Page 24 of Goodbye, Earl (Ladies’ Revenge Club #4)

“ O h, for God’s sake!” Claire huffed, watching her son cross his arms and collapse, bottom-first, into the dirt outside of the cottages. “Oliver, be reasonable!”

“I’m staying with Papa!” the boy insisted, setting his jaw in a way Claire suspected he’d gotten from her. “I want Papa!”

“He’s not even here yet, love! You are going to stay with me, in this cottage here. Isn’t it lovely?” She sighed, pressing her fingers into her temples and shaking her head. “It is too small for all three of us.”

Tommy was watching from a distance while Abra sniffed around, marking this rock or that weed.

She hadn’t said anything yet, choosing instead to lean on her walking stick and observe the tantrum as it unfolded, knowing that Oliver’s governess was farther behind in the carriage train and could not yet intervene.

“There are bigger ones!” Oliver wailed, pointing at three in the immediate vicinity. “Bigger!”

Claire groaned.

It was already dark. Even in ideal circumstances, the trip would have taken most of the day across the hilly terrain. As it was, they had hit a rainstorm about halfway in and had to contend with misty horizons and muddy roads for almost double the usual travel time.

In the distance, there was the thrum of voices and revelry alongside a few orange glows from bonfires. She was tired and hungry and nursing the beginnings of what promised to be a spectacular headache.

All she wanted in the world was to go inside the cottage and fall on its bed, but her son, it appeared, preferred to wallow in the grass.

“Oliver, other people are going to stay in those cottages!” she said, her voice hitting a higher octave than was strictly necessary for a composed Mama. “This one is ours!”

“You could take mine,” said Tommy, flashing that gold tooth with the width of her grin. “I wouldn’t mind.”

Claire cut her eyes to the other woman, winning nothing in response but a cackle.

“I’m only one lady, after all,” Tommy continued, “plenty of room for Abra and myself in this smaller one.”

“Fine. Fine!” said Claire, dropping her hands onto her knees and bending down to meet her son’s eye. “Will that get you up and into the house, Oliver?”

“Papa will come too?” Oliver demanded, a wary defiance flashing in his eyes.

“Yes! Papa will come too,” she forced herself to say through the bile that wanted to taint her words. “Get up, now.”

“Well,” said Oliver, wavering a little in clear surprise that he’d won. “All right.”

It would be fine, Claire told herself as the exhausted-looking groom moved their luggage from one stoop to the other. She’d already been sharing a house with Freddy for weeks upon weeks. This would be no different.

They would spend most of their time down at the games, anyhow. This was just a place to fall asleep, just a soft landing for the main event.

She gave a bag of coins to one of the village boys who had run up to assist in the clear hopes of a penny or two when their carriage had arrived. “Go and buy some food from the stalls for us,” she told him. “It doesn’t matter what.”

It truly didn’t. She would eat flame-charred horse just now and thank them for the privilege. It did occur to her that the boy might just run off with the coin, never to return, but she thought he seemed a canny sort of lad who might, instead, have whiffed the promise of repeat business.

Besides, he could keep a sausage or two if he wanted.

The cottage itself was exactly as charming as Silas had described, with a thatched roof and plenty of cream and wooden fixtures inside.

It felt a little bit charmed, Claire thought, obviously cleaner and better maintained than a real house built the same way would likely be.

As far as she knew, no one lived in these cottages for the remainder of the year.

When the food arrived, an assortment of toasted cheese, hot oysters, and roasted nuts, she ate so quickly and ravenously that she could scarce recall the taste. Oliver appeared to do the same, almost immediately beginning to yawn and droop in the aftermath.

His fatigue, she thought privately, was a gift.

She put him down in the trundle bed in the smallest bedroom without even bathing or changing him. He would sleep in his shirtsleeves tonight and be no worse for it in the morning. She kissed his brow and thought how nice it would be if her own clothing were so simply repositioned.

When the other carriages rambled to a stop outside, she went personally to inform Freddy of the change.

She was done hiding from him. Done letting him gloat and preen and torment. She was too tired for any of it.

“Oh, Claire,” Dot had said in the aftermath of the news, which Freddy received with a detached sort of indifference that Claire suspected was from the same fatigue she herself felt. “I need to tell you something.”

“Can it wait?” Claire asked, frowning and turning to find Dot’s hand on her shoulder. “I am so very tired.”

Dot glanced at Freddy and Silas, who were grabbing their personal bags from the overhead shelves in the carriage. Freddy paused to open his bag on the foothold, tucking something inside of it.

Dot winced, turning back to Claire. “It shouldn’t, but I suppose it could.”

“Then let it wait, Dot,” Claire said with an approximation of an encouraging smile, not caring a whit what nonsense had unfolded in the trip here. How much worse could things really get, after all? Dot didn’t even know about the riverbank or what had happened in the foyer.

“It’s only that I gave him—”

“Later.” Claire shook her head, already turning to leave. She wanted to be back inside and locked in her own chambers before Freddy could enter the cottage. “We’ll all be better after some rest. Enjoy your night, Dot.”

Dot did not answer or otherwise make herself known.

Claire did force herself to wash, since stripping down to a shirt and sleeping was not an option for her as it was for her son.

She almost drifted off in the copper tub, which was round and very deep as opposed to long, only rousing herself because the sound of conversation outside her bedroom window willed it.

She pulled the first night rail that her fingers could find in the open valise over her body and crawled onto the bed, not even bothering to pull the comforter back. She sank onto the pillows. She exhaled. And then she slept.

She woke half convinced that she was still in a dream.

The sun had not risen. It was still pitch-dark. In the distance were still the whoops and rumbles of late-night revelry. In the air was the most delectable scent, like butter and dough and something heady and sweet.

It drew her from her exhausted slumber just as effectively as a shaking hand to her shoulder would have done, pulling her up to sitting in her bed like she’d been awakened from a wicked enchantment.

What was that delicious smell?

She pushed her hair from her face. She had fallen asleep before it could be braided or tied into rag curls. It was tangled, loose down her back and weaving around her elbows as she felt around for a dressing gown, her body demanding she follow the scent in the air.

Almonds, she thought. Vanilla? And fruit, something red and thick.

It took her a moment to remember that she was not in her room back at Crooked Nook. The dressing gown she’d used after her bath was still sodden, hanging over the back of a wicker chair near the vanity.

She could almost taste the sugar on her tongue, warm and dissolving.

The staff were all supposed to be in their own cottages until morning, when they would attend the preparations for descending down to the games.

She gave one last glance at her wet dressing gown and decided it did not matter.

If one of the kitchen girls was preparing breakfast here, they would not balk at their lady coming to investigate.

She did not even bother with slippers, padding barefoot instead from her room and into the sparsely lit hall, following the glow of candlelight from the kitchen.

She could hear humming as she drew closer. Worse, she recognized the voice, and still did not stop.

Why should Freddy have some of tonight’s surprise confection and not Claire? He could very well share if it awoke him too.

His voice was still as honeyed as it ever was, she thought in the faint recesses of her mind. He still had a beautiful lilt. She recognized the tune but could not place the lyrics. She supposed the lyrics did not matter anyway, when a song was only hummed.

She softened her step. She drew lighter breaths. She touched the arch that led to the kitchen before letting herself ease around it, wanting to observe the den she was about to enter before making herself known.

She felt her grip tighten on the wooden beam under her fingers.

He was alone.

His back was to her, but the kitchen was alight with activity.

A pile of pits sat on the wooden table behind him, next to a bowl of halved cherries.

There was a pot on the stove, bubbling delicately like a percussive accompaniment to his song.

Freddy himself was standing over a smear of flour, his sleeves rolled to the elbow as he worked a pile of dough with his fingers, pressing and fluffing and folding it in ritualistic turns.

Every now and then he gave it a light slap, as if testing its willingness to accept the abuse or otherwise spring back into shape.

She wasn’t breathing anymore.

He turned to the side, streaks of flour and dough on his forearms and a bit dusting his jaw as he reached for another handful, sprinkling it over the dough and then reaching over to a white- crusted wooden spoon to stir the delicious thing bubbling in the pot.

He smiled to himself, as though what he found there pleased him, and transitioned to the coda in the song he was humming. He moved the pot to the side and doused the fire with a practiced flourish of the dampener, sending the whole affair into nothing but a puff of smoke.

When he spun around to walk toward the table, Claire was wholly unprepared to be discovered.