(To his credit, while he did have a few confusing dreams about it as the years went by, he never spoke of it to another human.
He was, indeed, the soul of discretion.)
Chapter Eight
The women currently residing under the roof of the house had gathered in the kitchen, as though it were the keep of a castle under siege. They all felt a little like they’d been drained of blood, too. Their hearts and nerves (and vocal cords, in the case of Dot, the recipient of many a sidelong baleful glare) had taken some punishment. Copious amounts of tea would be required to restore them to anything like equilibrium. They’d all gotten two cups down so far.
Bolt and Hardy, both seasoned fighters, familiar with getting and inflicting wounds and then doing something about them, had determined that the gash was a bit long but it wasn’t horrifically deep. All of the man’s nearby organs seemed to remain whole and safely inside his body. He was as lucky as a man who’d been stabbed could be.
Lucien had bravely volunteered to sew up the man. Because, as he said, “I’ve done it before. My stitches are a thing of beauty.”
The ladies had been told that Mr. Bellingham had been in and out of consciousness and shockingly silent and stoic, apart from hissed-in breaths and a white-knuckled clench around the block of wood they’d given him to grip. It was as though he’d known precisely how to get sewn up.
But he seemed unable to say another complete word after his first startling ones.
Visiting that kind of horrible pain on another man even as a life-saving measure took a toll. After he’d finished, a white-faced Lucien had gone outside to the little park named for his mother to be alone for a moment and take deep breaths. There he waited for Mr. Delacorte and an apothecary; Mr. Delacorte had run up the road to fetch him, as he knew which of the remedies in his case cured or alleviated various ailments but he wasn’t always certain which doses to administer now, and he didn’t want to go and poison a man who seemed to have survived, so far, being stabbed.
“It was the sort of thing Mr. Tweedy could have done,” Delilah said wistfully.
“Fetch the apothecary for stabbed men who topple through doorways?” Angelique mused.
“Precisely.”
They’d both seen Mr. Tweedy back out of the building. Mostly they’d seen the whites of his eyes, which had been bulging like billiard balls.
It seemed an ill-omened day indeed.
“Perhaps puffed sleeves weren’t the way to go after all,” Angelique reflected.
Delilah attempted a laugh but it became a sigh.
They were both, in fact, genuinely a bit glum and a bit reeling.
An earl and his family had resided comfortably with them for some weeks. So had a duke. And not just any duke—the Duke ofValkirk. Thekinghad visited. No one had stabbed any of them. They supposed anyone could be assaulted anywhere at any time in London. And yet they could not help but feel responsible.
But dear Mr. Bellingham . . . on the threshold of their own building . . .
The work of The Grand Palace on the Thames house continued while all of this with poor Mr. Bellingham was being sorted out. Peeling (apples and potatoes and onions), rolling, kneading, cleaning. The maids, revived, soothed and set upright, were soberly finishing up the dusting and scrubbing blood droplets from the foyer.
But everyone in the kitchen, easily distracted, kept starting and stopping their tasks to stare into space.
Aurelie sat quietly at the table, listening to the work going on about her. Though she had been provided some instruction regarding decisions involved in running an aristocratic household, she had not been trained to cook, of course, and so this room fascinated her, too. She was pleased to be among the women, but she suspected everyone present would assume that someone named Mrs. Gallagher would know how to cook, and she worried that the conversation would turn to recipes and such things.
“I find it soothing to fold apples into tarts,” Delilah said to her. “When I am full of thoughts.”
And so that was what Aurelie was doing, following Delilah’s example. She’d been given some apples and dough. She was, indeed, full of thoughts. Of the poor fallen man, and of two men all but soaring through the air at the sound of terror and trouble, and of how everyone had reached for each other and helped.
“If Mr. Tweedy is so fainthearted,” Aurelie ventured, “perhaps he is not the right sort of person to work here after all?”
Delilah and Angelique looked at her with surprise.
Then they both slowly smiled.
“I think you have the right of it, Mrs. Gallagher.Why, Helga here was brave enough to chase someone out with a rolling . . .”
They stopped, probably when they freshly realized they were speaking to a guest, who had been assured in her own interview that they didn’t let rogues get in the door.
“I think you can ask someone if they are brave and they mightthinkthey are brave,” Aurelie reflected. “And perhaps Mr. Tweedy looked as though he ought to be brave. But one never knows until one is tested.”
