“My lady has rung for her breakfast tray,” Kat said sharply to the girl whose job it was. As her ladyship’s personal footman, Kat was the second most highly ranked manservant in the manor after the butler, and the maid jumped to her feet and bobbed a curtsey. “I am sorry, Mr. Fivepence,” she said. “I shall take it up immediately.”
“Everything is ready, Mr. Fivepence,” said the cook. “It shall take only a moment to toast the muffins and put the hot chocolate in the serving jug.”
She nodded in the direction of a kitchen maid, who snatched up several muffins, fitted them to the toasting fork she held, and bent over the hearth to reach it close to the flames.
A tray waited at the end of the table nearest to Kat, covered by a cloth. Kat lifted the fabric and inspected the contents, not because she thought the cook might have forgotten something, but because it was part of her male persona and of the Lady of Carr Abbas mystique she had been carefully building.
Part of convincing everyone in the household and the neighborhood that, while her ladyship was gentle and kind, appreciative ofeverything done for her, her ladyship’s servant was proud and protective, insisting only perfection was good enough for the lady.
Captain Harraway watched with what looked like amusement. Kat avoided looking at Jacob after her first searching glance.
If it was Jacob.
“My apologies to you and your mistress,” said Captain Harraway. “I have distracted her servants from their duties.”
Even without looking, Kat knew Jacob was staring at her. She could feel the weight of his gaze on her skin. She continued to pretend to ignore him.
“I shall let her know you have called, sir,” she said.
“Oh, this is not a call. I shall not disturb the lady at such an early hour. I merely stopped by to let the house know Flynn and I were on the grounds.” He flashed a brilliant smile at the cook. “But Cook’s wonderful muffins tempted me from my work.”
The words after the servant’s name washed over Kat as she fought to show no reaction to the final confirmation of her hopes—or were they, perhaps, fears?Flynn.It is him.But what does he want? Why is he here?
“Perhaps your lady might wish to walk out later, in the direction of your pretty lake?” said Captain Harraway. “I should be pleased to show her my work. I shall only be sketching today, until I find the precise scene I wish to capture.”
“I shall pass on that message, sir,” said Kat, a safe enough remark, and no commitment. She had lost the battle to keep from looking at Jacob and had caught his eye. One corner of his mouth tipped up in the impudent half-smile she remembered so well, and he tapped his chest above his heart.
Her own heart leaped, interpreting the gesture to mean he still had the amulet she had given him for good luck, pinned to his small clothes. “I shall wear it near my heart,” he had told her, “so it is close to you, for you will always be there,in my heart.”
But was she just daydreaming? She didn’t even know if he had recognized her, let alone whether he still remembered their boy-girl promises.
“I am ready, Mr. Fivepence,” said the maid.
Kat blinked. She had been staring at Jacob and had missed the final assembly of the tray. “Very well,” she said. “Thank you, Cook. Good day, sir, Mr. Flynn.”
After Kat Fivepennyhad left, the housekeeper appeared to chivy the servants to their work. When Captain Harraway apologized for distracting her staff and said they would be off into the landscape, Jake half expected her to say the words he’d heard so many times when he was a boy, “You may leave, but I wish to have a little word with young Flynn.”
So much so, that he only breathed freely again when the pair of them were outside and walking toward the lake.
“That was interesting,” said the captain, once they were out of earshot of the house. “You heard what the tenants and workers said about the houses and fields belonging to the Lady of Carr Abbas. And now we see that everyone in the house accepts her as their lady. I wonder what she has told them.”
Jake wasn’t sure how to respond. He knew that Kat would do anything for Miss Ellen and so would Mrs. Kirby. He hadn’t told the captain about Kat yet, nor Mrs. Kirby, and he wouldn’t do so until he’d had a chance to talk to his Kat. Even if she wouldn’t tell him what was going on, even if she lied, he would at least have given her the chance to explain herself. He owed her that.
When he had come back to England, he had put the captain’sneeds ahead of reuniting with Kat. Now he had to choose between them again. Now, he chose Kat—Captain Harraway could look after himself. Depending on what she told him, he’d decide how to square it with the captain.
That she would come, he didn’t doubt. He knew that exasperated look. She’d talk Miss Ellen into it, and she’d find a way to talk to him without the captain or Miss Ellen listening in. From the looks of her, she was annoyed, and he doubted she would accept as an excuse that he’d been certain she must have married by now.
If she had been waiting eight years for him to return, she had a right to be peevish. He’d be lucky to come out of the coming conversation with his privates intact. Jake grinned. She was a stick of dynamite, was his Kat, and from what he’d seen, her fuse was well and truly lit!
He had to wait a little over an hour. The captain didn’t set up his easel, but wandered back and forth around the lake, stopping from time to time to make pencil sketches. Jake had brought a book in his pocket—the third volume of Tristram Shandy. He found a spot to put the horse blanket where he could sit leaning against the fallen trunk of a tree while having a view of the roaming captain and over the path from the house.
The book didn’t manage to capture his attention. Part of his mind was seething with questions, part revisiting memories of Kat as a girl, and part staying alert to his surroundings. He found himself abandoning a sentence in the middle, with no memory of its content, instead staring down the path or following Captain Harraway with his gaze, so that when he returned to the book, he had to read the passage again.
There she was at long last. Not pacing behind her mistress as a dignified footman should, but marching beside her, the pair of them chatting like the friends they had been in girlhood—though not in front of Miss Ellen’s mother or her older sisters.
Captain Harraway had seen them too. He had beensitting on a rock by the lake, his sketch pad on his knee and his pencil flying, for the past fifteen minutes, so he must like the aspect. Now he stood, put the pad and his pencils in the copious pocket of the coat he wore, and took several paces toward Miss Ellen and Kat.
Or, rather—Jake corrected himself to acknowledge the captain’s point of view—the false Lady of Carr Abbas and her footman.
