Birdie and the Beastly Duke by Sofi Laporte

Chapter 10

“Your Grace, we’re being invaded!” Higgins, who never rushed, ran, or spoke loudly, managed to do all three, startling Gabriel so that he dropped the figure he was holding in his hand.

“Whatever is the matter, Higgins?” his master asked.

“Women!” The man leaned a hand against the wall as he gasped. “The castle is invaded by women.”

Higgins must be delusional. Maybe it had been too much for him to take care of the girl, but how one girl could multiply into many was beyond him. Gabriel watched with concern as Higgins wheezed and gasped for breath.

“You shouldn’t be running. Not even during an invasion.” Gabriel picked up the figure he’d been painting and set it down on his table.

Higgins gestured with his hand to the door. “I’ve never experienced anything like it. Come and see for yourself.”

Gabriel crept stealthily down the corridor as if approaching an unsuspecting enemy.

Indeed, there were noises in the main hall that sounded suspiciously like a gaggle of women. Was his wife holding a tea party?

He stopped on the top stairs, went down to his knees, from there lay on his stomach and peeked between the wooden bars of the baluster. It was in the same manner he’d lain in the ridge near Hougoumont and observed Napoleon’s troops approach. From this point, he could gather intelligence without being seen.

Except these weren’t Napoleon’s troops. It was something worse. They were women, indeed.

One of them was his wife. She was eagerly talking, gesticulating with her hands as she appeared to be directions to a group of women who held mops, buckets and brooms. Then they spread in all directions to their assigned places.

Heaven help him.

They were going to clean the place!

Higgins was entirely right. It was an invasion of the grossest sort.

He felt oddly helpless. She really was determined to settle down here, was she? She was going to clean up this place. Other than firmly locking his door and staying out of sight, there was nothing he could do about it unless he revealed himself.

Face a group of women?

He broke out in a sweat.

He’d rather face Boney’s firing squad.

He crept back to his room, feeling defeated.

It had been a satisfying day.

For the first time in a fortnight, Birdie finally had her bath.

She also had a maid, Ally, who helped her. She whispered when she talked, so Birdiehad to tell her to speak up several times. Ally was a shy girl who’d worked previously as a maid in a manor house near Edinburgh. When the lady of the house passed away, she was dismissed from her post, and she had travelled north to live with her sister and her family. She worked quietly, flitting from room to room like a shadow. She pressed, folded, and put away Birdie’s clothes, and mended tears and holes in her stockings. She also tamed Birdie’s unruly hair, deftly tying it into a bun that did not look too severe, teasing out some locks that stayed in shape.

Birdie now had a pretty new dress that Eilidh, with her nimble fingers, had quickly produced. Eilidh had spoken the truth when she’d said she knew how to sew. Birdie’s wardrobe was full of old dresses that were long out of fashion. Eilidh promised she would take them one by one and adjust them for her. That woman could sew a ball gown out of the dusty curtains without blinking if she told her to.

Birdie stroked the dark blue velvet material of her new dress. It was warm, and it matched the plaid shawl. She thought it looked good on her.

The new cook, Mrs Gowan, made traditional Scottish food. For supper tonight they’d have Cullen Skink, she’d announced. It turned out to be a creamy soup with smoked haddock, potatoes, onions, served with toasted bread. Birdie had never eaten anything so divine. Well, after her diet of porridge and sausage, anything would taste divine.

The duke, however, hadn’t come down for supper. He’d been notoriously absent the entire day. Birdie wondered what he was doing.

Later,she wandered into a room that must’ve been a study. It had mahogany shelves crammed with books. An oak writing table stood in the middle of the room. She assumed it was the old duke’s study, long since abandoned.

Birdie went to the table and opened the drawers. They were stuffed with papers, books, bills.

Sitting in the heavy leather chair, she emptied the drawers.

At the bottom were two leather books.

Ledgers. She flipped one open and studied the numbers. “Whoever did the accounting here must have had a horrid sense of numbers,” she said as she shook her head. Then she grabbed a quill and calculated.

After two hours, she rubbed her eyes. The candles were burning low. Was there any point in trying to decipher the ledgers further? She could make neither head nor tail of it. Either someone had badly tampered with the numbers, or she was simply too tired to calculate.

She tucked the ledgers under her arm and wandered into the drawing room, which looked quite comfortable now that the holland covers had been removed. The room had been cleaned, the carpets beaten, and the curtains and windows washed. It was a wood-panelled room with a threadbare old sofa and a pianoforte. She had taken little notice of the instrument before but now had a desire to try it out.

Birdie sat down on the stool and pressed a key. The piano was badly out of tune.

Regardless, she played a simple Mozart melody that she’d been taught at the seminary. Birdie was an indifferent player. She would never be as accomplished as her friend Arabella, who played piano to an almost professional level. She was out of practice and did not have the music sheets to help her along.

Sensing a presence behind her, she paused, her hands hovering above the keys.

“That was atrocious,” a voice behind her said.

She whirled around. Gabriel was leaning against the doorway, his arms crossed. A lock of black hair fell across his face, shadowing his injured side. He was in shirtsleeves, his shirt tucked in one side of his breeches and hanging loose on the other. He looked handsome, dangerous, wild.

Birdie’s pulse increased, and suddenly the room seemed too small.

“I thought I was doing rather well. Not a single mistake.” She hammered down on the keys again.

Gabriel winced.

“It’s the piano. It’s out of tune,” Birdie explained as played another chord.

“You’re hacking onto the keys with brute force. You have to play with more feeling.”

“Oh?” She hammered down once more. “I think it sounds rather good.”

Gabriel hovered by the doorway, hesitating as if he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to enter or leave. Birdie wondered what had brought him out of his den. Was it really the atrociousness of her playing?

“I found something in the desk's drawer.” Birdie got up. She picked up the ledgers and handed them to him. “You should look at them. There is something deeply wrong with those numbers, but I can’t figure out what it is.”

He didn’t take them.

“Don’t you want to have a look at them?”

“It is no concern of mine.”

Birdie almost dropped the books. “What! This is about your estate! Your lands, your tenants, your income. Normally, dukes have a steward who takes care of it. But since you aren’t possessed of even the most basic of serving staff, maybe it is to be expected that you do not have a steward, either.”

He tucked his hands under his armpits. “You brought in all those women today. What did you think you were doing?”

She thought that was obvious. Lifting a hand, she waved it about as if to show him the room in all its glory. “They were cleaning the castle. It was well overdue. Don’t you like what they did today? This castle is actually not that bad when you’ve cleared away all the muck and grime.”

“I preferred it the way it was before.”

Birdie stared at him. “I am about to throw the candlestick at you,” she declared, reaching for the candlestick.

Gabriel ducked immediately. He looked so ridiculously alarmed that an involuntary laugh escaped her, which took the gravity out of the situation.

“I take it you paid them from the pouch I gave you,” her husband asked.

Birdie thought of how that pouch was now considerably lighter than it was before. She shrugged.

He scowled. “The money was meant to be for you, not for paying servants.”

Birdie folded her arms. “Someone has to pay the servants.”

“How often do I have to say it: I don’t need anyone other than Higgins.” Gabriel jutted out his chin like a spoilt child.

Dear me. The man was dumb, deaf, or inordinately stubborn. But then, so was she. Well, just stubborn. She was definitely not dumb, and certainly not deaf. She peeked at the man before her. Why did she have the impression he was sulking? Could he seriously be miffed because she told someone to mop the floor?

“We also have a cook now who is capable of cooking more than porridge,” she chattered on. “Higgins will no longer have to spend his valuable time in the kitchen but will be able to devote himself to more important things. Where is he anyhow?”

“He left. He leaves every night.”

“What? Where to?”

Gabriel shrugged. “He has a room in one of the outer houses.”

“You are saying that he doesn’t sleep in the castle?”

“It would seem so.”

“But why?”

“It appears he is afraid of ghosts. Along with the rest of them.”

Birdie digested his words. The women had left at dusk. As far as she knew, not because they were afraid of ghosts, but because they needed to be home before the men returned from work. That was a slightly different matter. Tomorrow morning, they would return.

“Are you saying that all this time, you spent your nights all alone in the castle?” Birdie could hardly believe it.

Gabriel shrugged and turned to go. She followed him, breathless.

“Wait. Can you just tell me one thing?”

He stopped in his tracks.

“Just so I understand. Why do you want to live in the midst of,”––she waved her hand––“ruin, decay and dirt?” She refused to believe he enjoyed it. “Why not make it a home?”

“This isn’t my home. It never will be.” He turned around suddenly, looking straight into her eyes. His were a deep, dark chocolate brown. And deeply sad. “And it will never be your home, either.”

He stopped in front of a massive door that led up the tower stairs. He opened it with a key.

“Where are you going?” Birdie eyed the heavy door, remembering the first night in the castle when she’d fled in fright after having seen him for the first time. Her cheeks heated in embarrassment.

“To my room. Alone,” Gabriel said without turning around and slammed the door in her face. She heard his footsteps on the stone stairs winding up the tower.

Birdie sighed and left, knowing that, except for her husband in the tower, she was all alone in the castle.

That nightshe heard it again. The scratching and scraping. The footsteps. She shivered in her bed, wrapped herself even more tightly in her blanket and told herself there was no such thing as ghosts. It was Gabriel, walking up and down in his room. Maybe he couldn’t sleep, either. Or perhaps Higgins doing whatever butlers usually did. But Higgins wasn’t in the castle. And it was nearly midnight.

At around half past midnight, she sat up.

“Roberta Talbot, you are a goose.” She pulled on a second dress, thick stockings and a coat. Taking a candle and a lantern, she went on a ghost hunt.