Dear Lady Disdain

And Hal, the young footman, once the ale had begun to work on him the night before, had roared belligerently at Jeb, who had said something deliberately provocative about Miss Anna Berriman, calling her ‘your typical idle fine lady’, and suggesting that she was more decorative than useful. ‘You just watch your manners, sithee. Miss Stacy ain’t no useless fine lady. Why, tonight she not only took the lead in getting us all out of the pickle we were in when the coach overturned, but she walked more than a mile through the snow herself, helping the postilion so that poor Polly, who was injured, could ride pillion with John Coachman, when by rights she ought to have been sitting there with him.’

Well, now, that was a surprise. Eager to discover more about this odd young woman, who annoyed him every time they met—and partly, he acknowledged, by not conforming to any of the expectations he had of women—Matt had commented sardonically, ‘And is that her sole claim to not being a fine lady? If so, it’s little enough.’

Hal had just been about to retort hotly, Well, she runs Blanchard’s Bank as well as any man, when he had belatedly remembered Miss Stacy’s injunction that no one was to reveal who she was until they reached York.

So he had consoled himself by sulking until Matt, still pushing at him, had asked, apparently inconsequentially, ‘And what is her real name, Hal? She says she is Miss Anna, and you and the rest sometimes call her that and sometimes Miss Stacy. Which is it?’

Hal had muttered sullenly into his ale, ‘Her pa used to call her Miss Stacy, and it stuck. Something to do with her ma, I think.’

‘Oh, and who and what was her pa when he was at home?’ asked Jeb, who, like Matt, found Miss Berriman intriguing as well as annoying.

‘A gentleman.’ Hal had enough sense left to be evasive. ‘His pa left him money, they say.’

One of the nouveaux riches created by the late wars, then, thought Matt. Which might explain the hauteur as a form of defence, in a society which tolerated rather than approved of them, although the explanation seemed thin. He wanted to ask, How much money? but he thought that any more questions and Hal would be waving his fists at him again, and the last thing he wanted, with the women sleeping at the other end of the kitchen, was a brawl.

Just before they finally retired for the night Jeb came up to him and muttered, so that the others couldn’t hear what they were saying, ‘Hot for her, are you?’

Matt drew back, almost assuming the aristocrat again. He stopped abruptly. He didn’t like the effect being back in England had on him. The very air breathed social difference and unwanted deference. He was used to being a man among men, not a demi-god among men.

‘Now what should make you think that? I don’t even like the woman, as you must see.’

Jeb shrugged. ‘Liking has nothing to do with it, as well you know. Wanting to wipe that don’t-touch-me expression off her face by having her on her back was more what you were thinking of by your own expression, I should say.’

There was such a grain of truth in this that Matt turned away, saying irritably, ‘For God’s sake, Jeb, have you nothing better to do than try to talk me into bed with a noisy termagant? And now off to your own bed before I lose patience with you.’

Well, he hadn’t convinced Jeb that he didn’t want Miss Anna Berriman, if that was her name, beneath him, that was for sure, if the knowing expression on his face when he crawled into his makeshift bed was any guide.

And what did he think of her? Nothing, of course, only that she was someone chance-met and now in his house, and he wanted her out of it.

Which, he now recognised wearily, wasn’t going to be soon. If the worsening weather was any guide, they might be penned in the Hall for days. The sooner they could warm up some of the bedrooms so that they were all spared her dictatorial presence the better.

Later on in the day he found that trying to heat some of the many bedrooms was a mammoth task, and no mistake. Matt, Jeb and all the able-bodied men lent a hand, including the postilion, who, when he moaned that this was no business of his and he wasn’t paid to lug coals and logs about for free, was rapidly informed by Matt that to do so was some part of his payment for his board and lodging.

On his second trip upstairs Matt found Lady Disdain, as he was coming to think of her, toiling along the landing with a full scuttle of coal.

‘Come, madam,’ he told her roughly, ‘allow me to take this from you. Carrying coals is men’s work. What are you trying to prove?’

Stacy looked him firmly in his blazing amber eyes. Her eyebrows rose, and she evaded his reaching hand, swinging the scuttle away from him. ‘Men’s work, you say? How many maidservants have carried scuttles full of coal up and down these stairs, do you think? That poor child in the kitchen can barely lift a pan on to the fire, and Horrocks was commanding her to see that this was taken up to the master. You mean, I think, that ladies don’t carry coal. But you have already informed me that I am no lady, so have done, I pray you.’

There was no telling her anything.

Stacy saw that she had scored a hit, a palpable hit.

He shrugged. ‘As you will, but remember that the servants are trained to do this work, and you are not.’

‘Then I collect that I must learn, m’lord,’ was her smart riposte to him, and she swept by him, a slow and laboured sweep, she thought afterwards ruefully, for it was true that her whole body was beginning to protest at the back-breaking work she had been doing since she had arrived at Pontisford Hall.

The coals were for her bedroom, one of the smaller and less well-appointed ones, since its size would make it easier to warm up quickly. The fire was alight, but there was more smoke than flames rising from it, and Jeb was poking at it in an uninformed way, she saw. Doubtless he was more used to squatting half-naked in a wigwam and nursing a few sticks to life, was her acid inward commentary.

‘Allow me,’ she said briskly and, wrenching the poker from his astonished hands, she stirred the fire vigorously, producing a blazing flame which she presently fed with a few coals, before standing back to look at her room.

And what a room. No lady’s bower, this. The dust-sheets had been ripped from the bed and the furniture and were lying discarded in the corner. Grey fluff and cobwebs were everywhere. Clean linen, ready for the bed, and a great quilt had been placed on a chest under a window whose only view was of snow, and yet more snow.

‘I can’t sleep in this,’ she told Jeb. ‘The room needs a thorough cleaning before it is habitable.’

‘So it does.’ Jeb’s grin was sly and he lifted his shoulders in a massive shrug. ‘Poor Polly’s wrist is worse than ever this morning, the cook isn’t paid to clean bedrooms and the little maid has woken up with a fever. So, who’s to do it?’ He was being particularly insolent because he wanted to see how far the woman opposite him would go if provoked. A long way, it seemed.

‘If there is no one else able to clean this room, and the one which is being prepared for Miss Landen,’ Stacy told him, wondering how long she could keep up her iron determination to show him, and his impossible master, that there was nothing, but nothing this fine lady would not do to prove herself as willing as any high-nosed man, ‘then I shall clean them myself.’