Pam Rosenthal - The Slightest Provocation

A challenging week lay ahead of him. Meet with Sidmouth, finally find out what the letter of introduction was worth. Apply himself and his abilities, one way or another, in the service of the public order. Duty, discipline…

Surely tonight he could allow himself a few small private pleasures.

“That’s right, Ned. You can rest your head on the desk.”

Breeches around her ankles. Her legs parted, toes barely touching the floor. He’d raised the ragged shirt, pulled down the boy’s drawers she wore beneath the breeches.

Indecent.

Hands on himself now, the tightening now, the pulling, the… ah, the release. From desire (at least for the moment), from responsibility, from duty and from his own ambitions as well.

And from the pull of memories so carefully suppressed for so long, and now, it seemed, so constantly, confusingly, and overwhelmingly present.

The coaching inn yard was noisy, crowded, and quite fun this morning, Peggy Weightman thought. Say what you would (and Peggy felt herself eminently qualified to comment, what with all the places she and Lady Christopher had been), London was still the center of the civilized world: so many people to watch, all their clattering comings and goings. For herself, Peggy didn’t mind in the slightest about the delay with the post chaise. In her line of work, there was always something that wanted fixing or mending.

But Lady Christopher was impatient to be gone, so Mr. Morrice had got her a seat in the stagecoach, with a place for Peggy on top. It would be a pretty day, dozing in the sunlight on the way to familiar places; they’d be reaching home late tonight. Peggy sipped the beer the waiter had brought her. Considerate of Lady Christopher to send him from the bar; she would have become quite parched out here, keeping an eye on their mountain of luggage.

Perhaps it was the beer that was making her sleepy-not forgetting that she hadn’t had a good night’s rest her entire last week in France.

Ah, well. There were better things than a good night’s rest.

Too soon to worry about what else the sleepiness might betoken. Nor fret about whether Tom would mind if such a thing did come to pass. Her smile grew warmer, Tom being such a cozy name for such a big man. They’d been kissing in the pantry of Lady Rowen’s apartments in Paris when she’d first called him it. He’d laughed, but she’d seen well enough that he liked it. And he would be coming down to the country soon enough, for the marchioness was already wanting to get back to Rowen. Peggy trusted him. Well, she had to, didn’t she?

She wouldn’t worry about anything, except to wish now that she hadn’t bought all those pretty trifles in France; better to give her people at home the coins directly. Still, it would be fun to tell about her travels. Her cousins (not including Cathy, the schoolmistress) would admire how well she looked in the dresses Lady Christopher had passed down to her, and all the girls would want to hear about…

Everybody else called him Thomas. It suited how grave he looked; Lady Christopher had raised her eyebrows when Peggy slipped into using the little private name for him. Surprising the lady would have noticed, her clearly having troubles with her gentleman, medicine bottle still uncorked on the table, room reeking of brandy. It had been all anybody could do to scrub the smell off her and get her dressed.

But that was how she was. Surprising, inconsistent-one minute distracted or buried in her books, and the next quite sharp and noticing more than you wanted her to.

And when Peggy had her own little moment of sadness (waving from the deck while the packet boat pulled away and Tom’s head and shoulders faded from view), Lady Christopher had turned and given Peggy her own handkerchief. Silent-like. Tactful, you might say.

Peggy found it interesting to be in service-even if Tom would protest that a footman weren’t more than a large monkey, tricked out in velvet and trained to fetch and carry. And heaven only knew how Lady Christopher would manage without Peggy keeping her neat and pinned together.

The Penleys had been known as fair employers, and so were their daughters: Lady Christopher, Mrs. Grandin, and Mrs. MacNeill in Glasgow. A pity, people’d said last year, how that steward was cheating Mrs. Grandin, and so obvious about it too. And you could still hear the old story, repeated round a cottage hearth, of how Mr. Penley had saved a poacher’s life.

Must have been a shock to him, his youngest daughter running off with one of the Stansell boys. People’d thought Lord Kit had got her in trouble, but that part wasn’t true (proving that it didn’t always have to be, if a person was lucky). Peggy had been quite young at the time, but even a little girl could find it exciting, a bit mysterious, all the talk about whether he really were the marquess’s son-and if not, who was his dad anyway?

The more serious workingmen at Grefford, who read the pamphlets and argued over the newspapers and went to the night meetings, would quell such gossip-and so would Peggy’s cousin Cathy.

“Don’t you have better things to chatter about,” Cathy’d say, “than the gentry and what they do in their beds? Aren’t life’s real problems enough for you?”

But real-life problems were dull and intractable, especially these hard days. Peggy didn’t see why you shouldn’t get a little amusement from people whose lives remained cozy and comfortable no matter how bad the harvest, who wore fine clothes and rode in carriages even after a marriage’s scandalous separation or a night spent throwing things at each other.

Why not get some entertainment from the gentry and especially the aristocrats, she’d asked Cathy; don’t they owe us that much anyway? And Cathy, she could see, didn’t have a good answer, except to sniff that she was sure she’d done right getting Peggy a job as a rich lady’s maid. Which she hadn’t meant as a compliment, even if it were Mrs. Penley who’d paid to educate her as a schoolmistress.

But Cathy hadn’t seen Paris or Constantinople or the Alps or antiquities like Peggy had. Travel made you wise, and that was a fact.

I’ve seen the world, Peggy repeated to herself. I have a fine, tall man who loves me and is surely coming back for me.

It was a pretty day, and she was wearing a neat drab poplin that Lady Christopher had grown tired of. Smiling up at the waiter who’d come for her glass, she could feel how well the skirt hung since she’d taken a needle to it. She could even feel a bit sorry for her employer, who appeared in rather a state of disconsolation, like there were someone in the crowd she’d hoped to see.

And if men want to flirt with me, Peggy thought (for she’d caught a glimpse of a brown coat with bright buttons moving in her direction), I’m sure it isn’t my fault.

A decent-looking man, though she herself didn’t care for whiskers. Nearly as tall as Tom, if a bit on the corpulent side. Just off the night mail from Derby, ruddy-faced, like he’d gotten a good sleep on the journey. He had a bold expression on him, the sort of man you’d say could sell coals to Newcastle.

Wouldn’t hurt just to talk. If he wanted more than talk, he could just take himself off to Soho for it.

Though at the end of ten or so minutes, when his friends came for him, he left in a great hubbub of self-importance, which she didn’t like, nor that he hadn’t presented her to them, even after he’d seemed so interested in what she’d had to say about her travels and the people back home at Grefford.