Forever My Love (Berkeley-Faulkner #2)(9)

“Did you say something?” Sackville inquired.

“I… no, I didn’t.” They reached his room, and Alec managed to smile at his friend. “Well, until supper…”

“I’ll see you then,” Sackville responded, his round face creasing with a cheerful expression. As Alec watched, Sackville started the climb up to the room at the top of the turret steps. To visit Mira. “I’ll try not to be late,” the older man murmured confidentially, and winked before continuing up to Mira’s room.

Alec went inside his bedchamber and flung himself on the canopied bed, his hands behind his head as he stared at the clock. Alone with his brooding thoughts, he waited, giving a string of soft, meaningful curses as each quarter-hour passed. Finally an hour had gone by, and then Alec heard the sound of Sackville’s shuffling feet on the turret steps.

An hour, he thought bleakly. He had spent an hour up there with her.

. He wondered how she looked right now. Probably tumbled and tangled in the sheets. Her fair skin rosy, marked by another man’s caresses, her hair falling in a black-brown cascade over the pillows. Were her eyes filled with satisfaction or wistful longing? Had she wanted to be held after making love, had she wanted to be caressed and kissed? He thought of how she had felt in his arms that morning, trembling, shy, outraged. He wanted to hold her again.

Feeling the need of companionship, Mira ate supper downstairs that night at the upper servants’ table. The most significant members of Lord Sackville’s household sat at this table, which was presided over by the housekeeper. Although the atmosphere was much

warmer and congenial than that of the guests in the main eating room, dinner at the upper servants’ table was conducted with all the rules and graces of proper etiquette. The cook, the butler, the valet, and the menservants were seated according to rank, while Mrs. Daniel, the housekeeper, took the head of the table. Mira sat to Mrs. Daniel’s left, her brown eyes darting curiously to the doorway as the more boisterous noise of those who ate in the servants’ hall floated into the room. Most of Lord Sackville’s guests had brought their personal servants with them, and none of Sackville’s staff particularly liked such an invasion.

“An unruly lot, the visiting help are,” Mrs. Daniel remarked, casting her twinkling blue eyes upward in feigned dismay. Her plump, jolly face was ruddy with good health and good humor. “Thank the Lord we don’t have to share our table with them.”

“Yes, I’m glad o’t,” Joseph, the groom of the chambers, replied gruffly. “The livery that the Duke of Bedford brought wi’im… a snottier lot o’ daffodils you never seen, I assure ‘ee.”

They all chuckled softly, partaking of the hot, steaming meal with pleasure and enthusiasm. There were roast beef, chickens and sausages, root vegetables, pudding steamed in a round-shaped mold, and thick slices of bread. Mira lifted a glass of watered-down wine to her lips, peering over the rim inquiringly as one of the footmen turned his head to cough harshly. It was Pauly, a tall man of about thirty-five, who had been tormented by a long-lasting chest cold.

“Pauly, I did not know your cough was still with you,” Mira said, setting down her glass and looking at him in concern. “Did those coltsfoot lozenges do any good at all?”

“Best-tastin’ one y’iver made,” Pauly replied, pausing to suppress another rattling cough with his napkin. “It’s no use worrying more about it, the cough’ll go when it’s gone, and none sooner.”

“I should have known to make them stronger, Mira said, sighing and then looking at him impishly “The better-tasting my concoctions are, the le* effective.”

“I’d sooner take your remedies before the physs cian’s, Mira,” Mrs: Daniel commented, and there wa an agreeing murmur heard around the table. Ther*. was not one of them who hadn’t been helped in oik way or another by Mira’s cures; they went to hei whenever an ailment struck them. She was unques tionably more popular than the local physician, a quack who insisted on haphazard potions and bleeding hi; patients as a standard remedy for everything Iron wasp stings to fever. Mira’s compassion and her natu ral ability to help those in pain were the reasons why they had all come to accept her so readily into the small community. Ordinarily the lord’s mistress would earn nothing but scorn from any one of them.

“I’ll make you some calamint tea after supper, Pauly and that will clear it up if nothing else will,” Mira said.

He nodded in thanks, his face turning red as he sought to prevent the cough from further disturbing the conversation.

“It’s the September chill,” remarked Percy, Lord Sackville’s valet. Percy, an older gentleman with gray hair at the temples, had always been extraordinarily gentle and kind to Mira. She knew that he understood her relationship with Sackville, and although he was not entirely approving of it, Percy treated her with the deferential respect that was usually shown only to the highest-born ladies. “The beginning of winter’s creeping up on us.”

“Another winter,” Mrs. Comfit said glumly. “I can hardly bear the thought, not when last spring was so long in coming and the summer so short.”

“My third winter here,” Mira murmured, putting down her bread slowly. Three winters at Sackville Manor. Would she wake up one morning and find that

instead of twenty she would be twenty-five, or thirty? Would the next seasons slip by even faster than the last ones? Mira cast a look around the table at the familiar faces, bewildered by the sense of loneliness that had come over her so suddenly. Why was she unhappy when they all seemed so contented with their lives? Perhaps I should dose myself with some of my own medicines, she mused wryly. With all the herbs in her bag—confrey, coriander, flax, basil, and the rest— didn’t she have something for this nameless affliction?