ought to care. “Worth finding out, I’d say.” Another kiss, this one harder. “But not until I have a damn bath.” Will wrenched himself away. “Right. Yes. I’m going to take that bath, while you go find Daisy at the Blue Boar and tell her she doesn’t need to tidy up for us tomorrow morning. While you’re there, get a jug of ale and put it on our tab, will you?”
Martin hadn’t even known they had a tab, but of course they did. In villages everybody ran tabs, otherwise every shopkeeper and barman would be perpetually counting out farthings.
“And maybe get a loaf of bread if the baker is still open. We still have some of Mrs. Tanner’s jam. There won’t be any milk for your tea, but—”
“It’s all right,” Martin said, slightly stunned, as he finally understood that Will was attempting to provision them for a day spent in bed. “I can take my tea black.” He swallowed.
Will did something between a salute and a wave and sauntered off into the cottage. Martin was left staring after him, then shook himself into some semblance of intelligence and headed for the village. As always when he went to the village, he had the urge to pull his hat low over his forehead, but if anyone had recognized him as bearing a striking resemblance to the former owner of Friars’ Gate, they didn’t mention it.
Daisy was behind the bar at the Blue Boar, and her eyebrows shot all the way up to the ruffle on her cap when she saw him. “Out and about on your own?” she asked, pouring him a half pint of bitter without his asking. “Mr. Sedgwick must be worried sick, wondering what’s happened to you.”
“Very droll. I’m here for a jug of ale and to tell you not to bother coming tomorrow morning.”
“Why?”
“Because the cottage is already in a state of impeccable cleanliness and you deserve a morning to yourself,” Martin said, because it was the first thing he thought of. “Also, would you show me how to do the wash?”
“How to wash what?”
“Linens and shirts and that sort of thing.” It had occurred to him that he did not want people examining any bedlinens he and Will had debauched. This was likely prudish and almost certainly eccentric, but he wasn’t exposing Will to even the shadow of a rumor. At Lindley Priory, there had been a vast and steamy laundry where maids boiled and beat the household linens, then dried them in the sun. That was satisfactorily anonymous in a way that turning your underthings over to your neighbor was not. Besides, it seemed that laundry was something else he could do, like feeding the pigs. It wasn’t, perhaps, an important task, but it had to be done, and somebody had to do it. Maybe, given time, the Martin Easterbrook who tended livestock and thought about laundry could also do other useful things. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, that is. I’m not trying to do you out of work,” he added, when she still hadn’t replied.
“That,” she said, an odd expression on her face, “is almost sweet.”
“No it isn’t,” he said automatically.
“You’re really harmless, aren’t you?”
“Take it back.” He was utterly confused about what was going on.
“You’re stroppy, to be sure—”
“I beg your pardon, but are you calling me stroppy?”
“—but it’s all on the surface.”
“I assure you that I’m foul tempered down to my very soul.”
She patted his forearm. “Drink up, lamb. One day next week I’ll teach you how to do the wash.” He had the uncomfortable sense that they had just taken part in two very different conversations.
On his way home, a loaf of bread under one arm and the jug of ale in the crook of his elbow, he picked a handful of primroses that were growing beneath the hedges that lined the lane. This was reprehensibly transparent of him even though he was fairly certain he had long passed the point where mysterious aloofness was an option. But he still felt like he ought to pretend that he hadn’t passed that point, for Will’s sake if not his own self-defense.
When he opened the door and thrust the flowers at Will with all the ceremony of a man trying to get rid of something nasty, he felt like he had crossed an irrevocable line. Judging by Will’s expression—dazed and surprised but very far from displeased—he was pretty sure he was not the only one who thought so.