‘Neither, I thank you. Now, secure your own cup, Lord Northam, and come and sit by me and tell me all the London gossip. The guest of honour should not be acting the waiter.’ As he came back with a cup of tea he did not want she moved the chair beside her for him and gave a ‘Tsk!’ of exasperation as it stuck on something. ‘Now what is wedged – Oh!’
A sewing basket rolled out from under the chair, losing its lid in the process and spilling silks, a thimble and a piece of half-worked canvas at her feet.
Theo dropped to his knees and began to gather it up. ‘You do very fine work, Lady Swinburn,’ he remarked, twisting round, the delicate petit point strip in his hands. ‘This will form part of a bell pull, I imagine.’
‘That is not my work,’ she said after one dismissive glance. ‘Our niece Laura embroiders. She must have forgotten it.’
‘Oh yes, you said the other day that she has gone to Bath to care for an elderly relative who is unwell, I recall,’ Mrs Gilpin said comfortably. ‘Such a good, dutiful thing to do. She is a dear girl.’
From the expressions on the Swinburn family’s faces – except for Charles who was buried in his tea cup – good, dutiful and dear were not the adjectives they would have used for the absent Laura. For a moment Lady Swinburn looked as though she had eaten a wasp and Sir Walter glowered and then they were smiling again.
‘Yes, a dear girl indeed,’ Lady Swinburn agreed tepidly.
Theo guessed that Miss Laura had been sent off in disgrace following a family disagreement, perhaps something as serious as a dangerous flirtation with a footman. Or even the consequences of that flirtation going too far, in which case the ailing relative was not going to recover for about nine months, he predicted.
The sewing basket was put to rights, Theo took his seat, sipped his cooling tea and waited a polite half hour before making his farewells and escaping with a feeling of relief to the carriage for the moonlit drive back to the Grange.
At the stables he found that Jed Tucker his groom had arrived with the riding horses. The man looked weary but the horses seemed to have travelled well. Jed was a man of fe
w words and rather more grunts, but Theo knew how to interpret them and was reassured.
There was light from the kitchen windows, he saw, and took the shorter way across the back yard rather than walk round to the front door. He tapped and opened it and found Mrs Bishop reading the Norwich Intelligencer on one side of the range, Mrs Albright hemming a sheet on the other and the footmen playing cards at the table end.
‘Sorry to disturb you.’ He waved them all back to their seats. ‘I was too lazy to walk round to the front door from the stables.’
‘You had a pleasant evening, I hope?’ Mrs Albright said.
‘Very, thank you.’ Theo had no intention of trusting the footmen – Edward and Terence, if he recalled rightly – not to gossip to all the neighbouring servants if he made any disparaging remark about the Swinburn party.
‘I persuaded Pitkin to go to his bed half an hour since when he confessed that you had told him not to wait up for you, my lord. Terence, take a jug of hot water to his lordship’s chamber, if you please.’
‘Yes, Mrs Albright.’ The man tossed down his cards, raked the pile of farthing stakes from the centre of the table towards himself with a grin for his opponent, and went into the scullery.
‘You will strain your eyes, sewing at this time of night, Mrs Albright,’ Theo observed.
‘This sort of plain hemming I can do with hardly a glance,’ she said, looking at him as she spoke, her needle still pricking in and out of the seam.
You will make those lovely green eyes sore, was the kind of thing he would say to a lady at this point, but one did not flirt with the staff, it was unfair. She had dropped her scissors on the rag rug under her feet and Theo knelt to pick them up and drop them back into her sewing basket, thinking of the one he had already righted that evening.
And there, under his fingers, was the weave of fine canvas and the satin slide of silk threads. ‘This is lovely work,’ he said as he lifted it from the basket, unable to resist the intricacy of the entwined foliage and flowers.
Ivy and roses, ferns and lilies – a match for the bell-pull at Swinburn Manor. A perfect match. Identical, in fact.
He laid it back carefully, not looking into her face until he was certain she would not read speculation on his. ‘Exquisite. You must need very good light for that. Do you work from a pattern book?’
‘Oh no.’ She was blushing slightly from the praise, or perhaps it was the heat of the fire. ‘I design my own patterns. You see?’ She bent towards the basket, a tendril of her hair brushing against his cheek like a lover’s breath, then she was holding out a paper.
Theo sat back on his heels and opened it out. His hand shook a little and he took a moment to steady it before he studied the grid of tiny squares, each coloured to show a twisting design along a strip about six inches wide. ‘A bell-pull.’
‘Yes, that is just the bottom twelve inches, of course.’ She was looking at her hemming now and he had the impression that he had disturbed her.
But not as much as I am disturbed. He needed to talk to her, but not here, not now with Mrs Bishop folding away her newspaper and the footmen setting the kitchen to order. And he needed to think, because something very strange was going on here and if he was not careful this young woman was going to run, just as he suspected she had done once before. He touched his fingers to the spot where her hair had brushed the skin and shivered.
Lord Northam rose to his feet. ‘I am for my bed. Good night, all.’
There was a chorus of responses, including, Laura supposed, her own. What was it about the man? He was well-looking, but then so were many gentlemen. He was considerate and good-humoured, but then so was Perry and he had never provoked so much as a fluttering of the pulse in her. There were those broad shoulders and the powerful thighs as he pushed himself upright, of course. They were enough to cause fluttering in any female with a pulse.
Theo Quenten. Try as she might, she could not think about him by his title any longer, although it was a dangerous indulgence. Why did she feel like this? Was it because he was attracted to her and so very carefully hiding the fact? There was a warmth in his eyes when she caught him looking, something in his voice that touched a feminine recognition and response in her that was very different from that first girlish fancy – but he was at pains not to do anything to make her uncomfortable. He was a gentleman and gentlemen did not flirt with their staff.