Paula Marshall - Dear Lady Disdain

This had the desired effect on Hal, of starting him off all over again. He had begun by defending his mistress from discourtesy, but he was now defending his own prowess. He advanced on the smiling butler with his fists raised. ‘I’ll have you know I work out at Jackson’s gym. I’ve never seen you there, and that’s a fact. Put up your dukes—or shut up.’

The only things the butler raised were his wet and soapy hands, which didn’t stop Hal. ‘Any excuse to dodge a fight,’ he sneered, and threw a punch in the butler’s direction.

For a moment Stacy was frozen by the unlikely revelation that Hal was not only her loyal servant, but also saw himself as her champion. At all costs she must not allow him to fight with the butler. Desperately she threw herself between the two men to expostulate with them, to do anything which might stop the coming brawl.

All she stopped was Hal’s fist. By good fortune she was struck only a glancing blow, but it was enough for her to see stars before she sat down, ignominiously and humiliatingly, on the kitchen floor. Through her swirling senses she heard Hal’s cry of distress. ‘Oh, mistress, God forgive me.’

She also heard the butler cursing under his breath, ‘Oh, hell and damnation, what next?’ as he put his soapy hands under her armpits and hauled her to her feet again.

Oh, God, what next, indeed? Would this dreadful evening never end? All that Stacy wanted was to be in her own comfortable bed, Polly in attendance, kind Louisa well and on her feet again, somewhere near by in loving attendance.

But what she got was something else entirely. The kitchen door opposite her opened abruptly to reveal to her dazed eyes a tall woman with a thin, hard face, decently dressed in black. The housekeeper presumably.

The woman took one comprehensive look at them all. At Stacy, white-faced and trembling. At Hal, now on his knees, agonised, begging forgiveness of her for his unintended blow. At Jeb, leaning against the wall, convulsed and chortling, ‘Oh, Matt, boy, this is your finest turn ever. Better than a play.’ At the assembled servants, both the Hall’s and Stacy’s, all either shocked or amused according to their preference, and lastly at the butler, a canvas apron round his waist, his soapy hands just releasing the now furious Stacy.

‘And what,’ the woman roared, happy to have a chance at getting back at the uncouth monster who had disrupted her easy life, and knowing that now she was under notice to leave she had nothing to lose by saucing him, ‘is the meaning of this, m’lord? And why are you wearing Cook’s apron and doing the washing-up?’

Everything, but everything, went into a weird kind of paralysis, as though time itself had stopped. For a long moment no one moved and no one spoke.

M’lord? Thought Stacy and all her party. M’lord? She must mean the butler. She can’t mean the butler, can she? Can she?

But she did.

Stacy turned to face him. M’lord. Of course, she should have known. Everything about him radiated authority—which she had mistaken for insolence. For whatever goddamned reason—and really, her internal language was growing more impossible by the minute—the coarse brute had chosen to lie to her from the first moment that he had spoken to her.

She did something which she had never expected to do, something which no lady should ever have done—but then, she told herself grimly afterwards, I am no lady, and for sure, for all his title, he is no gentleman! She slapped him across the face with all her strength.

Her blow broke the paralysis which had afflicted them all. Hubbub ensued. Hal rose slowly to his feet, staring at this unlikely lordship. Jeb gave a whistling roar into the silence which followed Stacy’s blow, and then began to clap his hands slowly. ‘Well struck, madam,’ he called to her from his post by the wall.

For his part Matt Falconer held his flaming cheek, and slowly admitted to himself that he should never have allowed his hot temper, long reined in during his years in the United States, to take him over now that he was back in England again and incite him to taunt this headstrong shrew—however much she had deserved it. And now least said, soonest mended. He picked up a towel and began to dry his hands.

He didn’t immediately address Stacy but said, almost mildly, to the triumphant woman who was defying him, ‘I told you not to call me m’lord, and I meant it. I am Matt, Mr Matt, or Mr Falconer to you.’

Stacy, overwhelmed by her own unladylike behaviour, conscious only of poor, sick Louisa’s reproachful stare, murmured hollowly to him, ‘She called you m’lord. Was that another lie in this house of liars, which you, the biggest liar of them all, are supremely fit to head?’

Matt held on to his temper. A hard feat, since he could see that the cross-grained bitch in front of him now had the upper hand, the moral hand, and would use it to provoke him further. She had a tongue like a striking adder, and no mistake.

‘Strictly speaking, madam…’

Stacy, lost to everything, resembling, had she but known it, her father in one of his rare and formidable tempers, raged at him. ‘You can speak strictly, then? I had thought insolence was more your line. But pray continue,’ she added, poisonously sweet, as she saw him open his mouth. To explain presumably. But what explanation could mend this?

She no longer wanted her bed. She wanted to see m’lord whoever-he-was grovelling before her. Nothing less would do.

Matt decided not to bandy words with her. They had an audience, fascinated by the sight of their masters engaged in a ding-dong, knock-down quarrel in front of them, instead of it taking place decently in private. What a rare treat! And all the time in the world to enjoy it, since it was plain that they were all, except possibly the housekeeper, trapped in the kitchens for the night.

‘Strictly speaking,’ he said between his splendid teeth, his eyes still defying her whatever his tongue might say, ‘I am Matthew Falconer, Lord Radley—Earl Falconer’s heir. I prefer, however, to be known as Matt Falconer.’

‘Oh, I thought your preference was to be known as the butler,’ returned Stacy nastily, green eyes flashing, while inwardly she said to herself, Matt Falconer—now wasn’t he involved in some massive scandal when I was barely out of childhood? And no wonder, carrying on as he does.

‘Something wrong with butlers, is there?’ gritted Matt, his own eyes shooting fire as he immediately forgot the resolution which he had just made, that he would be unfailingly polite to this icy hellcat—could hellcats be icy?—and giving her what his old nurse had used to call ‘what for’ again. ‘Unconsidered serfs, are they? I had sooner be a good butler than a bad nobleman any day.’

‘And, of course, being who you are,’ Stacy shot back, all discretion, all decency gone, now completely the true descendant of the rampantly outrageous pedlar who had made the Blanchard fortune, ‘you know all about bad noblemen, I’m sure!’

Jeb, who was busy counting the score for each side as though he were the referee at a boxing-match, saw that red rage was overcoming his employer. He had experienced it rarely, but he knew the signs. And for once Mad Matt had met his match in a woman whose icy deadliness equalled his fiery temperament.

How he mastered himself Matt never knew. Each fresh insult she offered him had him wishing that he could teach her a lesson, put her across his knee…Added to his rage was his sudden shocked horror at the knowledge that, of all dreadful things, he was becoming sexually roused.

What he really wanted to do was to take her in his arms, bear her to the floor and show her who was master…