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The only difference this morning was that he now heartily wished he had.
* * *
Prudence wiped round her eggy plate with a crust of bread, fresh from the oven, and sighed with contentment.
‘’Tis good to see you have a hearty appetite,’ said the farmer’s wife, whose name was Madge. She had taken one look at Prudence’s feet, thrown her hands up in horror, and then gone all motherly.
‘Well, this is such good food,’ said Prudence, with a sigh. Madge had heaped her plate with bacon, fried eggs and mushrooms. ‘We hardly ate a thing yesterday.’
And she wasn’t sure when she might be eating anything again. Gregory—for she couldn’t help thinking of him by his first name after spending the night in his arms—had said they weren’t far from his aunt’s place and was assuming they would be welcome. But she wasn’t banking on it. Aunts, she had discovered, could be extremely unpredictable.
‘Now, you must let me help with the dishes,’ she said. ‘Or something.’
‘’Tain’t fitting for a fine lady such as yerself to ruin her hands with dishes,’ said Madge.
‘I’m not a fine lady. I’m just...’ She didn’t know exactly how to describe herself. ‘When I was a girl...’ She decided to explain as much as she could. ‘We travelled all over the place. Papa was a soldier, you see. So Mama and I had to learn how to do all sorts of chores. I can kill a chicken, and milk a goat, and bake bread.’
‘Ain’t no call for you to go killing none of our chickens,’ Madge protested.
‘No, of course not, I just—’
‘Very well, m’dear. You can do the dishes.’ She frowned. ‘’Twill make it look as though I kept you busy, anyhow, won’t it? If Peter comes back in sudden-like.’
‘Thank you,’ said Prudence meekly.
She was more than willing to let Madge think she was grateful to be spared the prospect of falling foul of her bad-tempered husband if that was what it took to help her overcome her scruples at having a guest do menial work.
The moment Prudence finished the dishes Madge urged her back to the kitchen table.
‘Here, you eat a bit of this,’ she said, spooning jam onto another thick slice of bread and butter. ‘That varmint had no business dragging a lady such as you out into the wilds with no more’n the clothes on your back, and starving you besides.’
‘It wasn’t his fault—really it wasn’t,’ she protested, before taking a bite of bread and jam.
But she knew she’d made Madge think it was, by being tight-lipped in response to all her very natural questions. Madge must think she was having second thoughts, or was ashamed of having been so impetuous, or something.
She was just wondering if she could come up with a story that would clear Gregory’s reputation, when the flavour of the jam exploded into her mouth.
‘Oh, goodness,’ she moaned. ‘But this jam is good.’
‘Last year’s strawberries,’ said Madge proudly.
‘I dreamed about strawberries last night,’ she admitted.
‘Well, you can take a pot of this jam, then.’
‘Oh, no, she can’t!’
Prudence saw that the doorway, in which the door had been standing open, was now full of the farmer and Gregory. A distinctly grimy, damp, dishevelled and irritated Gregory.
‘She’s nobbut a hussy, running off with her groom. Should have put her to work—not filled her with jam what’s meant for the market next week.’
‘’Tweren’t meant for no market. That was from a jar I’d already opened!’
As the farmer and his wife launched into a heated argument Gregory jerked his head at her, indicating that she should get up and leave. Which she was only too glad to do.
‘Thank you so much for seeing to my feet,’ she said, edging past Madge just as she was taking a breath in preparation for slinging another pithy remark at her husband. ‘One day you must give me the receipt for that ointment.’
Gregory shot her a look of disbelief, as though he couldn’t imagine ever coming anywhere near this farm again.
The farmer, who’d glanced at Prudence’s feet when she spoke of them, was now glaring at Madge in a very similar fashion.
‘Where’d she get those stockings?’
‘From me, of course, you cloth-head,’ said Madge.
‘Ain’t it enough I caught the pair of them trespassing on our land but you must give ’em the food from our table and the very clothes off our back?’
Prudence had just reached the doorway, and Gregory’s side, when Madge darted up to her.
