Her own breath quite left her at that. “Since when?”
“Since before Dickie went to the kitchen, Madame,” said the butler. His hands trembled very slightly.
Was that five minutes? Seven? Verity stood immobile a long moment, unable to think. It didn’t make any sense. Bertie was a healthy man who experienced few physical maladies.
She crossed the room and dipped to one knee before the settee. “Bertie,” she called softly, addressing him more intimately than she had at any point in the past decade. “Can you hear me, Bertie?”
He did not respond. No dramatic fluttering of the eyelids. No looking at her as if he were Snow White freshly awakened from a poisoned sleep and she the prince who brought him back to life.
She touched him, something else she hadn’t done in ten years. His palm was wet, as was his starched cuff. He was still warm, but her finger pressed over his wrist could detect no pulse, only an obstinate stillness.
She dug the pad of her thumb into his veins. Could he possibly be dead? He was only thirty-eight years old. He hadn’t even been ill. And he had an assignation with Mrs. Danner tonight. The oysters for his postcoital fortification were resting on a bed of ice in the cold larder and the hazelnut butter was ready for the dessert crepes beloved by Mrs. Danner.
His pulse refused to beat.
She released his hand and rose, her mind numb. The kitchen crew had stayed put at her command. But the rest of the indoor staff had assembled in the drawing room, the men behind Mr. Prior, the women behind Mrs. Boyce, the housekeeper…everyone pressed close to the walls, a sea of black uniforms with foam caps of white collars and aprons.
In response to Mrs. Boyce’s inquiring gaze, Verity shook her head. The man who was once to be her prince was dead. He had taken her up to his castle, but had not kept her there. In the end she had returned to the kitchen, dumped the shards of her delusion in the rubbish bin, and carried on as if she’d never believed that she stood to become the mistress of this esteemed house.
“We’d better cable his solicitors, then,” said Mrs. Boyce. “They’ll need to inform his brother that Fairleigh Park is now his.”
His brother. In all the drama of Bertie’s abrupt passing, Verity had not even thought of the succession of Fairleigh Park. Now she shook somewhere deep inside, like a dish of aspic set down too hard.
She nodded vaguely. “I’ll be in the kitchen should you need me.”
In her copy of Taillevent’s Le Viandier, where the book opened to a recipe for gilded chicken with quenelles, Verity kept a brown envelope marked List of Cheese Merchants in the 16th Arondissement.
The envelope contained, among other things, a news clipping from the county fish wrapper, about the Liberals’ recent victory in the general election after six years in opposition. Verity had written the date in a corner: 16.08.1892. In the middle of the article, a grainy photograph of Stuart Somerset gazed back at her.
She never touched his image, for fear that her strokes would blur it. Sometimes she looked at it very closely, the clipping almost at her nose. Sometimes she put it as far as her lap, but never farther, never beyond reach.
The man in the photograph was dramatically hand—some—the face of a Shakespearean actor in his prime, all sharp peaks and deep angles. From afar she’d watched his meteoric rise—one of London’s most sought-after barristers, and now, with the Liberals back in power, Mr. Gladstone’s Chief Whip in the House of Commons—quite something for a man who’d spent his first nine years in a Manchester slum.
He’d accomplished it all on his own merits, of course, but she’d played her small part. She’d walked away from him, from hopes and dreams enough to spawn a generation of poets, so that he could be the man he was meant to be, the man whose face on her clipping she dared not touch.
Chapter Two
London
We’ve known each other a long time, Miss Bessler,” said Stuart Somerset. At the Besslers’ Hanover Square house, the drawing room had once been a rather ghastly green. But Miss Bessler, taking the reins of the household after her mother’s passing, had papered the walls in a shade of carmine that was almost sensual, yet still solemn enough for the home of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Miss Bessler raised a severe eyebrow at Stuart. She looked very fine tonight: Her eyes were bright, her cheeks held a tinge of becoming blush, her Prussian blue gown was pure drama against the crimson chaise longue on which they sat nearly knee to knee.
“We’ve been friends a long time, Mr. Somerset,” she corrected him.