Ah, it didn’t matter anymore.
Mary Smith was apparently dead by snake bite, and Patience the maid would simply disappear.
“Did he see me? When you walked out, did he see me?” Curled up in a ball just outside the door was not the last image she wanted Mr. Woodsworth to have of her.
“No, he stayed at his desk.”
“Good.”
“Did he hurt you?”
Did he hurt her? What kind of a question was that? How could she answer it truthfully? His proposal had been the most painful moment of her life. The most painful and most beautiful.
“Well?” Nicholas’s voice had gone deep with panic.
“Not in the way you are thinking.”
“In what way did he hurt you?”
“I just want to go home. I didn’t make it to my thirty days. I didn’t make it to Bath.” Her words tumbled out one after another, and Nicholas’s expression grew more confused with each addition. “I didn’t even manage to serve under General Woodsworth. He was away from home the entire time. Mr. Woodsworth promised me a letter of recommendation, and I forgot to ask it of him.”
Nicholas furrowed his brow and opened his mouth as if to ask a question. She wasn’t ready to answer any questions quite yet. He must have noticed her reticence, for he snapped his jaw closed and shook his head. “Which door?” he asked after a moment’s pause.
Patience pointed to hers. There were three other doors just like it that opened to three identically small rooms. She would never again have such anonymity. “That one.”
Nicholas set her feet down but kept his arm around her back. He pulled forward one of her hands. Her red, cracked, and ruined hands. “But it looks as if you did learn to work.”
She nodded, afraid that, if she spoke, she would once again start crying. She had learned to work. Not always in the most efficient manner. But she had earned her four shillings a week.
Although she hadn’t yet been paid.
She left Nicholas waiting at the door and gingerly made her first few steps into the room. She grabbed her cap off of the hook on the wall, then turned and left before giving herself any time to be sentimental about the tinderbox-sized room she had spent the last few weeks inhabiting.
She and Nicholas walked back down the hallway, and when they reached the kitchens, Patience turned to go in.
“Do you need something from there as well?”
“No, but the door is this way.”
“That is the servants’ entrance, Patience.”
Of course. The Duke of Harrington would never go through a servants’ entrance. And neither should his sister. She shook her head at her foolishness, then wrapped her arm around Nicholas’s. “Take me home.”
It was time to return to being Lady Patience Kendrick. Even if it meant leaving a piece of who she now was behind.
Chapter 18
“Come in,” Anthony called out. And then he held his breath. It had been a full month since Patience—Lady Patience—had left, and yet every time someone knocked on his study door, he still expected to see her open it.
Mr. Gilbert slid through the doorway.
In his hand was an envelope and a card, but he simply stood there and didn’t move forward to his desk. It was as if he was hesitant, and Mr. Gilbert was never hesitant.
“Well, what is it?” She wouldn’t have written to him, would she have? To offer an explanation or to tell him she was settled back home and doing fine? He still had no clue as to why a titled lady had ended up at his home looking for a position as a maid. It was one of the many things that had tormented him the past month. “What do you have for me?”
Mr. Gilbert cleared his throat. “Today is payday.”
Oh, nothing to do with Lady Patience. Perhaps Mr. Gilbert was hesitant because he was here to ask for a raise. Anthony paid the servants quite well, but there would be no replacing Mr. Gilbert. If he did ask, he would get it. “Is there something amiss with your pay?”
“No, my pay is fair,” Mr. Gilbert said. “Only I have a letter from your sister for you and Patience’s wages, and we never received a forwarding address.”
Her wages. “Leave the wages on my desk.”
“You’ll get them to her? Do you know where she is?”
“I know where she is.” Whether or not he would deliver the wages seemed to be the question. What would Lady Patience Kendrick need with a few shillings? He could have it delivered, he supposed. She had earned her pay. More than earned it. When he thought of the things he had made her do . . .
“Do you know if she is doing well? She seemed to really want work when she came.”
Anthony didn’t know if he should laugh or hit his head against the desk. He opted to do neither. “I’m sure she is doing much better than anyone here.”
“Well, you are correct about that. The whole household has been under a cloud since she left. With both her and the children gone, it seems unnaturally quiet.”
“She was just a maid, Gilbert. It must be the effect of the children being gone. That would make much more sense.”
“With all due respect, sir, she was never just a maid.”
Anthony put his elbow on his desk and covered his head with his hand. Mr. Gilbert had no idea how right he was. Patience was never just a maid. If she had been, she would be in Kent right now, and he would be counting down the minutes until he could see her again. He would have thought it an agony. Only because he didn’t know the agony of never seeing her again. Of never having seen her properly in the first place. Patience the maid didn’t exist, and yet his heart yearned for her. How did a man rationally recover from a woman so illogical she wasn’t even a real person?
“Just leave it on my desk.”
Mr. Gilbert placed the two envelopes in front of him. On the top envelope, someone had written her name. Patience Young. Young? Where had that come from?
“Patience told you her last name was Young?”
“I believe it was her brother’s name. He fell at Kabul, but I suppose before he left, he told her your father would hire her if she ever needed work.”
For a woman who supposedly didn’t lie, she certainly fabricated a lot of things.
“And she never said why she was in need of work?”
“Why is anyone in need of work? She must have needed money.”
In the last month, Anthony had looked into the house of Harrington. Money was most definitely not the problem.
“Well, whatever it was she was looking for here, I hope she found it.”