Storming the Castle

Page 5

Kate’s mouth was a tight line, and she glared as if this interloper were part of an invading army. “Just who are you?” she snapped.
“She’s your new nursemaid,” Wick intervened. He had already decided that Miss Damson’s calm command of the situation was just what they needed. “She gave Jonas water, Kate. And he drank it all up. I think he looks better already.”
“He’s wet,” Kate cried, horrified. “Now he’ll catch a cold. He’ll—he’ll—” Clutching her baby, she darted from the room without another word.
Miss Damson looked unsurprised. Rather than running after her new mistress, she turned to Madame Troisgros and, in French, thanked her for her help. Then she switched to English and thanked everyone else in the kitchen. And, finally, she had a detailed discussion with Lily, the maid in charge of the nursery, about exactly what sort of deposits Jonas had been making in his nappies.
“Are they green?” she was asking. “And how do they smell?”
She didn’t sound like someone who seemed barely old enough to have her first position. Wick couldn’t stop looking at her, though: at the rose color of her lips and the way her gown, where it was wet, clung to her bosom. It was a very nice bosom.
Very nice.
Wick glanced around the room and discovered that the footmen—not to mention the gaping knife boy—had noticed the same fact. With a jerk of his head, he sent them scurrying out of the kitchen.
Miss Damson, meanwhile, was giving Lily instructions about taking boiled water to the nursery three times a day. She didn’t sound like any nursemaid Wick had ever seen, not that he’d seen many.
Maybe that was what housekeepers sounded like when they were young. But that idea didn’t fit either.
She was a lady, Wick thought suddenly. Quality. He was amazed he hadn’t seen it immediately, but he knew why: because he wasn’t English. He’d bet everything he owned that she had a lady’s voice except that he wasn’t quite good enough with the language to tell the difference.
But then he listened closely and he realized he could tell the difference. After all, he and Gabriel had gone to Oxford back when they were striplings, before Gabriel took over this castle. Wick recognized the sound of her voice, the way it sounded at once sweet and a little sassy . . . that was a lady’s voice, not a nursemaid’s voice.
He had a cuckoo in his kitchen.
In her agitated state, Kate hadn’t noticed anything untoward, obviously. And Madame Troisgros had been far too glad to find someone who spoke French to consider the nursemaid’s origins. With Lily dismissed, the cook was now regaling Miss Damson with tales of the execrable vegetables she was forced to cook with, monstrous tubers fit only for pigs, or cochons. And Miss Damson was nodding and sympathizing . . .
Like a lady. A lady who spoke French, who had undoubtedly been brought up to a good marriage.
Wick became aware that water was running down the inside of his calf into his shoes. There was something about Miss Damson that made even a man with wet breeches hungry. Lustful. Those emotions that good servants could have only for each other—and never, ever, for the ladies they attended. Wick certainly never allowed himself that sort of inconvenient desire.
Just like that, he decided not to say a thing to Miss Damson about the question of her birth. If she was a lady who was merely presenting herself as a nursemaid for some obscure reason—well, then she wasn’t for him, not for the bastard brother of a prince.
But perhaps, if he was wrong, and she wasn’t a lady . . .
Not that he was looking for a wife, of course. But during the last year he had noticed the way Gabriel liked to hold Kate’s hand, the way he swept his wife into his arms, the way he kissed her when he thought no one was looking.
Back in Marburg, the king would have paired Wick off by now, given him to a third or fourth daughter of a gentleman, a woman grateful to be connected in any way to the royal family, a woman whose father would willingly overlook Wick’s ignoble birth. But here in England, he had volunteered to become his brother’s majordomo. He had chosen to run the castle, and he was damned good at it.
He’d known perfectly well what that choice meant for his future. As a servant, he was a servant, no matter how high in the hierarchy of service. He would never marry a gentleman’s daughter. And he’d accepted that, content with an occasional trip to London to meet cheerful women who were neither ladies nor servants but happy to share a bed for a time.
Content, at least, until his brother fell in love.
One night, before the baby was born, he was making his nightly rounds and recognized Gabriel’s laughter coming from the study. Thinking to find out the joke, he had his hand on the door when he heard his sister-in-law gasp in such a husky, pleading way that, disconcertingly, he realized his brother’s laughter was aroused by something rather different than a mere jest.
Needless to say, he didn’t go in.
Even so, he kept trying to tell himself that he had no use for a wife, given that his wife must necessarily be a servant. Kate, after all, was the granddaughter of an earl. She was a perfect person to marry a prince. Gabriel was extraordinarily lucky to have met her.
There were few Kates in the world, and none who ended up paired with bastards.
But still . . . as he followed Miss Damson’s admittedly delicious figure from the kitchen, he thought, for the first time in his life, that perhaps he could marry a servant after all.
If the servant was a lady.
Chapter Three
Philippa was feeling wildly self-conscious as she walked out of the kitchen ahead of the devilishly handsome Mr. Berwick. In fact, her skin prickled all over at the idea that he was just behind her.
Which was ridiculous. Absurd.
He was a majordomo, for goodness’ sake. A butler. Her mother would turn in her grave at the very idea that she was noticing a butler’s profile, let alone his voice.
True, he was the most handsome butler she’d ever seen. He didn’t bundle his hair into a little bag the way their family butler, Quirbles, did. Instead, it was pulled back from his face in a way that emphasized his brow. His eyebrows formed peaks over his eyes.
And those eyes . . . they were fierce and proud, like an eagle. Not like a butler. Nothing like a butler.
It wasn’t just she who saw it either. Back in the kitchen, they had all instinctively acted as if he were a gentleman rather than a butler. Fascinating.
Her mind returned to the baby. She was almost certain that Jonas merely had a very bad case of colic. She’d seen as much several times while accompanying her uncle on his rounds, and once in Little Ha’penny itself. But the worrisome question was whether the baby might have something called intussusception, if she remembered the name right. That was when the bowels were all going the wrong way, and no matter what anyone did, the baby died.
She started walking a little faster. There was no point in mentioning this possibility to the princess since it would terrify her for no good reason. If it was intussusception, there was nothing to be done. But she was fairly sure that her uncle had told her that intussusception was always accompanied by a very slow pulse. Jonas’s pulse had seemed quite normal, and in any case, Lily had not reported seeing any blood in his stool—another telltale sign.
She started ticking off in her mind all the things she had to do: reassure Jonas’s mother, first of all. Then give Jonas a warm bath, with a little massage of his tummy. She had some balsam in her bag that she could rub on it.