Betina Krahn (20 page)

In a short while she had contracted for their meats and poultry for the week ahead, all within the allotted budget. When they stepped outside into the street, Remington’s jaw was set and his nostrils flared with indignation.

“That was the most outrageous display of pound-flogging and penny-pinching I have ever witnessed in my life,” he gritted out. The words were intended for Antonia’s ears, but they carried to Molly’s as well. The butcher’s
widow lapped one hand over the other around the handle of her market basket and fixed him with a canny look.

“Ain’t never had to watch yer pennies, eh, yer lor’ship? Many’s the woman who would envy ye. But many more would think ye a fool to pay more than goin’ rate for decent food.”

“And you. You actually condone this sort of thing in your house?” he demanded of Antonia. Molly spoke for her.

“Ever house must practice some economies, yer lor’ship. It ain’t no disgrace. I be Laidy Toni’s buyer, and them shopmen would think she run a slack house if I didn’t bargain proper.” Then with a devious smile she picked up his hand and deposited her bag of coins in it. “Hope ye were watchin’ close, m’lord, ’cause it’s yer turn next.”

He stiffened and gave her his fiercest and most aristocratic glare. “I will not haggle over ha’pennies like some deprived fishwife.”

“Afraid you cannot do it, your lordship?” Antonia challenged with a smile that wouldn’t have melted butter.

What she couldn’t make him do by reason or wheedling, she intended to lever him into by goading his pride, he realized. But recognizing her tactic didn’t make it any easier for him to resist, especially when she removed several coins from the household purse and genteelly bargained for a number of spices in the neighboring grocer’s shop. He was boxed neatly into a corner of his own male pride. She could do it without apparent loss of dignity, her smug little smile said, but could he?

With a growl of protest he snatched the list from her hands, stuffed the purse into his pocket, and strode into the nearest greengrocer’s to do battle for peas, carrots, leeks, and turnips. He felt conspicuous in the extreme among the housekeepers, cooks, and matrons prowling the
bins and stands. Worse yet, he had no idea what faults one could decry in a leek or a turnip that would make a shopkeeper reduce its price.

As his frustration mounted, he retreated further and further into hard-nosed aristocratic hauteur. In desperation he inquired after the price of the turnips, declared it “too bloody high,” and demanded to know if the local constabulary knew of the shopkeeper’s thieving prices. He held his breath as the grocer quickly sized up his mien, his garments, and his superior air, and began—in long-standing English tradition—to defer to his better.

As Remington watched the little man scrambling to refigure his prices, it occurred to him that when all else failed, a pigheaded and insufferable air of nobility had been known to carry the day. And armed with that bit of insight, he was soon bargaining for the rest of his list as well.

Antonia and Molly watched from the front of the shop, biting their lips to keep their laughter from reaching his ears. His manner and countenance were a rather outrageous and self-conscious parody of his own upper-crust assumption and superiority. Seeing him behaving with such inflated condescension, Antonia could not help contrasting that insufferable aristocrat to the man who sat at her kitchen table in a corset, whittling potatoes into nubbins, and the tender, larcenous rogue who poured heated words into her ear and kissed her within an inch of her soul.

Remington Carr seemed to be several men inside, she suddenly understood. Her anger from that morning was dealt a fatal blow. In its place she felt an odd warmth growing for the prideful but sporting man she usually saw. How many noblemen would have braved a whole houseful of women, or donned a ladies’ corset, or taken on the work of a scullery maid even to make good a bet? And how many men of any breeding would have braved having their name
bandied about in Fleet Street scandal sheets to return for a second dose of women’s work?

Dangerous musings, she realized as he stepped out of the shop with his basket filled with vegetables and early fruits, and his eyes filled with satisfied light. Dangerous light. Mesmerizing light.

“Your change, madam,” he said, sifting coins through his fingers into Molly’s outstretched hand. He turned to Antonia with a triumphant sniff. “And I managed to get some fresh strawberries thrown into the bargain. I love strawberries.” He cast her a devastatingly tactile look from the corner of his eye as he started off.

“Not, however, as much as I love cherries and cream.”

Antonia managed to stall her reaction until his back was fully turned, then let the shiver come. The handsome wretch. He had just served notice that he wasn’t giving up his pursuit of her. To her everlasting shame she flushed hot with pleasure from the top of her head to the ends of her toes.

There were more lessons in store for Remington that afternoon. They entered several plain grocers, baker’s stalls, and tea and coffee shops where he watched Molly, and sometimes Antonia, taste, smell, or otherwise test the foodstuffs, then leave without purchasing anything. After the second or third of these fruitless missions, he stopped in the street outside and shifted his heavy shopping basket from one aching hand to the other, demanding to know why they hadn’t just made their purchases and gotten on with it.

Molly sidled closer, looking up at him from under the rim of her bonnet, and beckoned him down and into whisper range. “A body has to be wary these days,” she said confidentially. “Not all foodstuffs is good food. Even in decent shops ye get food wot’s cut wi’ tuck an’ filler. That coffee … he already ground it an’ added roast beans an’
chicory to stretch th’ poundage. Ye cannot buy anythin’ but whole, roasted beans and be sure of proper coffee, these days. A body must watch all the time. They’ll put potato flour in yer lard, water yer milk, shake barley rubble in yer oats, and put pea flour in yer pepper. Wheat flour gets cut with sulfur, lime, or alum, and yer tea is some part sycamore leaves if yer not careful. Then yer pickles an’ yer marmalades—well, ye wouldn’ want to know.” She shook her head at his expression of disbelief. “Come, I’ll show ye.”

They led him into a lower-end shop and let him sniff and sample a few ripe offenders. On holding a jar or joint into the sunlight, he could see the blue copper salts in the pickles and that some of the meats looked oddly red. His eyes widened, then narrowed as he began to see the sharp trafficking around him. And when they steered back to the better shops, they found several examples even among the more reputable merchants.

“Food is dear enough,” Antonia said to him as she saw him looking at working-class women doling out hard-won pennies for flour and salt that he had only minutes before discovered were badly adulterated. “They can scarcely afford it. And when they can buy, it may be as apt to do them harm from some noxious additive as it is to nourish them and their growing families. A woman must know how to tell what is good and what isn’t to safeguard her family’s health.”

“But aren’t there acts to stop such things?”

“Look around you, your lordship.” Antonia nodded around them, her mien quietly fierce. “Do you see anyone enforcing any ‘acts’?”

It was a lesson that followed Remington all through the evening. When he sat down to eat at Antonia’s table, he found himself looking at the deliciously crusty bread, tender poached halibut, and savory roast capon with new
eyes. When the ladies inquired as to what he had learned while shopping that day, he felt an odd tightness in his throat and glanced at Antonia. She was watching him with an unreadable expression.

He lifted the glass of wine Antonia’s abstemious ladies had provided for him and with a bit of effort produced a strained smile.

“I learned that spending money can be exhausting … that one should never buy a fish with milky eyes … and that I must never make a wager with Molly McFadden. She drives a mean bargain, indeed.”

The women laughed and nodded approvingly.

And in spite of himself, his smile began to broaden.

For the next two days Remington was kept busy at a number of tasks; inventorying linen, scrubbing bathing-room porcelain fixtures, polishing floors and furniture, and separating and preparing laundry to be sent out to be cleaned. He learned what constituted a worn bedsheet, how to keep gravy and wine stains from setting in table linen, how to bleach and sanitize a sink, how to scrub down a floor for waxing and then mix a proper beeswax and turpentine mixture, then wax it.

He also learned that women love nothing better than to talk while they work.

It occurred to him that here was a perfect chance to learn things about Antonia that might give him an advantage with her. He began with a simple question or two about them at first: “Where did you live before coming here?” or “How did you meet Lady Antonia?” They generally paused and glanced away into remembered vistas.

They spoke of parents: old and young, well-fixed and penurious, indulgent and stern. And they spoke of their husbands: a young officer, a butcher, a watchmaker, a
sailor, a farmer, a petty magistrate, a vice admiral, and a tailor … always with heartrending traces of longing.

As he watched Dame Hermione, the most oft-married of the lot, recounting the pleasures of her various husbands’ company, he found himself imagining them and envisioning them with a younger version of her. Her girlish smile was contagious as she recounted their exploits, some bordering on the wicked, some on the sublime. All her husbands were held and remembered with great affection. When a mist rose into her eyes, the smile still played at the corners of her mouth. Remington cleared whatever seemed to have gotten stuck in his throat and went back to counting table napkins, trying to think what it was he had intended to ask.

Each woman had a story to tell about how she met Antonia. Some had placed ads in papers or magazines, some had bundled up their possessions and come to scour the streets of London in the desperate hope of finding employment, and some had found her when they stumbled into the settlement house operated by the Assistance League.

“There she stood … with the saddest, sweetest eyes,” Maude Devine said, dabbing at the corners of her own eyes.

Remington shifted uncomfortably; he knew all about those beguiling blue eyes.

“Like a pure angel, she was,” Gertrude said, wagging her head. “A smile so sweet and kind … an’ me so desperate as to do whatever flesh allowed just to line my belly wi’ food.”

He adjusted his collar, remembering the alluring little smile that could seem so proper and so wicked at the same time.

“Not a word of rebuke or shaming. Naught but words
of comfort and consolation,” Victoria Bentley remembered with disarming candor, lowering her eyes. “Not even when she learned where I had … slept … the week before.”

He fidgeted, thinking of just how sweet Antonia’s tongue could be.

Antonia hadn’t judged or blamed or coerced these women, he understood. She had merely offered them a place to live, a place where they were needed and wanted. The warmth and admiration in the way they spoke of her unsettled him. He didn’t like all this goodness and virtue; he could feel it chipping away at his righteous male indignation. Just as he was about to abandon this potentially dangerous tact, her aunt Hermione came up with a bit of information that piqued his interest.

“She brought a breath of fresh air into Geoffrey’s life,” Hermione said, pausing in the midst of her stitchery. “He was considerably older and a bit set in his ways. Not a very romantic husband for a young girl. But she didn’t seem to mind. Humored him, she did, indulged all his crotchets … like candles of an evening. Geoffrey was forward thinking in many ways, but he hated gaslight. Preferred candles at night.” She smiled fondly. “And we still use them. Antonia does it out of respect for his memory. That”—the old lady laughed—“and I suspect she loves the candlelight herself.”

A woman who loved candlelight and stray cats, but coldly trapped men into marriages. A woman who looked and sounded like an angel but held a devil of a grudge against men, bachelors in particular. One minute she was breathing fire at him, the next she was melting in his arms. He couldn’t seem to get a grip on her. And that didn’t seem likely to change anytime soon; she seemed to have completely forgotten him.

He looked down at the parlor table he was waxing and saw his scowl reflected to him. What in hell was he doing here?

Contrary to Remington’s conclusion, Antonia was far from abandoning or ignoring him. She knew from hour to hour and minute to minute exactly where he was and what he was doing, including the fact that he had begun to talk to her ladies. She made rounds periodically and watched him from a distance as he listened, watched, and bent his efforts—however reluctantly—to the tasks they set for him.

His guarded manner was still there; he still didn’t trust them. But as they talked, over the course of two days, Antonia could see additional signs of change in him. His tightly coiled frame had begun to relax, and the hard angles of his face had begun to soften in her ladies’ presence. He wasn’t as easily startled, and at meals he no longer braced in his chair as if he were ready to bolt for the door at any moment. She was going to win their wager; she could just feel it.

On that first Saturday he finished helping restock and rearrange the larder in the kitchen, then found himself at loose ends for the first time in quite a while. It was a perfect opportunity for a “chance” encounter with Antonia, he thought, prowling the first floor, looking for her.

Most of the ladies had gone out for the morning to pay charitable calls, shop, or simply take the air in the park across Piccadilly. The house was quiet, and as Remington passed the study, he heard a noise and ducked through the doorway, thinking he might have found Antonia. It was only old Cleo Royal with her feather duster and chamois cloth, dusting off both her figurines and her memories. Remington paused, watching her tawdry theatrical finery
and birdlike movements from the doorway, then turned to go.