Charlie smiled in return, his sense of doom broken for the moment by the warmth between him and his savior. He couldn’t find the words, so he nodded.
“Good.” Jonathan stepped closer to him, cupped the side of Charlie’s face, then planted a quick, not-quite chaste kiss on Charlie’s lips. “Now, behave yourself. I’ll have someone send supper up for you. Until then, see if you can’t sort the dry plates from today and organize everything for tomorrow. I thought we might photograph the orangery in the morning, if the weather is accommodating, and the formal gardens in the afternoon.”
Charlie nodded enthusiastically, lips tingling from the kiss.
His heart dropped as soon as Jonathan left the room, though. It felt like an enormous risk to let his savior out of his sight for more than a few seconds. He didn’t trust the other guests roaming the house any more than he trusted Fairford’s servants.
“This is not a good place,” he whispered to himself as he went to the table where they’d left the photographic equipment when they’d come back from their afternoon’s work.
It didn’t take long to organize things as they needed to be organized. Two weeks as Jonathan’s apprentice had hardly made Charlie an expert photographer, but he knew where exposed dry plates needed to be stored and how Jonathan’s satchel should be packed for their work the next day.
He was finished with the task quickly, then sat waiting for someone to bring him supper.
The wait grew long. It settled heavily on Charlie’s shoulders, especially when his stomach started to growl.
What if the servants had forgotten about him? What if they’d deliberately ignored Jonathan’s request to have supper sent upas some sort of cruel joke? What if Jonathan had forgotten about him entirely?
That last thought unnerved Charlie so much that he lost his appetite. Jonathan wouldn’t forget about him, not after kissing him. He relied on Charlie’s help too much.
Although he could easily accomplish everything the two of them had been doing on his own. He’d worked solo for years before Charlie had come along. And he hadn’t stopped teasing Charlie about putting him back where he’d found him.
About an hour after being left alone, Charlie couldn’t stand the wait any longer. He got up, heart in his throat, and left the room to go in search of either supper or solace.
It was his luck that he came across the pale-faced maid as soon as he descended to the front hall.
“Um…my master asked that supper be sent up to me?” He managed to push out the words somehow.
The maid froze as if he’d shouted at her. Her brown eyes went large as she stared back at him. “I wouldn’t know, sir,” she said, dropping into a tight curtsy.
Charlie was stunned to have someone call him “sir”. So much that it robbed him of the ability to say anything else, even though he worked his mouth in the attempt to speak.
“Mr. Glenn would know, sir,” the maid went on, darting a furtive look around. She lowered her voice to almost nothing and said, “He’s gone to the orangery to fetch greens for Cook.”
Charlie frowned slightly, but he couldn’t find the words to ask why before the maid rushed off, as if even talking to Charlie was a sin.
Confused, Charlie searched around the hall, wishing he knew what to do. What he really wanted to do was run back upstairs to Jonathan’s room and hide under the bed until they could return to London. But hunger and the memory of his suffering from it on the street pushed him to pursue a more primal urge.
He had to eat, and if the person who could give him food was in the orangery, that was where he needed to go.
Even though the sun had set, bathing the landscape around Fairford House in darkness, Charlie felt better and bolder once he was out of the house. He hurried around to the side of the house, then found the path that led to the orangery by the light of the moon. Part of him thought he was mad for leaving the safety of his and Jonathan’s room to go anywhere on the unfamiliar grounds, but the gnawing in his stomach was too terrifying for sense to take over.
The orangery was dark, which gathered worry into a knot in Charlie’s gut as he approached it. If Mr. Glenn truly was there fetching greens, surely there would be at least a faint glow from a lantern. As far as Charlie could tell, the whole thing was black.
The same wasn’t true for the dull cottage that sat several yards distant from the orangery on the other side. The building itself seemed to blend into its surroundings in the dark, but a faint light glowed from the windows, all of which were curtained.
The cottage must have had something to do with the orangery. Perhaps Mr. Glenn had gone there to organize and bundle the greens he’d picked for Cook, like Jonathan had a darkroom to develop his photographs. All Charlie needed to do was to politely knock on the door and ask Mr. Glenn to see to his supper.
Even before he reached the side of the cottage, Charlie realized what a terrible idea the whole thing was. He was as like as not to have Mr. Glenn shout at him and tell him to go down to the kitchens to fetch supper for himself as he was to resolve anything. If he hadn’t nearly died of hunger just over a fortnight ago, he would have come to his senses sooner and just stayed in Jonathan’s room.
It was too late now, though. Especially when he noticed one of the cottage’s windows was open and someone inside was crying.
Charlie stopped where he was, a few feet from the window, to listen. Mr. Glenn wouldn’t be crying while sorting out greens, would he?
The cry came again. It was more of a pitiful sob that sounded from just inside the window, where the breeze blowing across the hillside sucked the curtains outward so that they flapped and billowed, as if the cottage itself were breathing. Again, nearly every instinct Charlie had told him to turn and run, but the sounds coming from inside the cottage demanded not to be ignored.
Cautiously, knowing it was a terrible idea, Charlie approached the window. His hand shook as he reached out to grasp the curtain so that he could draw it aside and look into the dimly lit room.
At first, he didn’t see anything. The cottage was a simple, one-room dwelling. It was rather nice, all things considered. A newish stove sat in one corner with a steaming, copper kettle on top. There was a counter next to that and several cabinets. Just under a window on the opposite side of the room was a table with two chairs. There was a comfortable-looking couch with a well-stocked bookshelf beside it.
