Rhys understood subtlety wouldn’t suffice. “Miss Birdwell?—”
Bretagne’s straight dark eyebrows crashed together. “Tilly?”
“She takes meals with your family and spends evenings with you?”
Obviously, he hadn’t come here to ask that question, but he found he wanted to know the answer.
“What of it?”
“Isn’t she Lady Percival’s servant?”
“I never took you for a snob, Osborne.”
Rhys just kept getting it wrong, didn’t he?
Bretagne snorted. “Tilly is my wife’s servant as much as she could be anyone’s servant.”
Rhys didn’t know how to reply to that, so he held his silence.
“Tilly is no one’s servant,” explained Bretagne. “She’s family. Not in the literal sense, of course, but as good as.”
“But she works as your wife’s lady’s maid.”
“Because she wants to.” Bretagne puffed his cigar. “Tilly doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to. My wife has made that very clear to her.”
“Yet she stays?”
“It’s unorthodox,” Bretagne allowed. “But my wife and Tilly have their own relationship.”
Rhys heard the implication. Bretagne wouldn’t be getting in the way of the bond his wife and Miss Birdwell shared.
“An interesting on dit hit my ears a couple of weeks ago, which I’d ignored,” continued Bretagne.
“Quite a few on dits must cross your path.” It was why he’d come to Bretagne with the problem of Papa’s missing signet ring in the first place.
“This one concerned you.”
“Well, I have made something of a spectacle of myself in the past.”
He was buying time and knew it.
“Recent,” said Bretagne. A quirk at the corner of his mouth indicated he might’ve started enjoying himself.
“Oh?”
“You were observed at Mivart’s with a rather eye-catching blonde.”
Rhys remained silent. Nothing was to be gained by lying to Lord Percival Bretagne.
“So, I’ll ask you this once. Why were you gadding about Town with my wife’s lady’s maid?”
A sudden, inexplicable, and utterly unexpected urge to defend roared up inside Rhys. “Her name is Miss Birdwell.”
“I know her name,” said Bretagne, plainly irked. “My question is—why do you?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I have time.”
