always been his habit, disrupted by her arrival. Mostly, he was shut in his study, not to be disturbed, or out at his club or… somewhere. Somewhere not lacking in female companionship of a wholly different sort, she suspected. Charlotte and the girls most often ate dinner without him in one of the small parlors rather than the dining room. The meals were lively and enjoyable, but she sometimes missed…
However, Alec obviously found her uninteresting, as well as useless. Why had she offered to help with the pile of correspondence that grew every day on his desk? He’d made it clear he judged her quite incapable, the sort of ignorant chit who simpered over Byron and wasted his precious time. She certainly wouldn’t bother him again.
“Tell us a story from the globe,” Lizzy urged.
Much better not to think of him at all, Charlotte told herself, and searched her mind for one of her father’s tales about far-flung places and exotic peoples. Briefly, her throat grew tight; so many times, she had sat with him just as Lizzy did now, begging for stories. Holding quite a different cat, however, she recalled with smile. “You remember Captain Cook?”
“He sailed all around the Pacific Ocean,” Lizzy answered.
“Very good. Well, when he first arrived at New Zealand in… 1769, I believe it was, he had great difficulties with the Maori tribesmen.” Watching Anne and Lizzy grow attentive, then engrossed, Charlotte felt contentment spread through her. She had always wished for sisters, and it was almost as if she had them now.
***
Lucy crouched by the kitchen hearth, keeping a close eye on the curling iron she was warming over the coals. It was tricky getting the heat just right—hot enough to curl hair well and properly, but never so hot as to singe it. She’d heard awful stories of maids who burnt off the little ringlets ladies liked to wear dangling by their ears. She could so easily imagine the bits of shriveled hair in a row on the dressing table—and the smell! Miss Charlotte would never give her the sack over such a mistake; she’d understand. That made it even more important to get things right.
“I have found that the iron should be touchable,” said a voice from above. “If it burns the fingers badly, it will do the same to hair.”
Lucy scrambled up to face Miss Cole’s high-toned dresser. Jennings’s fabled experience and assurance still overawed her. She couldn’t help dropping a curtsy. It was received with a slight smile.
“You are doing hair now?”
She would not be tongue-tied and awkward like a country bumpkin, Lucy told herself. “No, ma’am. I was just going to practice, like, on Agnes.” The kitchen maid giggled over the pile of potatoes she was peeling.
“Ah.” Under Jennings’s calm, evaluative gaze, Agnes’s smile faded. “Commendable.” Even the housekeeper sometimes deferred to Jennings, who was rumored to be the highest paid of all the staff. She hardly even looked like a servant. Her gowns might be in dark colors, which you would expect to fade into the background, but they were beautifully cut and draped. Lucy had heard that the dresser sold her mistress’s castoffs, a perk of her position, and made her own wardrobe. Tall and thin, with a bony face, Jennings kept her hair drawn back in a tight bun and was somehow more elegant for that. “Come along,” she said to Lucy. Behind her back, Agnes crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue, but Lucy didn’t feel the slightest urge to laugh.
Agnes’s eyes bugged when Jennings turned and caught her. “Remove the curling iron from the fire,” the older woman said. Agnes jumped to obey.
Lucy followed Jennings up to the chamber she occupied, next to Miss Cole’s dressing room. She had her own little sitting area in a corner, and Lucy was waved to a chair. “I understand you have a deft hand with a flatiron.”
Lucy flushed with pleasure. “I’ve tried to get it right.”
“You like your work?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You don’t mind being a servant?”
“Mind…?” Lucy wasn’t sure what she meant.
“Some see it as demeaning, you know. My own sister works from dawn to dark on her husband’s farm—exhausting, dirty work and barely feeding them these days—and still thinks herself better than I.”
“Farm labor is dreadful hard.” Lucy remembered the constant toil from her childhood. Her father rose every day stiff and aching and went to his bed tired out.
“So it is. I, on the other hand, am not tied to a scrap of played-out land. I