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“Do we stand here in the foyer, Your Grace, arguing over a cheese like a pair of dockside streetwalkers, or shall we repair to my parlor, where we can have a fire to warm us while we bicker?”
“Surrender the damned cheese and I’ll be on my way.”
“The damned cheese is wrapped and waiting for you in my parlor.”
He unbuttoned two buttons. “You weren’t sure I’d use the front door.”
“You pride yourself on eccentricity. For all I know, you’d attempt to stuff yourself down the chimney purely for the sake of novelty. Come along.”
He stalked at her elbow, his boots thumping against the carpets. For a man bent on remaining undetected, he made a deal of noise when in a pet. The parlor was warm, the sconces lit. Septimus had been curled on the sofa but he was nowhere to be seen now.
“You were having tea,” Rothhaven said, sampling a jam tart. “These are good.”
“Monsieur Henri regards the kitchen as a vocation, not simply a job.Dohelp yourself, by all means.”
Rothhaven went wandering around the room again, though he put his tarts—all three of them—on a plate before settling at Althea’s desk. He shrugged out of his coat between bites and then picked up a sealed note Althea had spent the better part of an hour writing.
“You are corresponding with Lady Phoebe Philpot?”Munch, munch, munch.
“You have crossed the line, Rothhaven, from flouting convention to outright rudeness. That is my personal correspondence, and I did not invite you to examine it.”
“No,” he said. “You issued an imperial summons, and having conjured the Demon of Rothhaven Hall, you must now suffer his company. If you take exception to rudeness, then how do you tolerate Lady Phoebe?”
Althea poured him a cup of tea, added a dollop of honey, and brought cup and saucer to the desk. “I won’t be tolerating her company, as it happens. She sent the first invitation I’ve received in months, and I must decline it.”
He finished his tarts and dusted his hands over the empty plate. “You are disappointed to decline an invitation from the biggest gossip between here and London?”
“It’s aninvitation, Rothhaven. Beggars can’t be choosers, even when those beggars grow up to acquire a title.”
He peered at her note again. “You don’t have a beggar’s penmanship, but then, you were speaking metaphorically.”
Althea would have taken the seat opposite the desk, but that was where a guest would sit and this washerparlor inherhome. She took the wing chair by the fire instead.
“I spoke literally. From earliest memory, I did whatever work I could find, but when there was no work, my father would send his children out to beg. My brother Stephen lost the use of a leg early in life, and his job was to look wan and pathetic, leaning on his crutch. My job was to do the actual pleading.”
Rothhaven remained seated at the desk, tapping the note against the blotter in a slow, quiet rhythm.
“Your fathersent his children out to beg?”
The note of horror was predictable, though disappointing nonetheless. “Quinn was older and usually away from home because he was large enough to take on serious manual labor. He also knew that as soon as he came back to the house, Papa would demand any money he earned. I learned from Quinn’s example.”
Tap…tap…tap…“What did you learn?”
“First, if I made any money begging, buy Papa some gin, or be prepared to dodge a very fast, mean set of fists. Buy food second and be sure we children had eaten most of it before arriving home. Give Papa the gin and the remaining food. Save a little coin to give Papa as well, and if the day was particularly lucky, save the last coin to hide somewhere outside the house. Rather than discuss this, might we resume arguing over the cheese?”
Over anything.
“So Phoebe Philpot extends you an invitation, and you are again that hungry girl, willing to brave the cold for hours in exchange for a morsel of acceptance.”
I will always be that hungry girl.“I cannot have what I want without learning to manage the Phoebe Philpots in this life. She’s nothing compared to the brood of vipers at Almack’s or the gantlet of Hyde Park’s carriage parade.” She should be nothing, rather.
Rothhaven broke the seal on the note, donned the spectacles in the pen tray, and read Althea’s polite regrets. “This will not do. Why aren’t you attending her infernal dinner?”
“Rothhaven, my own brothers do not open my correspondence. My sister at her most obnoxious—”
He crumpled up the note and glowered at Althea.
For the first time in her acquaintance with him, Rothhaven looked genuinely angry. Wearing her spectacles did not lessen his ferocity one bit, but rather, gilded his ire with a hint of scholarly scorn. Ye gods, he’d be a terror if he ever voted his seat in the Lords.
