held there for a moment. And Lord, he thought, if he had a knife he would surely be able to cut through the air between them. It seemed like a tangible thing, fairly throbbing with tension. Then she sighed softly.
“And perhaps, Mr. Thorne,” she said, “it is time we mingled with the other guests. I am going to see if there is anything my grandmother needs. Or my great-aunt.”
She got to her feet, walked behind the stool, and made her way across the drawing room toward the Dowager Countess of Riverdale. Anthony Rochford met her halfway there, and they approached the dowager together.
Gabriel lowered the cover over the keys, got to his feet, and looked around before moving toward the closest group. Strangely, he had not even been thinking of romance when he had caressed the back of her finger.
He had only been feeling it.
Ten
There was a letter among the usual invitations beside Gabriel’s plate when he sat down to breakfast the following morning. It was a report from Simon Norton at Brierley. Gabriel read it while he sipped his coffee.
Manley Rochford was spending lavishly on new furniture and draperies inside the house and on new arbors and follies and other new ventures in the park. These included a wilderness walk over the hills behind the house and a lake in the southwest corner of the park.
Gabriel’s eyes paused there. The southwest corner was where Mary had her cottage.
Manley and his wife were entertaining on a grand scale—teas and dinners and evening parties. There were plans in the making for a grand outdoor fete and evening ball during the summer, after their return from London as the Earl and Countess of Lyndale.
All the money that was being spent, Norton had discovered, had been borrowed on the expectation of the fortune Mr. Rochford was about to inherit. That was something, at least, Gabriel thought. Manley had obviously not been able to get his hands on the fortune that was not yet officially his.
The next section of the letter was more disturbing, especially to a man who had made a bit of a name for himself in Boston for treating every last one of his employees well. There was some distress in the neighborhood affecting those servants who had lost their positions to the men Manley had brought with him to Brierley. In some instances their homes had also been confiscated and given to the new staff. Some of the dismissed servants had families, a fact that multiplied the suffering.
A few had been hired and accommodated elsewhere in the neighborhood. Others, notably those who were young and unattached, had moved away to look for work elsewhere. A few had been rehired at Brierley as farm laborers—at a wage not only below what they had earned in their previous positions but also below what the other farm laborers doing comparable work were earning. Some had found no work at all. Rumor had it, though Norton had not been able to substantiate it, that all wages were to go down once Manley became the earl. And, incidentally, Norton’s own wages were lower than those of any of the other gardeners, though he was not complaining, he had added, since Mr. Thorne paid him well indeed for the steward’s job he was not yet doing.
Norton had discovered that the newly installed steward, the one Manley had brought with him, had paid a call upon Miss Beck and, without a by-your-leave, had tramped through her cottage, upstairs and down, in muddy boots, peering into every room and cupboard and nook and cranny while ignoring her completely and kicking one of her cats out of his way and cuffing one of her dogs, which had been yapping at his heels. He had informed Miss Beck that she must clear out all her junk and get rid of all the strays without further delay. The cottage was to be converted into a rustic shelter to add a picturesque touch to an island that would stand in the middle of the new lake.
Mary.
Gabriel slammed one hand down on the report, closed his eyes, and concentrated upon breathing through the fury that tempted him to sweep all the unoffending dishes off the table around him for the mere satisfaction of hearing them smash on the floor.
And not just Mary. Innocent servants and their families had lost their employment for no just cause. Some of them were now homeless. Yet they were his. His people. Good God, they were his responsibility.