Barbara Metzger Read Online Free

of assistance?"
    "It's your housekeeper I've come to ask for help, actually. I was hoping she might be of temporary aid, until I can make other arrangements, of course. Your Mrs., uh—Kane, is it?—seemed the likeliest, nearest source of advice in this quandary."
    "Yes, Mrs. Kane is quite the most competent female and an excellent mother. I am sure she will be happy to render what service she can.” He coughed again. “Mason, why don't you show his lordship to Mrs. Kane's sitting room?” His nose twitched. “Pardon me if I do not invite you gentlemen to share my breakfast parlor."
    Mason turned his back and stalked out of the entry, down the central corridor, his rigid spine bespeaking silent reproof. Lesley shrugged and, with another bow toward his host, gathered up the straw basket and followed. Mason showed them into a neat parlor at the rear of the house, jerked his head in barest obeisance, and left.
    They waited, and waited. “The gent didn't tell that Mason fellow to fetch the woman, only to show us here,” Byrd said, unnecessarily, in Lesley's opinion.
    The viscount had been pacing the tiny room, checking his watch against the plain wooden clock on the mantel. Other than the timepiece, the shelf was bare except for a small vase of flowers and a miniature of a man in uniform. He felt like an intruder. “I know that, you clunch. And the cur must have known she'd be about her duties somewhere. We'll just have to find her."
    "Like as not, they know where she is—in the kitchen. Told you we should of used the service entrance."
    Lesley gritted his teeth and followed another uppity servant—this one his own—down another well-lighted, well-maintained corridor.
    * * * *
    Mrs. Carissa Kane was indeed in the kitchen, fixing Sir Gilliam's breakfast plate just the way he liked it: two eggs, two slices of toast, two rashers of bacon. He wouldn't eat more; she wouldn't offer him less. Carissa also made sure her employer's favorite jam was on the tray, and some fresh butter, with a rose stamped into each pat.
    While she waited for the bell from Mason to indicate that Sir Gilliam was seated, with his coffee and his newspaper, Mrs. Kane arranged some tulips from the front border garden into a jasperware vase. She kept glancing over to the corner of the kitchen, where her daughter, Philippa, was eating her porridge. The four-year-old sat with her bare feet tucked under her stool, carefully out of the way of Cook, who was kneading dough for the tea cakes, and Bonnie, the maid, who was cleaning the already spotless kitchen.
    "If you are very good this morning, Pippa,” Mrs. Kane told the brown-haired child, “perhaps Cook will make an extra raspberry tart. Should you like that?"
    The little girl nodded solemnly and kept spooning up her breakfast.
    Cook smiled and said, “Our Pippa is always an angel, isn't that the Lord's own—Oh, my stars and Scriptures!” She dropped the bowl she was holding with a clatter, the spoon falling to the floor. Bonnie shrieked and raised her apron over her head. Pippa kept eating her porridge.
    Frowning, Carissa looked toward the doorway, where everyone's eyes seemed to be fixed, and she almost dropped the expensive vase. “Good heavens,” she whispered. There in the entry of her orderly kitchen, a place where even Mason seldom intruded, stood two of the most disreputable characters she could imagine. Carissa couldn't decide if she ought to grab up her daughter and run, or reach for Cook's meat cleaver to defend them all. What such brigands were doing invading Sir Gilliam's quiet kitchen she could not imagine, but there they were, bigger than life.
    The younger, shorter of the men, the one wearing the remains of a fashionable ensemble, with the remains of his breakfast, bowed slightly and stepped farther into the room. “Mrs. Kane?"
    Now Carissa recognized the callers—and they were still her worst nightmares, both of them, the pirate and the profligate peer. The gentleman, and she used