“Order and reputation, and more important, the proper management of a household and the people in it. Yes, Miss Hosmer, I am.”
Temperance picked up her toast and took a bite.
“I will also need a full accounting of the household expenses for the past two years,” he said, after a moment. “And the guest rooms in the east wing should be prepared. I will be reviewing the staff schedules this week.” He glanced at Albina.
“Lady Wilmington. I trust you understand my meaning.”
“Every word,” Albina said pleasantly. “You have very clear diction.”
His gaze rested on her for a moment. Then it moved to Soot, who was still on the chair.
And then on his son.
“Joseph, sit up.”
Joseph, whose posture was already so correct that sitting up further would have required structural modifications, sat up.
Temperance looked at the boy, and watched the interaction unfold with great curiosity.
“Joseph,” she said. “Would you like more toast?”
His eyes moved to his father, who was looking at his letter again, and then back to Temperance.
“I have had sufficient, thank you,” he said, very correctly.
Temperance looked at his plate. He had had, by her count, one piece. She pushed the toast rack toward him anyway.
Harper, without looking up from his letter, said, “Sit up, Joseph.”
The breakfast room settled into a quiet that was not quite comfortable and Albina, who could read a room better than anyone Temperance had ever known, chose this moment to reach over and retrieve Soot from the chair beside Temperance, settling the cat into her lap. Soot immediately began to purr and the sound was very loud in the quiet room.
Harper looked up and Albina smiled at him over her teacup with the serenity of a woman who had survived thirty years of a man telling her what to do and had emerged on the other side fundamentally unchanged.
Something moved across Harper’s expression that Temperance could not quite read. He looked from Albina to Temperance and back, and she had the sense he was revising something. Some prior estimate of the situation he had constructed before arriving and found, now that he was here, to be not entirely accurate.
He returned to his letter with a sigh.
“Nine o’clock tomorrow,” he said. “Both of you.”
Albina looked at her daughter, grinning.
“Of course,” Temperance said.
She said it in the pleasant, even tone she had been using all morning. But she knew that things had suddenly changed.
Perhaps for the worse.
CHAPTER 5
“Sit down,” Alethea said. “I’ll have tea sent up.”
Temperance had rushed over to her friends estate at the first opportunity.
“I don’t need tea, what I do need is you fill you lot in with what has happened.”
She had written earlier urgently requesting her friends to come in. Charity arrived just after her.
“Tell us,” she said.
