he replied abruptly. “Why aren’t you in it?” Edna hastily retreated into the scullery.
Mina eyed him warily. “It seems foolish to lay that large table for just one person to eat a slice of toast,” she answered, drawing herself up to her full height. He looked unimpressed. Admittedly, she did not reach further than his shoulder.
“I’ve got something to occupy you today,” he replied darkly. “You sew?”
“Yes,” Mina admitted. “As a matter of fact, I was going to start repairing my dress today.”
“I’ve got another project in mind,” he said, taking her elbow and steering her out of the kitchen into the passageway.
Mina stole a sideways look at him. “What is it?”
“You’ll see.” He opened the parlor door and guided her inside.
Mina saw at once there was a quantity of blue velvet fabric piled up on the dining table. She looked at it and then back at Nye questioningly.
“It’s curtains,” he said. “You need to alter them.”
“For in here?” She glanced over at the windows.
“No,” he said. “For the bedroom.”
“For my bedroom?” she asked in surprise, glancing critically at the heavy blue fabric. “They don’t really look like bedroom curtains. I would have thought a floral print—”
“For the bedroom,” he said flatly. “I’ll have a brass curtain rod put up in there in this morning.”
“Oh.” On the whole, Mina felt markedly unenthusiastic about the task. She had always liked creating new things from scratch, alteration projects not so much. “Are they lined?” she asked, flipping over the blue velvet, and finding the yellow silk lining. “They look expensive.” She glanced at him quizzically. “Were they hanging in another room?”
He didn’t deign to answer this, just walked back to the door. Before opening it, he looked back over his shoulder at her. “I want no more standing at windows in the early hours, Mina,” he said with a strange tension running through his words.
Mina almost gasped. “But how did you—?”
“I don’t sleep,” he said succinctly. “So, I see everything. Remember that.”
“You don’t sleep?” Mina repeated doubtfully, but he had already wrenched the door open and was striding off. She frowned as she took up the workbox to extract a tape measure and tailor’s chalk. These curtains were long and luxurious. It seemed frankly a crime to cut them down sufficiently for the attic room window. She would be practically hacking them in half! She bit her lip, wishing she could hang them in this room where they would be much better suited.
How tiresome of Nye to insist she have them in the attic bedroom! He must have spotted her stood there, staring out in her white nightgown. But why did he have to make it an issue, she wondered? If he had problems sleeping surely, he should sympathize! She mounted the steps up to the attic, deep in thought. She had finished with the tape measure when the two men from earlier came sheepishly into the room with tools to put up the curtain rail.
“Mrs. Nye,” they murmured in unison, looking anywhere but at her.
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell them to have a care in her room, but glancing around the bare attic bedroom, she suddenly realized how foolish that would be. There was truly little here to show it was even her room. Instead she nodded to them briskly and left them to it.
She spent the next few hours ill-temperedly altering curtains, one of her least favorite tasks. In truth, she had only ever done it once before, but this fabric was a good deal more difficult to work with. Edna gave her the use of a flat iron and trivet from the scullery to press the material, but she had to be very careful indeed for she was not used to dealing with quantities of velvet and silk which required more gentle care than the cottons or linens she was used to working with.
A knock on the door before lunch turned out to be Gus Hopkirk who ambled in with another bunch of wildflowers for her. This brightened her mood somewhat, though she had no vase to put them in. In the kitchen, she discovered a pretty blue jug for this purpose and then returned to place them in the center of the mahogany table. To her surprise, Gus was still waiting for her in the parlor. She offered him a cup of tea and he took the pipe out of his mouth with an expression of pleasant surprise.
“That would be very nice of