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.’
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