Page 37 of My Darling Mr. Darling

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“What?”

It was little more than a choked whisper, and the way Violet’s hand flew to her throat and tugged at the collar of her gown alarmed him—as if it were a noose about her neck. Like she sensed a trap springing closed around her, her eyes darted and she took a step back, nearly colliding with Davis, who furrowed his brow and put all of his energy behind his dour stare.

“For tea,” John clarified. “Or dinner, if you’d like to stay longer. The staff miss you. I don’t think Wentworth’s quite gotten over the fright you gave him.”

Her face changed from horrified shock to a careful blankness—so she was determined to keep up the fiction that she had no idea who had broken into his house, then. A closed topic, one they danced around, but she refused to acknowledge.

“He thought you were dead, you know,” he said. “When I said he had thought he had seen a ghost, it wasn’t an exaggeration. He truly thought you were dead. Perhaps the whole of the staff did.”

She swallowed audibly, her stormy eyes bleak. “Did youtellhim—”

“No, of course I didn’t tell him that,” he said, maybe a trifle more severely than was wise. “I had no idea he harbored such thoughts, and I disabused him of it immediately. Considering that the atmosphere of the house turned nearly jovial afterward, I’d say he’s spread the news to the rest of the staff.”

Those tense fingers, so tight at the collar of her gown, relaxed at last. “They’re all still there? You kept them on?” she asked, her brows drawing together as if she did not know what to make of that information. Perhaps what to make ofhim.

“Your former housekeeper, Mrs. Evans, was pensioned off a few years ago at her own request. But, yes, the rest of the staff remains the same.” His hand was still extended, and if she would onlytakeit…

“Why did you keep them on?”

“For what reason ought I have dismissed them?” Now the confusion was his. “They’ve resided in that house longer than I. They ran the household like a well-oiled machine, and I knew enough of them in your father’s day from what he had told me to know that they were loyal and steadfast.” Even if hehadwanted to change up the household, in those early days they hadn’t felt likehisstaff to dismiss. They had always been Townsend’s—and Violet’s. Perhaps they still were.

But they were also his, now, and he had grown rather fond of them. And they, too, had eventually accepted him into their fold. They’d grown accustomed to one another, in the way of those long acquainted. He knew Wentworth’s footsteps in the hall when the old man crept down to the kitchen for a spot of tea because his joints were aching, and he drank the warm milk Mrs. Morris sent him to bed with when she felt he could use the encouragement to sleep, because it was simply the way of things.

“Mrs. Morris is the housekeeper now,” he said. “You might recall her; she was—”

“Nancy Morris? The housemaid?” Violet’s fingers drifted from her collar to her lips, as if to press back a smile. “She used to catch me at the bottom of the stairs when I slid down the banisters.”

Somehow, John had absolutely no trouble imagining just that. “She filled the role when the former housekeeper retired, and while I had meant to find another one, she did such a fine job that I saw no sense in replacing her,” he said.

“I will come,” she blurted out, jerking when Davis gave a low, disapproving growl behind her, not unlike a particularly vicious guard dog. Her voice trembled with some strong emotion that she tried to conceal, but came out anyway in the uneven tenor of it, “I will come. But—just for tea.”

Chapter Fourteen

It had taken all of a handful of seconds upon arriving back at the townhouse for Violet to be surrounded by the staff she had known all of her young life. The moment they had entered the front door, Wentworth had stumbled back a pace, his hand laid over his heart as he cried out, “Miss Violet!”

And that cry had alerted Liza, the upstairs maid, who had told the Millie, the scullery maid—and from there the word had spread like wildfire, and John had been lost in the shuffle of servants, all but ejected from the crowd they’d made of his foyer.

He could barely see the top of her head through the cluster of maids, footmen, and other servants, but from the garbled voices overlapping in a sonorous wave of sound and from the way they pressed in around her, vying for hugs and ruffling her hair as if she were still the child they’d once known, it was all perfectly clear.

Violet was home at last, surrounded by her family. He hadn’t realized it before, but seeing the way they crowded around her, fawned over her—they had raised her, all of them. She might not have grown up with her mother—who had passed at her birth of childbed fever—but she had had more than a dozen other family members all the same, and they had all had a place in her life, in her heart.

One more thing to regret then, that he’d torn her away from the place she had loved, and the people who had loved her.

Relegated to the outer edge of the room, John peered through the crush of shoulders and jostle of limbs for a peek at her, and in a small slice of space between he saw her face for just a moment. Though she’d claimed the portrait that hung upon his wall to be a poor likeness, it wasn’t true—certainly she was older, and her face contained a maturity that she had lacked in her younger years, but that same pure joy glowed upon it now as it had then. It was only that it had been too many years since last she had had a reason to be joyful. The severity to which he had become accustomed from her had melted away like snow in full sun—and if she moved awkwardly into the affectionate embraces bestowed upon her by those who had known and loved her best, it was only that she had so long been absent that affection that she did not know how to receive it again.

Mrs. Nettles clucked something as she pinched Violet’s cheeks, and Violet ducked her head with an abashed murmur. Wentworth clapped his hands to Violet’s shoulders and said something unintelligible in a high voice, choked with emotion. Mrs. Morris stroked a hand over Violet’s hair and whispered something to her that made a dimple appear in Violet’s cheek.

And John pressed one hand over his chest, baffled by the strange ache that rose there. Though he had lived in this house nearly eight years now, he had never felt more an outsider, a usurper. True, the house had neverfeltlike his—but now he could see that it truly had always been Violet’s. Even years removed from it, still it was hers, still the staff were hers. It had all just been waiting for her to return.

In the fracas, Violet had entirely forgotten he existed. And as she relaxed into the adoration of the servants who had clearly missed her a great deal, exchanging greetings and exclamations and embraces, John slipped quietly from the room to allow her these unguarded moments—a gift she was not even aware he had given her.

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Mrs. Nettles seemed to have taken it for granted that Violet would stay for dinner, and Violet hadn’t the heart to refuse her. But the kitchen staff had become so involved in preparations for a meal that even Violet had considered to be a bit much—though Mrs. Nettles had assured her that she’d been given free rein over it—and it had quickly become apparent that Violet was only in the way.

The sharpclackof knives chopping through vegetables singed Violet’s ears, and the sting of sliced onions burned her eyes, and over the barked orders and the general flurry of such heavy activity, nobody much noticed when she backed out of the kitchen and disappeared down the hall.