Read Online The Butler Did It by Kasey Michaels - Free Book Online

spending the evening. He’d wondered where it had been. He looked up again, grinning, and said, “Sometimes Mr. Thornley likes to take his ease in that bedchamber, m’lord, seein’ as how there ain’t nobody else to sleep there. It’s…it’s his back, m’lord. It sometimes pains him terrible, and he says the bedding in there is better than a mustard plaster.”
    â€œSo he’s gone to bed? Is that what you’re saying?”
    â€œOh, no, m’lord, I’d not be saying that,” Riley said, getting caught up in his lie. “It’s gathering up his belongings he’s doing, sure as check, ashamed as he’d be for you to know what he’s been about. Sleepin’ in the master’s bed? Tch, tch.”
    Morgan considered this. “But…why would I have reason to go into those rooms?”
    Riley rolled his eyes. “You know Mr. Thornley, m’lord. A real stickler he is, for what’s proper.”
    â€œProper, Riley, is that I get something to eat before my ribs start shaking hands with my backbone. Now, go get that tray.”
    â€œYes, m’lord. I’ll just be doing that, right now. You go sit yourself down, m’lord, rest your weary bones, and it’s right back I’ll be,” Riley said.
    He watched until Morgan closed the door behind him, then headed, lickety-split, for the servant stairs, where he met Thornley, who was ascending the stairs with a duplicate to the tray now residing in Cliff Clifford’s bedchamber.
    Crisis averted. Postponed. But not resolved.
    Â 
    â€œW E COULD TELL THEM there is a problem with the drains, and they’d die if they remained here,” Thornley said as his small staff sat behind the closed and locked door of his private quarters, out of earshot from the Westham servants who had arrived with the marquis.
    It had been a long and sleepless night. A worried one, too.
    â€œCan we do that? I don’t want to do that. Makes me look a poor housekeeper,” Mrs. Timon said, worrying at a thumbnail with her teeth. A splendid cook, Hazel Timon was tall, reed thin, and with a spotty complexion that would make it easy to believe she herself subsisted on stale bread and ditch water…and nail clippings.
    â€œMrs. Timon, you’re biting again,” Thornley said, pointing a finger at her nasty habit.
    â€œAnd she’s snuffling again,” Mrs. Timon shot back, folding her hands in her lap as she glared at Claramae, who had been intermittently crying into her apron the whole of the night long.
    Riley leaned over to put a comforting arm around the young maid, allowing his hand to drift just a bit too low over her shoulder, which earned him a sharp slap from the girl just as his fingertips were beginning to find the foray interesting.
    â€œNo, no, no, we can’t have this,” Thornley said, clapping his hands to bring everyone back to attention. “Quarreling amongst ourselves aids nothing. Think, people. What else can we do?”
    â€œI’d make up some breakfast,” Mrs. Timon offered, “excepting for that Gassie fella took over my kitchens.”
    â€œGas- ton, Mrs. Timon,” Thornley said absently, staring at the list he’d made during the darkest and least imaginative portions of the night.
    The plague. Discarded as too deadly. And where was one to find a plague cart when one needed one? Worse, who would volunteer to play corpse?
    Measles? Too spotty by half and, besides, Thornley’s memory had told him that his lordship had contracted themeasles as a child, so covering Claramae in red spots wouldn’t have the man haring back to Westham.
    A fire in the kitchens? Mrs. Timon would have his liver and lights, and if it got out of hand, half of London could go up in flames. Their situation was desperate, but not dire enough to risk another Great Fire.
    What was left?
    Thornley’s mind kept coming to the same