Page 17 of The Housekeeper's Secret

He was close enough to catch the scent of her skin. Vanilla, nutmeg, roses—the scent that had haunted him since the afternoon in the library, overlaid now with rain. Gently, unhurriedly, he closed his fingers around the dragonfly and cupped it between his palms.

‘I’ve got it.’

A little of the rigid tension ebbed out of her.

‘What is it?’

‘A dragonfly. Look.’

Slowly he opened his hands. The insect trembled on his palm for a moment before launching itself skywards in a flash of iridescence.

‘Thank you.’ Her smile was small and reluctant, her eyes as blue as the dragonfly. ‘On its behalf as much as my own. If you hadn’t been here, I would probably have swatted it.’

They resumed walking. ‘That would have been a shame,’ he remarked. ‘They only live for a week or two. Imagine that—having a matter of days to live your whole life, and being cut down before you’ve had half of it.’

Imagine that.

‘I would never have forgiven myself,’ she said, in a tone that was laced with enough irony for him to know that she was teasing.

It felt like a small breakthrough. A minor victory.

The hillside got steeper and stonier as it dipped down to meet the road. Gathering up her skirts, she cast him a quick sideways glance. ‘For someone who spends their life carrying trays and standing in rich people’s dining rooms you seem to know quite a lot about nature.’

‘That’s because I grew up in the countryside.’

When they reached the drystone wall their steps slowed and he held out his hand to help her over the stile. She ignored it, as he had half expected she would, and used the wooden post to steady herself instead.

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Oxfordshire.’ He jumped down from the stile. ‘The Upton Priory estate. My father was coachman to Lord Halewood. I started in the stables there.’

‘As a groom?’

‘Carriage groom.’

‘Ah. A tiger.’

It was the second time he’d heard that word today; an old-fashioned name for the young lads who helped with the horses and sat on the back step of carriages in their gold-striped waistcoats. It made him think of the disembodied head snarling from its mount in Coldwell’s godforsaken hallway. You hardly heard the term now; it was dying out, along with the role. These days, the wealthy and titled had mostly exchanged their horse-drawn vehicles for motorised ones and had no need of boys to run alongside and fold down steps.

‘What made you swap the stables for the servants’ hall?’

The rutted road was all puddles. He glimpsed the white hem of her petticoat as she lifted her skirt clear to pick her way between them.

‘I was poached by one of Lord Halewood’s guests. Offered a job as a footman at a place in Hampshire.’

‘The French countess?’

‘That’s right.’ He felt a pulse of surprise (and foolish pleasure) that she remembered, and tried to recall exactly what he’d said in the servants’ hall that first night: his employment history was more pitted with dangerous potholes than the badly made road. ‘I didn’t particularly want to leave, and I certainly never wanted to work indoors, but the wage was too good to turn down. And my mother wanted me to take it.’

Lucy Arden had always been proud of how well her oldest boy had done at school. She was fond of saying that he might look like his handsome, feckless father but he took after her with his reading and writing, and he was wasted in the stables. When Lord Benningfield made his offer, she must have known she was unwell, but she kept that from him, urging him to take the job for Jack’s sake as well as his own. ‘I had a younger brother who was old enough to start work by then. Moving on meant he could have my place.’

On the other side of the road, the high wall that formed the boundary to the park stretched away into the distance in both directions. There was a little gate set into it, weathered and furred with moss. He went ahead of her to push it open and stepped aside to let her go first.

‘Is your brother still there? In your old place?’

The question caught him off guard. ‘No,’ he said, more abruptly than he’d intended. ‘No, he—He’s not there, he—’

She had been walking in front of him, along a path through rank-smelling, overgrown shrubbery. Emerging, she gave a sudden, strangled cry and startled back, so that he almost collided with her. Instinctively he stepped forward to put himself between her and whatever had frightened her, and saw it was only the lad from the gate lodge.

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