A Lady's Dream Come True - Grace Burrowes Page 0,6
about to eat my third cinnamon bun, unless you care to arm-wrestle me for the basket.”
“Perhaps another time. I’ve eaten my fill of sweets.” Oak would be famished by noon, which prompted him to butter two more pieces of toast and make them into a sandwich.
“You needn’t tuck away a snack,” Jeremy said. “Mrs. Channing doesn’t run that sort of household. Old Bracken plays the stern majordomo, because a widow must be careful, but we’re free to impose on the kitchen for a tray if we’re peckish. Late at night, I’ve been known to raid the larder, though you mustn’t tell Alexander. He has a boy’s exalted notions of fairness, which are most inconvenient when a tutor is a mere mortal fellow. More tea?”
“Please.”
Forester poured for them both. “You’re wondering if she’ll pay you on time, but you don’t want to make a bad impression by raising that question with a near stranger. I asked Miss Digg the same thing before we’d shared our first cup of tea.”
“Who’s Miss Digg?”
“Tamsin Diggory, the governess. She and I are distantly connected by marriage, or steps, or halves, or removes. I never can quite recall which.”
Forester put three lumps of sugar in his tea before going on. “Miss Digg sometimes takes breakfast with Catherine on the upstairs terrace, though I suppose I ought to call her Miss Catherine. She’s fourteen, and that is such a difficult age, particularly when you’re enduring it in your step-mama’s household. Alexander is a squirmy, saucy, naughty little boy, but that’s the extent of the challenge he poses. He’s educable, as we all were at six years of age. Catherine is a female who fancies herself the toast of London one minute and Mrs. Siddons’s more talented understudy the next. Lord, I do love a good strong cup of tea.”
Oak generally preferred a quiet start to his day, but Forester put him in mind of noisy, nosy brothers, a not-unpleasant association.
“Wages are paid timely in this household?” he asked.
“To the penny, absolutely. Mrs. Channing is a good employer. I haven’t been here that long myself—only arrived in April—but she’s fair, doesn’t put on airs, listens when I have advice to offer regarding her son, and looks after her domestics. Take your time dusting off those old portraits, Mr. Dorning. Hampshire’s as pleasant a place to spend your summer as anywhere.”
Jeremy winked at him, then took a slurp of tea.
“If a fellow would rather be in London,” Oak said, “Hampshire can be isolated.”
“Do you have a particular reason for preferring London? I can’t afford Town myself. I go up to visit an uncle at Yuletide, and I suppose the city air isn’t so bad in spring and fall, but the coal smoke in winter and the stink in summer disagree with me.”
“The Royal Academy is in London,” Oak said, regretting the admission as soon as he’d made it. His brothers regarded his artistic aspirations with fond puzzlement now, but growing up, he’d been the butt of more fraternal humor than any one boy should have to endure.
He’d hidden in trees to escape his brothers’ notice, and found the perspective offered by a higher vantage point worth sketching for its own sake.
“So you’re a serious artist,” Forester said, making a joke of the observation. “If you’re looking to Mrs. Channing to become your patroness, you’re bound for disappointment. The late, great, much-lamented Mr. Channing rather put her off artists. I gather he was the mercurial sort. I don’t intend to let such tendencies take root in the boy.”
“Mr. Channing apparently left his family awash in old paintings, which I hope to restore to salable quality. That is the extent of my engagement and of my ambitions here.” That Forester would imply otherwise sat slightly ill with Oak. A widow of means generally needed those means—if Mrs. Channing was even as comfortably situated as she appeared to be.
Why sell art unless the coin was needed? But then, cinnamon buns, roaring fires, and a well-stocked breakfast buffet didn’t argue for want of means. The lady’s finances were none of Oak’s business, provided he was adequately and timely compensated for his efforts.
“She’s pretty,” Forester said, considering his tea. “You get used to that. She’s also a genuinely nice woman, which comes as something of a surprise.”
A full stomach and a decent night’s sleep made idling around the breakfast table much longer an impossibility. After a long day shut up in a coach, Oak needed to move.