The saucy girl tossed the stays aside, laid out the dress, and started helping Perry out of her gown, biting back a grin. “And also, there’s the matter of that painting upstairs and getting your shape just so.”
Heat crawled up her neck. Until her brothers married, she’d had no girls to share naughty jokes with. And she knew, such familiarity with a maid was not proper, but she couldn’t help laughing. “You wicked girl,” she said, and let Jenny settle the chemise over her head.
And wondered, not for the first time whether she would have survived a childhood in Seven Dials as well as Jenny had.
Perry steppedinto the kitchen and the house rattled as the door slammed to.
The fragrance of bacon and toasting bread wafted to her, making her stomach rumble.
“His horse is gone.” She went to look over Jenny’s shoulder. “Eggs too? You’re a fast learner. You’ve done a bang-up job.”
The girl smiled. “And MacEwen?”
“In the stable, tending tohishorse.”
Expertly tending to it. There’d been no need for her to concern herself.
“He could use a bit of a grooming himself.” She’d told him so herself in her best Lady Perpetua of thetonvoice.
Jenny’s face was tinged with more pink than the fire would induce. She’d noticed the man’s scruffy beard. “Traveling, he was. Will you eat upstairs, my lady?”
“The kitchen is fine.” The kitchen was wonderful. In fact, in the mix of all of this freedom, she’d like to one day try her own hand at cookery.
Jenny set a plate of food on the table. “Shall I fetch him for breakfast when you’ve finished eating?”
“Fetch him now—or, better, take a plate to him. I doubt he’ll come in. He’s lingering in that stable to make sure I don’t take Chestnut out.”
Jenny pulled another plate and began filling it. “He’ll need to wash and have a shave.”
“Can you shave a man, Jenny?” she asked around a bite of bacon.
The girl laughed. “Fergus MacEwen wouldna let me near his neck with a razor, miss.”
“You take him that plate. I’ll pump out a fresh bucket and put it to heat.”
A short while later,the mare sidestepped, nervous about the extra stirrup hanging at her other side, and Perry shushed her. Chestnut had been trained to the sidesaddle, and the one Perry had brought along with her had mysteriously disappeared.
Never mind. There’d been tack and saddles enough in the stables—her mother’s stables, she reminded herself, and she could saddle a horse as fast as any groom. She rucked up her skirts and swung her leg over the man’s saddle, moving as softly as possible out of the yard, so as not to disturb MacEwen’s shave.
She’d ridden this way many a time with a groom pacing behind, clucking, or Charley racing her, laughing. It was damn liberating. The next time she’d don the breeches she’d brought with her.
If Fox could steal her saddle, she could wear breeches. She could do dratted well anything she wished.
She reached the end of the short drive where the treacherous cliff road merged with the lane that led from Crampton and continued on south to Scarborough across the high moorland.
She pressed a knee to Chestnut and headed south.
The papers in Father’s study showed that the path cut into the cliff had been the one to choose if she wished to dodge any neighbors, and that road was also on her property. It was hers.
Or would be hers when she married. She mentally kicked aside that small rock in her plans and followed the path through the gorse. Whether this wild parcel went with the house, she couldn’t remember. The wild summer grasses stretched tall, this land unplanted and undeveloped. Perhaps it was too rocky to be under cultivation else her mother would have seen to it, like she’d seen to Cransdall.
But Mama had been dead for ten years. Enough time for wild plants to take hold of the earth again.
Perry brushed her eye and clucked at Chestnut to proceed. It was hard to believe that such a desolate landscape could be teeming with men and women sneaking about with goods brought in from the Continent.
Her nerves tingled and Chestnut’s ears swiveled. She drew the horse up. There, in the brush, something or someone dark had moved.
