Loving Julia Read online

  “I don’ ’ave no maid,” Jewel said, looking the smaller woman right in the eyes.

  “I see,” said Mrs. Johnson, taken aback at the unexpected Cockney accent that rolled out of the mouth of her new mistress. Johnson looked shocked as well. But something in Jewel’s expression must have warned them that they would be better off making no comment.

  “Come then, Miss Julia, and I’ll take you up,” Mrs. Johnson said briskly. She led the way toward the wide staircase that curved upward at the end of the great hall. As they walked toward it, Jewel saw a delicate iron railing surrounding what appeared to be a balcony halfway up the stone wall.

  “The minstrel’s gallery,” said Mrs. Johnson, noticing her look. “They used to use it whenever there was a ball here. But since Miss Elizabeth’s passing …” She broke off, shaking her head. “Well, you don’t want to hear me rattle on.” She continued the climb to the second floor in what Jewel guessed was uncharacteristic silence.

  The room Jewel was shown to was lovely. It was huge by her standards with green and white vine-patterned wallpaper and simple white curtains shading the two floor to ceiling windows. A delicate four-poster bed dominated one wall while a matching armoire and dressing table stood against another. A green, white, and pink floral carpet lay on the polished oak floor beside the bed. Another carpet lay in front of the white marble fireplace that was so pristine that it obviously hadn’t been used in many a day.

  Mrs. Johnson, noting the absence of a fire, called down to a servant below. In just a few minutes a young girl in a black uniform entered carrying an armload of wood. This she piled into the fireplace, and in short order a flame was flicking at the logs. Another black-uniformed young girl appeared before the first one had finished, and Mrs. Johnson introduced her as Emily. She was small with a round rosy face and merry brown eyes. Her hair was scraped back beneath a white mob cap, but from the single curl that peeped out, Jewel saw that it was a warm brown color.

  Emily curtsied to Jewel, then stood with her hands clasped before her, staring down at the floor as Mrs. Johnson explained to her that she would be serving as Miss Julia’s maid until a real lady’s maid could be engaged for her. Then, with a smile at Jewel and a stern look for Emily, who was still staring at the floor, Mrs. Johnson dismissed the girl.

  “You may start your duties on the morrow, Emily,” the housekeeper said. “I will do for Miss Julia tonight.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Emily replied in a shy voice, and with another curtsy took herself off. Mrs. Johnson then turned to Jewel.

  “She’s a good girl, Miss Julia, just a little overwhelmed at this elevation in her station. But if she doesn’t please, you have only to tell me and we’ll find someone else. Until his lordship engages a proper lady’s maid for you, that is.” After a sweeping glance around the room, Mrs. Johnson said, “If you would like, Miss Julia, I will have a bath sent up. Oh, and your dinner, of course. Unless you would prefer to eat downstairs in the dining room?”

  “N-no. T’anks. Uh, Mrs. Johnson, I think I’ll ’ave that bath tomorrer, if yer don’ mind. Could I jest ’ave my supper tonight? Up ’ere?”

  “Certainly, Miss Julia, whatever you wish. I’ll tell Emily that you prefer to bathe in the mornings then, shall I?”

  The truth was that Jewel preferred not to bathe at all, at least not in the way the gentry apparently did it, naked and immersed in water up to her neck. She had rather enjoyed her experience with the rose soap the night before, but it was not something she cared to repeat too often. The chances of contracting the ague went up considerably, she thought, the more one took such foolhardy chances. In any case, tonight all she wanted to do was eat and crawl into that supremely comfortable looking bed.

  “Shall I help you undress, Miss Julia?” Mrs. Johnson moved toward her as she spoke. Startled, Jewel took a step backward.

  “No, no, Mrs. Johnson, I c’n take off me own clothes. T’anks.”

  “Very well, Miss Julia. I will have Emily bring up appropriate night attire, as you didn’t bring your baggage with you.” Jewel nodded assent to this. “Will that be all then, Miss Julia?”

  Jewel nodded, and Mrs. Johnson turned toward the door. Then with her hand on the knob she stopped and looked over her shoulder.

  “Uh, Miss Julia.” She hesitated, frowning. “If you should hear … sounds in the night, please don’t be frightened. Miss Chloe suffers from nightmares, and sometimes she screams. She’s in this wing, so if she does you will surely hear her.”

  Jewel’s hand paused in the act of unbuttoning her pelisse. She stared at the housekeeper. “Who be Miss Chloe?”

  “Miss Chloe is his lordship’s daughter.” “’is daughter!” Of course, the earl’s mother had said something about a backward child, Jewel recalled. She found the notion that he was married and a father oddly unsettling. She added slowly. “Be ’is wife ’ere, too?”

  “Lady Moorland is dead,” Mrs. Johnson said, her cheerful face suddenly stern. And then before Jewel could question her further she left the room, closing the door quietly behind her.

  IX

  Five days later Jewel was still waiting to be roused from her slumber by the terrified screams of a little girl. But so far it hadn’t happened. Instead, she had difficulty sleeping because of the profound quiet; all her life she had been used to the noise and bustle of the city around her as she slept.

  From her bedroom window the morning after she had arrived she had seen a little girl surely no more than six years old go for a walk with an older woman whom Jewel assumed was her nursemaid. The child had looked small and fine-boned with the earl’s gilded hair streaming down her back from beneath a velvet cap. She was dressed in a stylish claret velvet coat that made her look like a miniature of a fashionable lady.

  But what struck Jewel most about the child was how very unchildlike she seemed. She didn’t laugh, or run, or shout as a little girl might be expected to do when she reached the freedom of the outdoors. She merely walked along in silence, her hand in her nursemaid’s, looking neither to the left nor the right until the pair rounded a privet hedge and disappeared from sight. Jewel stared after them for a moment, then shrugged. The earl’s daughter was none of her concern. No more than the earl was.

  She had not seen him at all since the day they arrived. When she had asked for him timidly the first morning, she had been told by a pokerfaced Johnson that he was “out.” And “out” or “busy” he had remained until finally she stopped asking. Once she had gotten a glimpse of him riding from the stables as if the hounds of hell were on his heels, but other than that she had not set eyes on him, and his apparent lack of interest in her well-being both angered and, oddly, hurt her. He had left instructions that she was to be provided with a wardrobe, and the first morning a seamstress had arrived at the house. She had proceeded to push and pull Jewel until she was ready to scream.

  But the first of her new dresses was to arrive that very day. Jewel, though she hated to admit it, was excited. In her whole life she had never had a dress made especially for her. Jewel was sure the dresses would be beautiful; anything would be an improvement on the scratchy black wool. Although she now wore some of the proper underclothes—she flatly refused to wear stays, they made her feel like she couldn’t breathe—the dress still itched. Only now she knew enough to only scratch when she was alone.

  Except for the seamstress Jewel had seen no one from outside the house. She passed the time exploring the house and grounds, trying her best to stay out of everyone’s way. There was a veritable army of servants: stillroom maids and laundry maids, parlor maids and upstairs maids, footmen and under-footmen, gardeners and under-gardeners, in addition to Chloe’s nursemaid, Leister, the earl’s valet, and Johnson and Mrs. Johnson. Each one of them curtsied every time they saw her, which made Jewel extremely uncomfortable. She had no idea how to acknowledge such a salutation. Should she curtsy back, or smile, or say thanks, or ignore the whole business? Confused as she was, she took the latter course and then wondere
d if that was why the servants never spoke to her. Or perhaps they weren’t supposed to speak to her?

  Being one of the gentry was more complicated than she had ever guessed. Even eating was an ordeal. After one try at eating a meal in the grand dining room, alone at a table vast enough to seat fifty people, she had vowed never to repeat the experience. Two footmen had served her meal while Johnson supervised. There was enough food to feed at least ten people, and the table was awash with glittering crystal, silver, and china, most of which Jewel hadn’t the least notion what to do with.

  Ever since, she had been eating from a tray in her room. But she was getting tired of having no one to talk to. Certainly being rich was not quite as much fun as she had expected. She was lonely, ill at ease, and felt more and more like a fish out of water. For the first time in her life she was at leisure, and she decided she had never been so well to pass and yet so heartily bored in her life.

  So when Emily knocked on the door of her room after luncheon on the fifth day with the announcement that her new clothes had arrived, Jewel welcomed the diversion with open arms. For such a vast order—it was not every day that someone asked Miss Soames to provide them with a complete wardrobe—the seamstress had come again herself instead of having the garments sent as was her custom.

  “Here you are, Mrs. Stratham. And I hope you enjoy them,” Miss Soames said, as she prepared to leave, having seen the items into Emily’s hands. The maid, excited by the prospect of her lady’s having a real wardrobe at last, was already opening the boxes and laying the contents out on the bed. Out came white linen petticoats, white silk chemises, white lawn nightgowns, white silk and cotton stockings, garters, stays, and then dress after dress in unrelieved black. Emily’s face fell and Jewel’s eyes widened.

  “But miss, they be all black!” Jewel protested faintly to Miss Soames.

  The seamstress’ eyebrows rose as her eyes ran over Jewel with condescension. “But of course they are, my dear Mrs. Stratham. On his lordship’s orders. He led me to understand you recently lost your husband.”

  “Oh. Oh, ayeh, me ’usband,” Jewel mumbled, having almost forgotten that she had been married, let alone widowed. She had seen fat shopkeepers’ wives walking about in black dresses after their husbands had died, but they were old women, married a long time. But she couldn’t dress in black for the rest of her life! And considering the quantity of garments the earl had had made up for her, he was apparently expecting her to do just that.

  “Wait right ’ere, would ya? I ’ave to go ’ave a lil talk wit’ somebody.” Jewel’s eyes gleamed with determination as she marched from the room in search of the earl. Dressing in black for the next half century for a husband she had scarcely known was ridiculous.

  “May I help you, Miss Julia?” One of the footmen—or under�footmen, she could never tell—materialized out of the shadows beneath the stairs as she stepped down into the grand hall.

  “I be lookin’ for ’is lordship,” she announced, staring right into his eyes as if daring him to put a rub in her way.

  “His lordship is in the library, I believe, Miss Julia.”

  “And where’d that be?”

  “On the first floor of the north wing. But, Miss Julia, he gave specific orders that he is not to be disturbed.”

  “Well, bully for ’im,” Jewel muttered as she marched in the direction of the north wing. Her earlier exploration of the house paid off, as she easily found her way through the labyrinthian corridors to the one door on the first floor that was always closed. Hardly pausing to draw a deep breath, she rapped her knuckles sharply on the polished oak door.

  “Who is it?” the earl answered, irritation plain in his voice.

  “It be me, Jewel—uh, Julia, yer lordship,” Jewel answered. After a slight pause she heard a distinct, “Go away.” Her temper heated. Just because he was an all-powerful earl didn’t mean he could dismiss her as if she were nothing! The light of battle flared in her eyes as she turned the knob and opened the door.

  He was sprawled in a big wing chair before the fire, one booted foot resting on a footstool while the other was planted solidly on the rug. A glass holding an amber liquid was in one hand while a bottle containing more rested on a table at his elbow. A long thin cigar lay in a gold dish on the same table, a white drift of smoke rising lazily from it. On the footstool an open book lay face down. He was in shirtsleeves, without coat or cravat, and wore buckskin trousers instead of the breeches she had expected. The fire gleamed brightly off the silver-gilt of his hair, but left his face in shadow. Jewel could only see the gleam of his eyes as they ran over her slowly from head to toe.

  “Do you know, I had almost forgotten about you? If you were to take yourself off again, I might succeed completely.” His voice was slightly slurred, and if not actively hostile was certainly not welcoming. Jewel’s chin came up, and she took a couple of steps into the room.

  “Do come in,” he said ironically.

  She ignored that, too, advancing determinedly until she stood beside the stool where that one booted foot still rested. He sat without moving, looking up at her through narrowed eyes that Jewel could see now were more than a little bloodshot.

  “You be holed up in ’ere drinkin’!” The discovery that he was at least a trifle bosky surprised her, or she would never have said it out loud.

  “What the bloody hell business is it of yours?” he growled. As she watched he deliberately lifted the glass to his lips and drained the contents, then poured himself another.

  His tone more than his words angered her.

  “It ain’t me bizness a-tall, if ya wan’ ter get soused,” she

  agreed cordially, and his eyes glinted at her for an instant before shifting to his glass.

  “Damned right, it isn’t,” he muttered, and took another long swallow.

  Watching him, Jewel thought that he didn’t look much like the complete to a shade lord whose acquaintance she had made in London. This man was just as handsome, but it was a surly, mussed handsomeness instead of the sartorial perfection she had thought characteristic of him. His hair was disordered, his cheeks showed a trace of stubble, and his white shirt was faintly crumpled. All in all, Jewel thought that she could like this man better than the other—if looks were everything. In this state he was not nearly so intimidating; at least, accustomed as she was to loud, abusive, imbibing males, she didn’t find him so.

  “Did you want something?” He was looking at her again. In the shock of finding him like this, she had nearly forgotten her errand.

  “Them new dresses ya got me, they be all black!” she accused, her grievance resurfacing with a vengeance.

  “So, what of it?” It was clear from his tone that he had lost what tiny vestige of interest he might once have felt in her reason for barging in on his privacy.

  Jewel glared at him. “If ya ’ad asked me afore ya went ter orderin’ ’em, I’d ’ave tole ya that I don’ like black. I wan’ ter tell Miss Soames to make ’em over again, in colors.”

  He made a negative gesture with his head. “Impossible. In case you have forgotten, you’re a widow now. You’re in mourning.”

  “So are ya if Timothy be yer cousin, but I don’ see ya goin’ aroun’ all in black,” Jewel flared.

  “What I choose to do and what I choose for you to do are two different things,” he said, looking up at her with hooded eyes. “The correct period of mourning for a young widow is one year. During that time you will observe all outward conventions of respect for your deceased husband, including dressing exclusively in black. Do I make myself clear?”

  Jewel stared at him, her lips tightening. His eyes met hers just as she was about to explode. Their expression checked her outburst as effectively as a splash of cold water. She scowled at him as he continued to regard her with cold blue eyes and faintly lifted brows. Finally, she nodded reluctantly.

  “Yes, my lord,” he prompted, speaking to his glass.

  “Yes, my lord,” she repeated, hands cle
nching as she turned to go. She would like to tell him what he could do with his “my lords,” but she didn’t quite dare.

  “Wait,” he said, and she turned back to look at him.

  “I had really almost forgotten your existence,” he said, sounding as if the words were meant more for himself than her. He looked up at her, his eyes sharpening. “But now that you’ve reminded me, something really must be done about your atrocious accent. And your manners. I will have Johnson engage a governess for you as soon as possible, certainly no later than the end of the week. Then you may begin to learn to speak and behave like a civilized human being.”

  Jewel bristled. Maybe she didn’t talk as fancy as he did, but at least she didn’t insult him with every breath she uttered.

  “Ya got ter be the rudest man I’ve ever met,” she said through her teeth, and turned to leave him again. This time he stopped her with a snap of his fingers. Thoroughly affronted—she was not a dog!—Jewel turned to glare at him.

  “My lord,” he corrected softly. Jewel ground her teeth.

  “My lord,” she managed, seething, and was turning to go for the third time when the portrait over the mantel caught her eye. It was a beautiful thing done in pastels, showing a slender young woman with soft fair hair seated in a chair, her white skirts billowing around her. Leaning against her knee was a small girl of perhaps three years with long, silver-gilt curls and sky blue eyes. The child was beautiful while the woman was merely pretty.

  But there was such love in the woman’s quiet face as she gazed at the child that Jewel was touched by it.