Read Online Carola Dunn by The Actressand the Rake - Free Book Online

smile Nerissa turned on him. Maybe his intervention wouldn’t be needed after all, he decided smugly.
     

Chapter 5
     
    “Miss? Miss! You said to wake you at four.” The soft, slow voice had vowels as broad as Yorkshire’s yet quite different.
    Nerissa drifted gently out of sleep. Who...?Where...? This wasn’t her narrow bed in the tiny back chamber in York. She sat up, bewildered, and rubbed her eyes.
    “I brung you tea, miss, and a good bit o’ lardy-cake, still warm fro’ the oven it is, seeing as you missed your luncheon.”
    “Thank you.” She blinked at the chubby maid in her grey dress and white apron and cap. “You’re Maud.”
    “That’s right, miss. Mrs Hibbert said I’m to wait on you, long as I give satisfaction, miss.” Maud gave her an anxious look as she set her tray on the bedside table and poured tea.
    “Mrs...? Oh yes, the housekeeper. I’m at Addlescombe!” The morning’s events flooded back into her mind.
    “Please, miss.” The maid’s fingers twisted a corner of her apron. “If I does summat wrong, will you tell me how to do it right? I’d like fine to be your abigail.”
    “Heavens, Maud, I’ve never had an abigail in my life. I shan’t know if you do something wrong. We shall just have to work it out together.”
    “Oh yes, miss!” said the girl with a joyful smile on her rosy face. “And I ‘spect her ladyship’s abigail’ll tell me how to go on. I’ll just unpack now, shall I miss?”
    “But I left my box at the inn in Riddlebourne.”
    “Mr Harwood sent a groom for it, miss. ‘Tis just outside the door.”
    She bustled around, opening curtains to admit a flood of pale gold afternoon sunshine, and fetching in Nerissa’s battered box from the passage. Nerissa lounged luxuriously. As she sipped the tea and nibbled on the lardy-cake, a rich concoction studded with currants and glazed with sugar, she examined her chamber.
    Some twelve feet square, the room was light and airy, with white walls and ceiling and two large sash windows on adjacent walls. The curtains were of pale green calico patterned with ox-eye daisies, matching the coverlet of the tester bed. Above the plain, white-painted wood mantelpiece hung a watercolour of a meadow where a rusty-red cow munched on still more daisies. Nerissa smiled at the contented beast.
    Maud put away her few garments in the clothes press and set her brush and comb on the small dressing table. Polished wood gleamed in the slanting sunshine. Everything was simple but spotless, unpretentious but in excellent condition.
    As Maud shook out and hung the last of her three dresses, Nerissa became aware of a low rumble of voices coming through the wall behind her bed. A clank and a swoosh followed.
    “What on earth is that noise?”
    “Mr Courtenay ordered a bath, miss.”
    “He has the next chamber?” she asked, suppressing an idiotic urge to turn and look at the wall. Naturally the presence of an unclad gentleman on the other side of it had nothing to do with the strange sensation in her middle. She put the twinge down to the excessively large slice of fresh-baked lardy-cake she had just consumed to the last crumb.
    “Yes, miss. These two rooms on the side passage was the only chambers left in this wing,” Maud informed her. “‘Tother bedroom wing’s all shut up, like, all under holland covers.”
    There was no sense in opening an entire wing just for Mr Courtenay, she had to agree. Besides, it was nothing to her if he had the next room, nor if he chose to take a bath. In fact, that sounded like an excellent notion, after three days on the road.
    “I don’t suppose I could have a bath, too, Maud?”
    “O’ course, miss. I’ll go see to it this minute.”
    As she hurried out, the strains of “Cherry Ripe,” slightly off key, echoed through the wall.
    Nerissa had heard the song often enough and knew perfectly well that the cherries referred to were not fruit but a woman’s lips. The double entendre had never