“Take these,” Malcolm Archer said. He removed a puppy from beneath his coat and thrust it into Lamentation’s hands. He plucked a second puppy from his trouser pocket, delivered that one as well, and then began, evidently, to look for the one that had emerged beside his scuffed boot.
Alice had rescued that one. She was holding it to her chest and murmuring into its tiny, floppy ear.
“Put these back in the kitchen,” Mr. Archer went on. “I’ll take the ladies up to their chambers and meet you back down here expediently.”
“To their... chambers?” Lamentation said faintly.
Mr. Archer’s brilliant smile did not falter. “Indeed. I trust you ladies have luggage?”
Ruby nodded. “Outside. By the front door.”
“Of course. Gerry can bring up your trunks after you’re settled.”
“Theirtrunks?” Lamentation echoed. “After they’vesettled?”
“Yes.” Mr. Archer put out a hand toward Ruby and her friends. “These are Princess Serafina’s ladies-in-waiting. And they will be residing here. At Pomeroy House.”
Lamentation blinked several more times. “The princess’s ladies-in-waiting? I... did not realize she had those.”
She does now, Ruby thought, and tried not to look as guilty as she felt.
Mr. Archer, who no doubt had also been unaware of their existence—because they’d made up the job whole-cloth—didn’t respond to the footman. Instead he directed the considerable force of his smile at Alice. “I’m sorry,” he said, “about all the dogs. May I take that one from you?”
A look of alarm crossed Alice’s face, and she clutched the puppy to her chest. “No! That is”—she modulated her voice—“no.” A blush made its way up to her hairline. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Archer, I should very much like to keep her.”
The puppy seemed to have fastened her teeth around Alice’s wrist, which did not deter Alice in the slightest.
Mr. Archer looked at Alice. He looked at the puppy. Then he glanced at Ruby, Tamsin, and the puppy-holding footmen. “Of course,” he said. “Yes. Why not? Puppies for everyone. We have plenty to go around.”
Ruby followed the little expansive gesture of his hand.
Her eyes narrowed. There was something peculiarly familiar about this Mr. Archer. Not his face, precisely, nor his name. But something about the arc of his shoulders—the sweep of his arm—
“Do I know you?” she asked, still staring at him. “Have we met?”
Lamentation and Gerry hastened out the door, puppies in arms and shirt tails billowing in their wake.
In the light of the sun through the cracked window, a faint flush seemed to have settled around Malcolm Archer’s throat. “No.”
“Are you certain? Did you work in London before you came here? Perhaps my father—the Earl of Hangleton—”
His blush became more decided—carnation pink above and below his thick black beard. “Before I came here, I was a captain in His Majesty’s Navy. We have not met.”
“Were you on an engraving, then?” she pressed. “Some military recruitment poster? Or perhaps a parade? I am certain—”
“No,” he said flatly. “I was not.”
She blinked. Embarrassment hit her then, and she felt her face heat. She always did this: pushed too hard, spoke too much and out of turn.
This was meant to be her new life. She would not wreck it with her old ways.
“Let me take you to your rooms,” he said, more gently this time. “This way.”
Ruby clamped her mouth closed and let him lead them out of the parlor.
Perhaps she had been wrong. Perhaps she did not know him. She surely would have remembered that voice, rough and sweet as honeycomb.
They followed Captain Archer through a parade of blindingly clean and bizarrely furnished rooms. One held stacks of crates that reached to the ceiling; another boasted perhaps three dozen screens in rows that seemed to be hiding pots of winding green shrubbery and possibly more dogs. Everything smelled, still, of vinegar.
