Deanna Raybourn - Silent on the Moor

Lady Allenby nodded toward the enormous pie. “Have you enough there, Mr. Valerius? There is plenty, and you have only to let Ailith know if you would like something more. I am afraid we must serve ourselves,” she finished. As we had settled into our meal, Mrs. Butters had filled plates for herself and the maids, then retired to her room to entertain them.

I remarked upon it, and Lady Allenby smiled apologetically. “An unconventional arrangement, but it was the most suitable we could devise under the circumstances. When we dine alone, we do not trouble if Mrs. Butters joins us at table, but of course it would not do to have the maids. One doesn’t like to dine with staff,” she finished on a deliberately cheerful note.

“No, one doesn’t,” Hilda echoed, throwing a meaningful look at Godwin.

He put his head back and roared with laughter. “Shall I take my plate and eat in the sheepfold then?”

Lady Allenby’s face had gone quite white and pinched. “Hilda! Godwin! That is enough. What will our guests think of you—” She broke off then, doubtless remembering that she was no longer mistress of Grimsgrave. I felt a surge of pity for her. The pattern of her life would have been settled and predictable before her family’s fortunes had fallen so dramatically. The question of where to put the servants for meals would never have arisen during the simpler times of her youth.

I turned to Ailith. “Tell me, Miss Allenby, what do you do for amusement?”

She patted her lips with a napkin and replied, but I was not listening. For some unaccountable reason I felt a desperate urge to keep the conversation civil, and I asked dozens of questions, most of Ailith and Godwin, determined to keep attention away from the prickly Hilda.

Ailith Allenby, I noticed, ate little, and what she did eat was consumed in tiny, delicate bites, and chewed very slowly. In contrast, Godwin filled his plate three times, eating heartily and laughing loudly. He was no gentleman, but he was merry and friendly, and if he was overly-familiar, it was an easy fault to forgive. The pale atheling looks that were so striking in the elder Allenby ladies had darkened to a gilded sort of masculinity in him. His hands, broad and thickly callused, were surprisingly graceful, and his features, although not as finely-limned as Ailith’s, were every bit as arresting.

More than once I found my eyes drifting to his over the meal, and more than once he shot me a mischievous wink when he thought no one else was paying attention. He put me a little in mind of Lucian Snow, the curate at the parish church at my father’s country estate at Bellmont Abbey in Blessingstoke. I could only hope Godwin Allenby made a better end than Mr. Snow, I thought with a shudder.

After the midday meal, the gentlemen left again—Godwin to attend to his sheep while Valerius struck out to explore the moor. Hilda scurried away as soon as the last spoonful of pudding had been swallowed, and the other Allenby ladies retired to their rooms. “A little repose just after dinner is the best thing for digestion,” Lady Allenby said, although I suspected she needed the rest more for her twisted joints than as an aid to digestion. She had eaten almost as much as Godwin, and I marvelled at her still-slender figure. Perhaps Rosalie’s mint tonic had been just the thing to spur her appetite.

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