night, yes. But for now we must push on. Agreed?”
“Grudgingly, yes,” Julia said, then squared her shoulders and climbed into the coach. She carefully eased the now-sleeping Alice aside so that she could sit on the front-facing seat—the rear-facing seat had been an unfortunate choice for her stomach—then pulled the child half onto her lap.
Looking out the opened window, she said, “She’ll need a bath, fresh clothing and a good night’s rest, Mr. Becket. She’s a small child and fragile and should be handled accordingly.”
Chance nodded, knowing the woman was right, hating himself for being so selfish. “You’ve made your point, Miss Carruthers. No need to drive it home with a hammer.”
“No need but definitely a strong desire,” Julia muttered as the man slapped his hat back on his head and returned to his mount. Moments later the coach lurched forward once more, never reaching the killing pace set earlier. She then spent the next hour stroking the sleeping Alice’s curls and looking out the off window while ordering her stomach to behave.
“Coming into Maidstone ahead!”
Julia blinked herself awake at the sound of the groom’s shout and looked out the off window yet again, happy to see the beginnings of civilization once more.
Within an hour she and Alice were settled in a lovely large room at one of the many inns along the water. Alice had been washed, slipped into a night rail, had gingerly nibbled on buttered bread and milky tea and was once again sound asleep, now between sweet-smelling sheets.
And Julia was hungry. This surprised her, but she trusted her stomach to know best, so she washed her face and hands, frowned at her no-longer-neat hair, tucked Buttercup into the bed beside Alice, locked the door behind her and took herself downstairs to search out the common room.
“Not in there, Miss Carruthers. Lord knows the grief you could come to if you were to encounter my coachman again while you’re still of a mind to boil him in oil,” she heard Chance Becket say just as she was about to step across the threshold into a low-ceilinged room sparsely peopled with farmers and travelers. “I’ve arranged for a private dining room.”
She turned about to see that he had changed out of his hacking clothes and into a finely tailored dark blue jacket over fawn pantaloons. His hair, damp and even more darkly blond, had been freshly combed and clubbed at his nape. He looked fresh and alert and entirely too handsome to be smiling at her, to even know her name. “It was not the coachman who ordered us to all but fly to the coast. And I doubt, sir, that it is customary for the nanny to break bread with the employer.”
Chance laughed, doubtful that anything so mundane as convention ever gave this woman much pause. If it did, she wouldn’t have taken a step out of her chamber before doing something with that thick mop of hair that looked as if she’d spent the day scrubbing floors. “Perhaps you require a chaperone?”
“Oh, don’t be silly. I’m a plain, aged old maid of nearly one and twenty. Nobody cares,” Julia said, absentmindedly pushing a stray lock of straight blond hair behind her ear as she felt her cheeks begin to flush. Why on earth had she told him her age? “Where, sir, is the private dining room? I’m starved.”
He gestured toward the hallway leading away from the small square foyer, and Julia had no choice but to precede him down the hall.
“In here,” Chance said, stepping ahead of her and pushing back the door that was already ajar. “Shall I leave it open—to ease an old maid’s sensibilities, I mean?”
Julia blinked rapidly, for she was suddenly so stupidly missish that she actually believed she might cry. “Now you’re being facetious. I’m the nanny, a simple domestic servant. Just do sit down, sir, so that I may.”
“You are many things, Miss Carruthers,” Chance said as they sat down on either side of the narrow wooden table, “but I am afraid that the role of servant is not one of them, at least not by nature. Tell me, have you ever considered the occupation of despot? I do believe you’d excel at it.”
Julia picked up a still-warm roll, ripped it into three pieces, then reached for a knife and the butter pot. It was time for a change of subject. “How long will you remain at Becket Hall before returning to London, sir? I had thought you had planned only to deliver us there, but the amount of luggage you’ve ordered brought with you seems to contradict that thought.”
“Oh, don’t pretty it all up with fine words, Miss Carruthers,” Chance said, using his fork to skewer a fat slab of pink ham and put it on his plate. “You poked about in my bedchamber, tallying up bits of luggage the way a headmaster counts noses. And you’re alarmed that I might actually remain at Becket Hall above a day, because nothing would make you happier than seeing the last of me. Oh, and I am a horrible parent to Alice. Correct?”
Julia chewed on a piece of roll, swallowed, then smiled. “Correct, Mr. Becket. Except for that last little bit. I don’t think you are a horrible parent, because Alice seems to love you, and children are the very best judges of people. After dogs, I suppose. But you’re not very attentive or perceptive when it comes to your child, are you? Most of your gender aren’t, leaving such things to the females. My father, I believe, was an exception, as he was forced to raise me alone.”
Chance leaned back on his chair, rather amused about her reference to dogs. “So following that thought—and having known you now for nearly four and twenty hours—I can conclude that it’s the mothers, then, who for the most part teach their children about tact and thinking before speaking and refraining from invading another’s privacy and the art of showing respect—that sort of thing?”
Julia lowered her gaze to her plate to find that she’d loaded it with ham and cheese from the platter in the middle of the table. Yet suddenly she had lost her appetite.
“Come, come now, Miss Carruthers. Consider this a necessarily delayed interview as to your qualifications to ride herd on my daughter, as the first was rather slapdash, to say the least. I begin to worry that, raised entirely by your father, as you say you were, you are not the one to help mold Alice to be a respectful, conformable child.”
Clearly the man was now driving home his own point with the head of a hammer. She was being reminded just who she was—and who she was not. And the pity of it was, she could not afford to push him any further, unless she wanted to be left here, in Maidstone, to fend for herself. “I’m her nanny, sir, her nurse, and not her tutor or her governess. I believe you can safely leave her teachings to others. I’m here to…to hold the chamber pot.”
“Quite,” Chance said, liking this woman better when she wasn’t keeping herself in check. He’d had seven years of society women, of women never saying what they meant, what they felt—if, indeed, they felt anything. Miss Carruthers was more like his sisters, none of whom suffered fools gladly.
Which, he realized, would make him the current fool, wouldn’t it? “Very well, we’ll dispense with the interview now. Perhaps you’d like to hear more about Becket Hall? After all, you will be living there.”
“For how long, sir?” Julia asked, her curiosity overcoming both her uncomfortably real nervousness and her temper.
“For you, Miss Carruthers? For as long as you can stomach the place, I imagine. For Alice, until she is grown and ready for her season. I don’t wish for her to grow up in London, and my own estate is manned only by a skeleton staff, which is why I’ve arranged for her to be with the family. I’ll visit her, of course.”
“Really?
