beady eyes bulged in terror. “Is it our Dan?”
Dan was Cosy’s brother. Lieutenant Dante Vaughn had recently sailed out of Tilbury on his way to join their father, Colonel Vaughn, who was stationed with his regiment in India.
Fearing everything from shipwreck to cannibals, Cosy ran back to her own room with Nora at her heels. Opening the window, Cosy leaned out. Rain blurred her vision, but she could just make out the shape of a man. “He’s left-handed,” she reported, having absorbed in childhood the Irish superstition that left-handed people are an unlucky breed.
“A ciotog,” Nora cried, crossing herself. “Sure the left-handed are the Devil’s own.”
Ashamed that she had yielded even briefly to a silly old superstition, Cosy pushed her head out of the window again. “What is your message, sir?” she called down, shouting over the roar of the streaming gutters. Her voice was instantly carried off by the wind, and she was obliged to scream at the top of her voice: “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”
Benedict had rented a house complete with staff. “Let me in!” he roared, incensed that one he took for a servant was not already downstairs waiting on him hand and foot.
“WHAT?” Cosy shrieked, shielding her face from the rain with one arm.
“LET ME IN. I AM SIR BENEDICT. I’VE BEEN GIVEN THE WRONG KEY.”
“It’s not a messenger, thanks be to God!” said Cosy, pulling her head in out of the rain. “He says he’s Sir Benedict. He’s locked out of his house, poor man.”
“I don’t care if it’s Saint Benedict he is,” Nora declared stoutly. “You can’t be letting in strange men in the middle of the night, Miss Cosy. You’re not in Ireland anymore.”
Cosy stuck her head back out and howled, “I’LL COME DOWN.”
“You’re too kind,” Benedict muttered, shivering, as she slammed the window shut.
Wet to the waist, Cosy ran to her wardrobe and opened the doors, her teeth chattering. “You’d not want to be left out in the rain yourself, Nora Murphy,” she snapped in response to Nora’s silent disapproval. “I daresay none of his English neighbors would let him in.”
“I’ll wake Jackson,” said Nora, naming the only other servant in the house.
“You will not,” Cosy said, toweling her hair into a damp, tangled mess. “He’s stocious, and I’ll not have Sir Benedict thinking all Irishmen are drunkards! Go and let his lordship in while I get dressed.” She threw off her dressing gown and pawed through the clothes in the wardrobe in search of something warm and modest to put on.
“I’ll not be seen by an Englishman in me shift,” Nora declared, shocked. “And a ciotog on top of it! He’ll be apt to make an atrocity out of me. You’d better go yourself, Miss Cosy.”
Cosy gurgled with laughter. “Ha! And be made an atrocity of?”
“Sure they never interfere with the gentlewomen,” Nora explained, pulling her shawl tightly around her crooked, spare body. “But he’d ravish me quick enough, and I am only a servant.”
Cosy grabbed an old riding skirt and pulled it on over her nightgown. The nightgown was of the finest French silk, but the skirt was of cheap green baize, the felt-like material used to cover gaming tables. Hardly fashionable; she usually wore it with a matching jacket when she cleaned house. “Let him in, you old wagon,” she insisted, hastily tucking her nightgown inside the skirt, “or I’ll tell Father Mallone of your un-Christianlike behavior!”
The threat had its effect on Nora. “I will, Miss Cosy,” she intoned in her sepulchral voice, her ropy limbs taut with offended dignity. “But when the ciotog murders us all, don’t come crying to me.”
Nora swept out, leaving her young lady to finish dressing in the dark. Downstairs, she opened the door so suddenly that she almost received a rap on the nose from the gentleman’s umbrella. “Good evening,” he said with crushing dignity. “How awfully kind of you to let me in. I do hope it wasn’t too much trouble.”
He held out his umbrella to the little hunchback, but, to his astonishment, she let out a shriek and ran away. “Sure Miss Cosy will be down in a squeeze, your honor!” she squeaked as she ran. “’Tis only after jumping into her clothes she is!”
She took the candle with her.
Presumably, “Miss Cosy” was the housekeeper, probably the woman who had shouted at him from the window. Benedict disliked her already. Needless to say, he was not accustomed to being kept waiting in a cold, dark hall while the housekeeper jumped into her clothes. And why was she a Miss Cosy, anyway? Married or not, most housekeepers assumed the honorific of “Mrs.” when they achieved the rank of an upper servant. Obviously, Miss Cosy wanted every man she met to think of her as marriageable!
After pushing his valise inside the house with his foot, the baronet closed the door against the wind and the rain and wiped his wet face with his sleeve.
Where the devil was Pickering? he thought angrily.
Since losing his right hand, he had learned to do everything with his left. Taking out his silver cheroot case, he lit a match, striking it on the underside of the hall table. After lighting the candles in a nearby sconce, he was able to see his surroundings a little better. The damask-covered walls and gilded sconces were in keeping with the elegance one expected from a Camden Place address, but the cheap tallow candles in the sconces cast a dirty, orange stain over everything. Benedict preferred the clean, white light of beeswax, a fact well-known to Pickering. Seriously displeased, he placed his umbrella in the stand just as a figure in skirts appeared at the top of the stairs. “Ah. Miss Cosy, I presume?”
Her Christian name was Cosima, but, as no one but her mother had ever called her that in her life, she saw nothing odd in this form of address. “Aye,” she answered, coming down the steps. “You said you were given the wrong key, Sir Benedict? You’re locked out?”
Miss Cosy was Irish, but, although she was obviously more genteel than the other servant, she made no attempt to speak with an English accent. “I rang the bell,” he complained.
“Ah, sure, we disconnected that jangly old bell,” she explained cheerfully.
“Indeed! Help me out of my coat,” he commanded brusquely, putting his back to her. As he turned, Cosy caught sight of his right side. His right arm ended abruptly at the elbow, and his coat sleeve had been pinned up. Poor man! He really was a ciotog. He must be a war hero, thought the colonel’s daughter, instantly claiming the stranger for the Army.
“I will, sir,” she said in a tone of great respect. Descending on him in a rush, she peeled the fine black wool from his shoulders. Wet through, the fabric stank of tobacco and perfume, which could only remind her of her own father, except that, being an incorrigible drunkard as well as a remorseless philanderer, Colonel Vaughn usually stank of whiskey, too. “I’ll hang it to dry in the kitchen, Sir Benedict,” she offered courteously.
“Certainly not,” he said harshly. “I won’t have my coat smelling of cooking.”
Cosy thought the smell of her cooking would have improved his musky coat, but she held her tongue. “I’ll hang it here so,” she said cheerfully, finding a hook for it above his umbrella.
“You
