Chapter 3 - The Rumor Mill
The gossip didn't start in the drawing room. It started in the pantry over a bowl of cold mutton stew.
By Thursday, the entire lower floor of the mansion knew that Mr. Nathan had refused his mother’s broth and asked for the maid from West Virginia to bring him his dry toast.
"Three kids," Cook said, slamming a heavy iron skillet onto the gas ring so hard the copper pots above her head rattled like small bells. "Twenty-five years old and three kids by three different men back in the hills. My sister’s cousin lives near Bluefield. She says everyone down there knows about the Miller girl."
"I heard the eldest is six," said James, the second footman, leaning against the butcher’s block while he polished a pair of silver sugar tongs. "Born when she was nineteen. No father on the paper. Then another one two years later. And the little girl—what’s her name? Lily?"
"Lily," Cook spat, shaking her head. "A disgraced name for a disgraced girl. Working here with her head down like she’s a saint in an apron, while her mother’s raising three bastards on a gravel road in Raleigh County with the money Mr. Nathan pays her to dust the moldings."
I stood behind the screen door of the scullery, holding two brass candlestick holders and a tin of rouge powder.
My heart was beating with a slow, heavy rhythm, like a wooden drum being struck deep underground.
I could have walked through the door.
I could have stood beside the butcher’s block, looked Cook in her fat, red-cheeked face, and told her that Johnny was nine, not six. I could have told her that Paul’s middle name was Arthur, after my father, who died in the upper pocket of the upper coal seam when I was twelve years old. I could have told her that Lily had a small brown mole behind her left ear that smelled like baby powder whenever she fell asleep in her high chair.
I could have told them that none of them had ever seen a coal fire burn through a five-room frame house in three minutes while the snow was four feet deep on the road.
I didn't move.
I adjusted the tin of rouge powder in my apron pocket, stepped back from the screen door, and walked down the hall toward the silver vault.
"Emily."
Nathan was standing at the end of the corridor, near the display case where his grandfather’s hunting rifles were kept behind leaded glass.
He wasn't wearing his coat today. He had on a dark blue wool sweater, the collar of a white shirt peeking out at his throat, his dark hair brushed back. He looked stronger than he had on Tuesday, but his eyes were still dark, sunken into the bone structure of his face like two gray stones.
"Mr. Carter," I said, stopping ten feet away and dipping my shoulder into a low half-curtsy.
"Stop doing that," he said.
I blinked. "Sir?"
"Stop dipping your shoulder like I’m a bishop," he said, walking toward me. His steps were quiet on the runner carpet. "My name is Nathan. You’ve said it twice in two weeks. I know you know how it sounds."
"It isn't proper, sir."
"Proper?" He stopped three feet away. He was tall—at least six foot two—and even with his thin frame, he filled the narrow corridor so completely I could smell the sharp, clean soap he used, a cold cedar scent that had nothing to do with the heavy perfumes of his mother’s guests. "My mother spent forty-five minutes at breakfast telling me that you have three children in West Virginia."
My fingers tightened around the brass candlesticks until the metal bit into my palm.
"She has good sources, sir," I whispered.
"She has loud sources," Nathan corrected softly. "She has the house manager, who listens at doors, and she has the local social register, which consists of forty old women who haven't had a new thought since nineteen-eighty-two."
He leaned his shoulder against the wood casing of the rifle cabinet.
"Are they yours?" he asked.
The silence between us was so thin I could hear the wind whistling through the iron grate of the wine cellar four floors below.
"Their names are Johnny, Paul, and Lily," I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the silver button of his sweater.
"That wasn't what I asked."
"That is all I have ever told anyone in this house, sir."
Nathan looked at me for a long time. He looked at the high collar of my dress, at the small, neat knot of hair at the base of my neck, at the way I stood—not slouching, not cowering, but holding my weight on my heels like a person who was waiting for a heavy blow to fall and had already decided not to move when it hit.
"They think you’re ashamed," he said quietly.
"I am not ashamed of anything in Raleigh County," I said, my voice dropping into a deep, flat tone that made his eyebrows lift slightly.
"Good," he said.
He reached out, took one of the brass candlesticks from my hand, and turned it over in his own palm, his thumb tracing the scrollwork around the base.
"Because my mother has invited twelve people to dinner on Saturday," he said softly. "The Van Dorns. The Hendersons. Her sister from Boston. She wants to demonstrate to the board that I am fully recovered and capable of taking back the chair at the investment house on Monday morning."
"I know, sir," I replied. "Mrs. Gable told us we are using the gold-rimmed plates."
"I don't want you in the scullery on Saturday, Emily," he said, looking down into my eyes.
"Sir?"
"I want you serving the head of the table," he said. "I want you standing right beside my chair."
"Your mother will have me dismissed before the soup course is finished," I said, a small, cold spark of reality breaking through my discipline.
"My mother doesn't own the house," Nathan said, setting the brass candlestick back into my hand, his fingers lingering against mine for two seconds longer than necessary. "And she doesn't own me."
He turned and walked back toward the main library, his long legs moving with a steady, deliberate power that hadn't been there three days ago.
May you like
I stood alone in the dark corridor, holding the two candlesticks against my apron.
Where his fingers had touched my hand, the skin felt warm—a strange, sharp heat that seemed to travel straight up my sleeve, past the heavy cotton wrap around my chest, and settle right against the cold scar tissue over my heart.
