indication that he’d heard. “Everyone here does something, Nat, and earns a wage for it. What do you think of that?”
“Would I be a servant, then?”
“You would be Nathaniel Christopher, I believe. Nothing about working for sixpence a week makes you more or less than that. I will speak to Truss about what he can expect. You will have to make time for your studies, of course, and what you get by way of compensation there is a head full of peculiar things that someone else thinks you should know. As fine a memory as you possess, you will take to it admirably.”
“I shall have a tutor?”
“As soon as I can secure the services of one. Later you will go to school, but not just now, I think. You’ve had a tutor before, haven’t you?”
“Mother taught me.”
Griffin tried to imagine it and failed. “Then she did well by you,” he said vaguely.
“She did not know about battles, sir. History was tedious, she said.”
“And you like it?”
“Yes. Very much. Comte DeRaine liked it also, and he had books and maps. Do you have maps, sir?”
