She Fed the Workhouse Children in Secret for Three Winters, Then an Earl Chose Her Over Every Lad...
Chapter 5
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"And cold.""Also aware.""I will have the gig brought round.""That is not necessary.""I know it is not necessary," he said. "I am doing it anyway. Please wait."She waited, not because she was told to, but because refusing would have been rude in a way that drew more attention to the basket, and drawing attention to the basket was the last thing she wanted.The gig came round. He handed her up into it himself, which was not required, and then stood in the drive and said in a conversational tone that suggested he had been choosing his words: "Stonemill is four streets past the baker's if the driver takes the north lane."She looked at him from the seat."The north lane is quicker at this hour," he said. "Fewer carts."And that was all. He stepped back. The gig moved forward.She sat in the cold all the way to the baker's and then all the way to the workhouse, and she thought about the Earl of Dunross the whole time, which was not a comfortable thing to think about, and was made considerably less comfortable by the fact that he had known where she was going and had said nothing about it except to make the getting there easier. A man who knew a secret and made the keeping of it more convenient was either a man of extraordinary discretion or a man who wanted something she had not yet understood. She had met enough of the second kind to be cautious about which category she was placing him in.She found out which category he was in on a Friday evening in February.She had known the shortfall was coming. She had run the arithmetic six different ways, and it came out the same six times, which was the particular mathematics of not quite enough. The parish board had cut the workhouse allowance after Christmas.There was a boy at Stonemill named Pip. Not his real name, but the only one anyone had ever called him: a thin, serious boy of seven who had arrived at the workhouse gate the previous autumn with nothing but a cough and a scrap of paper with the word Pip written on it in a childish hand. And Pip had been sick since January, and the apothecary required payment before he would come again.She was sitting in the library at Dunross Park on that Friday evening, having stayed after the household had mostly gone to their suppers, working through the last section of the 1858 records, when she heard footsteps in the passage, and the Earl came in.