Энни Бэрроуз – Regency Mistletoe & Marriages: A Countess by Christmas / The Earl's Mistletoe Bride (страница 3)

Helen could see that there must have been a sudden influx of visitors. She could just, she supposed, understand how the needs of one of the less important ones had been overlooked. But that did not mean she was going to meekly walk away and let the situation continue!

She strode past the loitering servants and into the kitchen.

‘I need some tea for Miss Forrest,’ she declared.

A perspiring, red-faced kitchen maid looked up from where she was sawing away at a loaf of bread.

‘Have to wait your turn,’ she said, without pausing in her task. ‘I only got one pair of hands, see, and I got to do Lady Thrapston’s tray first.’

The problem with having a Frenchman for a father, her aunt had often observed, was that it left Helen with a very un-English tendency to lose her temper.

‘Is Lady Thrapston an elderly woman who absolutely needs that tea to help her recover from the rigours of her journey?’ asked Helen militantly. Even though a very small part of her suspected that, since she was the Earl’s oldest surviving sister, Lady Thrapston might well be quite elderly, she felt little sympathy for the unknown woman. She was almost certain that Lady Thrapston was getting preferential treatment because of her rank, not her need. ‘I don’t suppose she dropped down in a dead faint, did she?’

The maid opened her mouth to deny it, but Helen smiled grimly, and said, ‘No, I thought not!’ She seized the edge of the tray that already contained a pot, the necessary crockery, and what bread the kitchen maid had already buttered. ‘Miss Forrest has been lying upstairs, untended, for the best part of an hour. You will just have to start another tray for Lady Thrapston!’

‘’Ere! You can’t do that!’ another maid protested.

‘I have done it!’ replied Helen, swirling round and elbowing her way through the shifting mass of visiting servants milling about in the doorway.

‘I’ll be telling Mrs Dent what you done!’ came a shrill voice from behind her.

Mrs Dent must be the housekeeper. The one who by rights ought to have made sure Aunt Bella was properly looked after. It was past time the woman got involved.

‘Good!’ she tossed back airily over her shoulder. ‘I have a few things I should like to say to her myself!’

It was a far longer trek back up to the little round room with a heavy tray in her hands than it had been going down, fuelled by indignation. She set the tray down on a table just inside the door, feeling the teapot to see if it was still at a drinkable temperature.

‘My goodness,’ said Aunt Bella, easing herself up against the pillows. ‘You did well! Did you find out what was taking so long?’

‘It appears that several other guests have arrived today, and the servants’ hall is in uproar.’

Her aunt pursed her lips as Helen poured her a cup of tea which, she saw to her relief, was still emitting wisps of steam.

‘I should not be a bit surprised to learn that everybody has arrived today,’ she said, taking the cup from Helen’s hand. ‘Given the fact that we have only two weeks for all of us to make our petitions known, while Lord Bridgemere is observing Christmas with his tenants. And it is only to be expected,’ she added wryly, ‘that without a woman to see to the minutiae things are bound to descend into chaos.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Only that he will not have either of his sisters acting as hostess,’ Aunt Bella explained. ‘Absolutely refuses to let them have so much as a toehold in any aspect of his life.’

‘He is not married, then?’

Her aunt sipped at her tea and sighed with pleasure. Then cocked an eyebrow at Helen. ‘Bridgemere? Marry? Perish the thought! Why would a man of his solitary disposition bother to saddle himself with a wife?’

‘I should have thought that was obvious,’ said Helen tartly.

Her aunt clicked her tongue disapprovingly.

‘Helen, you really ought not to know about such things. Besides, a man does not need a wife for that.’

Helen sat down, raised her cup to her lips, took a delicate sip, and widened her eyes.

‘I simply cannot imagine where I learned about…men’s…um…proclivities,’ she said. ‘Or why you should suppose that was what I was alluding to.’

‘Oh, yes, you can! And I do not know why you have suddenly decided to be so mealy-mouthed.’

‘Well, now that I am about to be a governess I thought I had better learn to keep a rein on my tongue.’ Once Helen had made sure the Earl would house her aunt, and provide some kind of pension for her, Helen was going to take up the post she had managed to secure as governess to the children of a family in Derbyshire.

Her aunt regarded her thoughtfully over the rim of her teacup. ‘Don’t know as how that will be doing your charges any favours. Girls need to know what kind of behaviour to expect from men. If they have not already learned it from their own menfolk.’

‘Oh, I quite agree,’ she said, leaning forward to relieve her aunt of her empty cup and depositing it on the tea tray. ‘But perhaps my employers would prefer me not to be too outspoken,’ she added, handing her a plate of bread and butter.

‘Humph,’ said her aunt, as she took a bite out of her bread.

‘Besides, I might not have been going to say what you thought I meant to say at all. Perhaps,’ she said mischievously, ‘I was only going to remark that a man of his station generally requires…an heir.’

Quick as a flash, her aunt replied, ‘He already has an heir. Lady Craddock’s oldest boy will inherit when he dies.’

‘So that only leaves his proclivities to discuss and disparage.’

‘Helen! How could you?’

‘What? Be so indelicate?’

‘No, make me almost choke on my bread and butter, you wretched girl!’

But her aunt was laughing, her cheeks pink with amusement, her eyes twinkling with mirth. And Helen knew it had been worth ruffling a few feathers in the servants’ hall to see her aunt smiling again. She would do anything for her dear Aunt Bella!

But Aunt Bella had still not got out of bed by the time they heard the faint echoes of the dinner gong sounding in the distance.

‘I am in no fit state to face them,’ she admitted wearily. ‘Just one more evening before I have to humble myself—is that too much to ask?’

Aunt Bella had prided herself on maintaining her independence from her family, in particular her overbearing brothers, for as long as Helen had known her.

‘All these years I have kept on telling everyone that I am quite capable of managing my own affairs,’ she had moaned when the invitation to the Christmas house party had arrived, ‘without the interference of any pompous, opinionated male, and now I am going to have to crawl to Lord Bridgemere himself and beg him for help!’

It was quite enough for today, Helen could see, that she was actually under Lord Bridgemere’s roof. It would be much better to put off laying out her dire situation before the cold and distant Earl until she had recovered from the journey.

‘Of course not!’ said Helen, stacking the empty cups and plates back on the tray. ‘I shall take these back down to the kitchen and arrange for something to be brought up.’

She had already asked the boy who had eventually dumped their luggage in the corridor outside their room if it was possible to have a supper tray brought up. He had shrugged, looking surly, from which she had deduced it would be highly unlikely.

So Helen once more descended to the kitchen, where she was informed by the same kitchen maid she had run up against before that they had enough to do getting a meal on the table without doing extra work for meddling so-and-sos who didn’t know their place. This argument was vociferously seconded by a stout cook.

‘Very well,’ said Helen, her eyes narrowing. ‘I can see you are all far too busy seeing to the guests who are well enough to go to the dining room.’ Once again she grabbed a tray, and began loading it with what she could find lying about, already half-prepared. ‘I shall save you the bother of having to go up all those stairs with a heavy tray,’ she finished acidly.

There were a few murmurs and dirty looks, but nobody actually tried to prevent her.

In the light of this inhospitality, however, she was seriously doubting the wisdom of her aunt’s scheme to apply to the Earl for help in her declining years. She had voiced these doubts previously, but her aunt had only sighed, and said, ‘He is not so lost to a sense of what is due to his family that he would leave an indigent elderly female to starve, Helen.’

But the fact that his staff cared so little about the weak and helpless must reflect his own attitude, Helen worried. Any help he gave to Aunt Bella would be grudging, at best. And her aunt had implied that had it not been Christmas it would have been a waste of time even writing to him!

Thank heaven she had come here with her. She shook her head as she climbed back up the stairs to the tower room, her generous mouth for once turned down at the corners. If she had not been here to wait on her she could just picture her poor aunt lying there, all alone and growing weaker by the hour, as the staff saw to all the grander, wealthier house guests. Helen was supposed to have taken up her governess duties at the beginning of December, but when she had seen how much her aunt was dreading visiting Alvanley Hall, and humbling herself before the head of the family, she had been on the verge of turning down the job altogether. She had longed to find something else nearby, something that would enable her to care for her aunt in her old age as she had cared for Helen as a child, but Aunt Bella had refused to let her.