Wicked Godmother Read Online Free Page B

fed.
    Rain trickled down the windowpanes as Jenny and Alice dusted and polished. ‘It is cold in here,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘I shall fetch Joseph to make up the fire and wind the clocks. You know Mr Palmer expects us to be prepared to receive people at all times.’
    Soon a fire was crackling on the hearth, and the clocks were busily ticking away, bringing with their chatter and chimes a feeling of expectancy. Time had returned to Number 67 Clarges Street. All that was now needed was a tenant.
    Jonas Palmer arrived an hour early, hoping to catch them unprepared, but Rainbird was used to the agent’s ways and had made sure everyone was ready at least three hours before his expected arrival.
    ‘Where’s Alice?’ demanded Palmer, glaring with his bulging eyes at Jenny, who was setting the tea tray on a table in the front parlour.
    ‘Alice is out on an errand,’ said Rainbird. The butler did not like the way the agent always leered at the beautiful Alice and undressed her with his eyes, and so he had told the housemaid to stay belowstairs. Jenny left the room, and Rainbird looked expectantly at the agent.
    ‘Do well for yourself, you lot,’ said Palmer grumpily, stretching his thick legs out towards the fire and glancing around the well-kept parlour. Rainbird waited patiently. It was useless to argue with Palmer.
    Palmer slurped his tea noisily. It was amazing, reflected Rainbird, how the agent could manage to drink a cup of tea with the spoon still sticking in it and not jab himself in the eye.
    ‘I spoke to his grace t’other day,’ said Palmer, ‘and he said to me, he says, them servants at Sixty-seven are too highly paid.’
    Rainbird looked at Palmer, his grey eyes suddenly sharp with suspicion. ‘Does the Duke of Pelham actually know what we are being paid?’
    ‘’Course he does. Don’t I take the books to him regular?’
    ‘And how was it in the Peninsula?’ asked Rainbird sweetly. ‘Hot?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘The Duke of Pelham has been in Portugal since last summer, so if you were speaking to him, I assume you plodded over the high mountains in order to achieve that end.’
    ‘Don’t take that hoity-toity tone with me,’ growled Palmer, turning red. ‘You’re nothing but a womanizer who wouldn’t have no pay at all if it weren’t for me.’
    Rainbird had been dismissed from Lord Trumpington’s household for having been found between the sheets with a very naked Lady Trumpington. The fact that my lady had practically dragged him into bed was not taken into account. Rainbird was dismissed in disgrace and, had it not been for Palmer, would have found it very hard to get another post, as Lord Trumpington had called him a mad rapist to anyone who would listen.
    Servants were always wrong. It was the custom for a man of society to take his footman along when he dined from home. The footman’s job was to pick his master up from under the table at the end of the meal and manage to get him home without occasioning any Methodist remarks about drunkenness. But should the master behave so badly that his far-gone inebriated state was impossible to conceal, as in the case of a certain lord who insisted on performing
entrechats
in the middle of the dining table, then it was the footman who was accused of drunkenness and dismissed.
    Rainbird remained silent. He felt sure if he managed to wait quietly long enough then the agent would get around to talking about the real purpose of his visit.
    And so it was. After trying unsuccessfully to bait Rainbird, Palmer heaved a disappointed sigh and said, ‘A tenant is arriving next month. Parcel of women, by the looks of it. Saw the lawyer concerned. Seems this knight, Sir Benjamin Hayner, died and left his two daughters in the care of a twenty-five-year-old miss called Metcalf. This Miss Metcalf will be arriving with the two girls. Again, there is going to be the question of accommodation for their lady’s maid.’
    Rainbird winced, and Palmer looked at him