He moved once more, his long legs disappearing the distance between them with speed and purpose. “You needn’t be alone,” he said, the words firm and strangely forthright before he added, softly, “He needn’t come between us, love.”
The endearment did her in.
What a terrible lie he told.
What a terrible mistake she’d made.
She lifted one hand, staying him again. “He’s not between us,” she said, her voice calm and cool and filled with truth. “He is not the problem.”
“It certainly isn’t you who is the problem.”
“I’m quite aware of who the problem is.”
He looked as though he’d been struck with a soup ladle, just on top of his handsome head, but she took no pleasure in the moment. She was too busy keeping her back straight and her tears at bay as she turned and left the room.
Chapter 15
SAD SOPHIE SEEKS
SOLACE IN SWEETS
Sophie was turning out to be very good at making scandalous exits and absolute rubbish at knowing what to do next.
She couldn’t return to her rooms, as she did not wish to be found, and she couldn’t leave the house, because it was the dead of night and she had nowhere to go. She did not think the Duke of Lyne would take well to her appropriating one of his carriages, either way. He’d likely consider it stealing.
And so Sophie followed her nose and her appetite, and went to the only place she ever felt comfortable in massive houses like this one. The kitchens.
The room was warm and well-lit and welcoming, just as all kitchens seemed to be. There were two large tables at its center, one set with massive platters of beautiful food: a perfectly golden roast goose, a platter of young asparagus greener than she’d ever seen, a towering pyramid of perfectly matched rosemary potatoes, a rack of lamb on a bed of herbs, a pot of mint jelly, and a tower of strawberry tarts that she was fairly certain she could smell from the doorway.
As it had been days since she’d had a proper meal, the food should have captured all her attention, but in these kitchens, the heavy-laden table was not the most compelling feature. No, it was the second table that drew her attention, filled with servants all eating their own evening meal—a meal that looked nothing like the elaborate plates waiting to be served to the now and future dukes she’d left behind.
The servants’ laughter drew her through the doorway, the smell of the warm food making her mouth water. She edged up onto her toes to see what they were eating, envy flaring when she identified the food. Pasties.
The little pouches of meat and vegetable and potato were piled high on several platters at the center of the servants’ table, and the chatter reached a fever pitch as they ate. She heard the gossip, about the angry duke, about the returned marquess, about the girl who had arrived with him. About her.
“Are they very much in love?”
“He must be. He’s come home with her. As though it’s done.”
“She doesn’t even have a chaperone,” someone whispered.
“I’ve no doubt they’re in love.”
Sophie hoped the young woman was not planning to wager on it.
“And you are such an expert, Katie.” The last was spoken by the woman who had been in the dining room, as she set a pitcher of ale on the table. Agnes.
Katie shrugged. “That’s what I’m told.” She turned to the housekeeper. “You’ve been here for a lifetime, Mrs. Graycote, has there ever even been a peep about a wife for the marquess?”
“Never,” a girl who was not Agnes replied.
“Only what we see in the gossip pages,” a third piped in. “He’s more likely to end a marriage than to start one.”
Laughter rang around the table, and Agnes shook her head as a footman entered the kitchens from the opposite end of the room. The housekeeper lifted her chin in his direction. “Are they ready for the next course?”
He nodded. “The lady left, and the men aren’t speaking.”
Agnes pointed to the goose. “Silence makes eating easier.”
“Eating makes not murdering each other easier, I think you mean.”
Sophie thought he made an excellent point, but Agnes, apparently, did not. The housekeeper looked sharply at the footman. “When I wish to know what you think I mean, I shall ask, Peter.”
The footman put his head down and went for the goose, as told. When he lifted the heavy platter to his shoulder and left, Agnes’s gaze found Sophie, shrouded in the dim light of the doorway. Sophie made to leave, but was stayed when the older woman noticed her, her eyes going wide in surprise before she offered a kind smile.
The conversation at the table continued, unaware of the silent exchange. “She left the table?”
“You wouldn’t want to do just that?”
Sophie nearly laughed. Most assuredly, anyone in their right mind would want to leave the table. “Of course I would,” came the reply, “But even I know you don’t leave a meal with a duke.”
“Two dukes, technically.”
There was a quiet pause, and then “Who is she?”
A young man replied. “The marquess introduced her as his future wife. Some lady nob.”
Of course, she was neither of those things. Not really.
“I helped her dress for dinner,” Sophie heard the maid whom she’d met earlier. “She don’t seem a nob. She’s wounded in the shoulder. And very tall.”
“Being tall don’t mean anything,” someone else piped up.
“Being wounded in the shoulder does, though. Does she have a name?”
Sophie had spent much of the last decade being disdainfully discussed as though she were an insect under glass, but always by aristocrats. It was a new experience entirely to be discussed by servants, and she was immediately aware that she belonged neither above nor below-stairs.
Her stomach growled.
Here, at least, she could eat pasties while being gossiped about.
“As a matter of fact, she does have a name,” she said, stepping into the light. Silence immediately fell and she would have laughed at the wide eyes around the table if she weren’t so hopeful that she would be welcome here, in this kitchen, with these people, who seemed more honest than anyone she’d known in recent years. “And since she left dinner without even finishing her soup, she’ll share it for the price of a pasty.”
There was a beat, during which the whole kitchen seemed to still, as though the words had come from up on high instead of from a woman wearing an ill-fitting dress. And then, they came unstuck en masse, moving and shuffling left and right, making room for her. She took her seat, a plate appearing before her, a warm pastry at its center. “It’s chicken and veg,” the maid to her right explained. “There’s also pork and veg.”
“This is lovely,” Sophie said, tearing the pasty in two, releasing a lovely whisper of steam alongside the magnificent scent of pie. Her mouth began to water, but she resisted taking a bite just long enough to say to the assembly, “I am Sophie Talbot.”
She almost did not hear the gasp of recognition from a collection of girls at the end of the table over her own sigh of enjoyment once the food was on her tongue. But she couldn’t not hear the excited “You’re a Soiled S!”
She stopped chewing.
“Ginny, you don’t just call her that,” another girl said. “It’s not flattering.”
The girl called Ginny had the grace to look mortified.
Sophie swallowed and pointed to the cask of ale at the end of the table. “May I?”
A gentleman nearby immediately filled a p
ewter mug and slid it toward her, golden liquid sloshing over the edge when she caught it. She drank. And brazened it through. “Some do refer to me as a Soiled S.”
“For your father,” said Ginny. “In coal.”
“How do you know that?” a young man across from her asked.
Ginny blushed. “I read the papers.”
“The scandal sheets are not the papers,” Agnes said.
The table laughed and Ginny dipped her head in embarrassment. Sophie took pity on the girl, taking another bite of pasty. “They’re more interesting than the papers, aren’t they, though?” She smiled when Ginny’s head snapped up. “I’m the youngest of the five.”
“The young ladies Talbot,” the girl explained to the table. “Daughters of Jack Talbot, who grew up ’ere, in Cumbria. Like us!”
“Except she’s a lady, so not at all like us,” the man at the end of the table said. What a strange world this was, where in one moment she could be too cheap for a duke, and in the next, too expensive for anyone else.
Without home.
She ignored the thought. “Actually,” Sophie said, “I am not very different. My father knows his way around a coal mine, as did my grandfather, and my great-grandfather.”
“My brother works in the mines,” someone piped up.
Sophie nodded. “Just like your brother, then. The only difference is that my father was lucky and bought a plot of land that eventually became the mouth to one of the richest mines in Britain.” Eyes widened around the table, as her carefully bred London accent gave way to her North Country brogue, and she relaxed into the tale, having heard it a thousand times as a child. “He dug and struck for days before he hit on something he could use. Something nobs in London could use.”
“See? She ain’t a nob!” crowed the maid from earlier that day.
Sophie shook her head. “I’m not. I spent my childhood in Mossband.”
“Except ye are,” the man at the end of the table said. “Because we’re callin’ you milady and yer to marry the duke’s son.”
Not really. She pushed the disappointment aside and drank before smiling down the table at him. “My father isn’t only good at coal; he’s good at cards, too.”