Page 124 of The Language of Love

Chapter 21

Henry knew he was behaving like a man unhinged, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.

Every night before he went to bed—usually far closer to dawn than dusk—he swore the next day would be better. That he would be better.

But today was his sixth morning at Stoke and he was tenser than he’d been the first morning.

He was determined to spend some time with Annis today. He’d neglected her shamefully since coming to Stoke, leaving her alone in the decaying pile of bricks with Julia and Edmund most days while he’d toured the various farms, horrified by the repairs and maintenance that had been deferred for decades.

Both he and his steward, a sturdy, phlegmatic middle-aged man named Milner, had worked sunup to sundown, hiring everyone they could find in the building trades to tackle the most important tasks first. Like roofing, for example. Every single tenant farmhouse had ancient, leaking roofs.

By the time Henry returned home in the evening, he barely had enough energy to bathe, shave, eat dinner, and then he was at it again, reading everything and anything he could find on farming, a subject on which he was woefully ignorant.

He’d also made time to inspect the Dower House and had arranged for a crew of roofers to start work on the house the following week, after they’d fixed one of the tenant roofs, which had a hole the size of a coach wheel.

For the first few nights he’d gone to Annis, made love to her less selfishly than he had the first night, and then tossed and turned in her bed until dawn. He would have gone to his own room, but he knew she liked to have him nearby.

Her courses began four nights ago, so he’d gone to his bed on those nights, usually not sleeping until an hour or two before the sun rose.

She had asked him, more than once, what was wrong.

How could he tell her if he didn’t know? All he could say was that he felt… frantic, as if he were working against a clock that he couldn’t see.

The only thing that made him feel better was to keep moving. Whenever he had too much time to think, he felt like his skin would crawl right off his body.

Today was the first day he would work from Stoke, rather than ride around the estate with Milner. Just being in the castle with Julia and Edmund nearby was enough to make him feel violent but Stoke was his house and he could scarcely avoid it forever.

He entered the breakfast room a little later than usual, at six-thirty. His first morning at Stoke, he’d come down to eat at six and found a cold fireplace, no food, and no servants.

He had summoned Mrs. Jenkins to ask where he might find breakfast.

“Viscount Singleton and Lady Rotherhithe usually eat in their rooms, my lord.”

That wouldn’t do, not at all. There were hardly enough servants to keep the house running. The last thing they needed to be doing was serving breakfasts to people in their rooms.

“Everyone except my wife will eat breakfast in the breakfast room from now on,” he’d decreed. “The countess may eat whenever she wishes, wherever she wishes.”

By everyone, he meant Julia and Edmund.

All the ancient great aunts and uncles who’d littered Stoke when he’d been a boy had died off. To a one, they had been dismissive and obnoxious to him. He now knew that most of their behavior had been his uncle’s fault—anyone who was kind to Henry had risked censure from the earl.

In any event, the breakfast room was now the only place for his two remaining hangers on to eat.

He arrived in the small, sunny room to find a series of chafing dishes on the rather gothic sideboard. As usual, Mrs. Jenkins was on hand to see that Henry’s coffee arrived scalding hot.

“Good morning, my lord,” she said, dispensing the black, viscous brew from a steaming silver pot.

“Good morning, Mrs. Jenkins.”

“Your coddled eggs will be here shortly, my lord.”

Henry nodded, not wanting to look at her and encounter the worshipful gaze she seemed to reserve just for him.

“And here is the post… my lord.” She hovered just to the right of his chair.

Henry sighed and looked up to find her staring down at him like a proud headmaster with his prime student. He couldn’t help being amused by how many times she’d said my lord in the past five minutes.

The master and servant dynamic between them made Henry more than a little uncomfortable. For all intents and purposes, Jenkins had been his mother and his father when he’d been growing up. While she’d never been affectionate—at least not in words—she had treated him with kindness, making sure that he had a gift to open on Christmas morning, something special on his birthday, and that he was decently, if not expensively, clothed. Given his uncle’s clutch-fisted ways, Henry suspected that Mrs. Jenkins had spent her own money on him.