Free To Have and to Hold by Patricia Gaffney Page A

really was no choice. "Yes, my lord," she answered, in a voice that started out steady and ended in a harsh whisper.
    He couldn't ask for more. Not yet. He made her a slight bow and left her alone.

6
     
    "Putain! Imbeciles partout!" Monsieur Judelet smacked a wooden spoon against the side of a bowl of rennet with such force, the handle split and the spoon end went flying across the kitchen.
    Rachel flinched, but held her ground. "I have said I will order the anchovies," she enunciated in her careful schoolgirl French. "They will arrive in time for you to make the fricassee of partridges, monsieur. Do not worry."
    That didn't begin to appease him. "Espece de vache," he snarled, brandishing a fork. "Idiot—get out!" Those were his three best English words; he spoke them so often, they came out virtually accent-free.
    "Remettez-vous," Rachel dared to say—Calm yourself—but she didn't turn her back on him as she sidled out of the room. So far Monsieur Judelet had thrown everything except knives at anyone who came into his kitchen with bad news—that they were out of anchovies, for example, or Lord D'Aubrey had barely touched his woodcock in caper sauce—but there was a first time for everything. Out in the hall, she could still hear him shouting, words she was thankful she couldn't understand. "Temperamental" was too mild a term to describe the hotheaded chef, but his rages never truly upset her. He was evenhandedly vile to everyone, and he was the only member of the household staff who seemed completely indifferent to her personal situation, if he even knew what it was.
    "Mrs. Wade?" She turned to see Tess coming toward her along the corridor from the servants' staircase. "Mrs. Wade, can you come an' look at the curtains in the yellow sitting room? Susan were beatin' 'em wi' a broom to get the dust out, like you said? An' all at onct they ripped something tumble an' come down on top of 'er 'ead. She were quite a object," she added, grinning at the memory. "Now we don't know what's best t' do, hang 'em up again or throw 'em away. So can you come an' have a look?"
    The housemaids were cleaning and airing all the drawing rooms, one each day when everything went well. Next week they would start on the second floor, where, besides a cavernous picture gallery, there were eleven bedrooms and an uncounted number of dressing, sitting, and powder rooms. It was a task Rachel had set for them herself, on her own initiative, after the most perfunctory consultation with his lordship. The fact that she gave instructions to the servants and they actually carried them out still seemed like a miracle to her, akin to parting the Red Sea or walking on water. She could scarcely believe she still had her job at all, much less that she was performing it fairly well. Any day, any minute, everything could blow up; one egregious blunder would be all it would take. So she moved slowly, worried about everything, and kept out of sight as much as possible. She reminded herself of some slow, plodding animal, a night creature turned out of its lair, blinking in the scary daylight, hoping no one would notice it and bash its brains in with a shovel.
    What a violent metaphor, she thought, following Tess upstairs. It would have disturbed her, except she was grateful for the fact that her mind was thinking in analogies at all. It hadn't in prison. Nothing was like anything there: everything was precisely, horribly, exactly what it was. Comparisons to anything better would have been pointless, to anything worse, impossible.
    The yellow drawing room owed its name to the dingy, brocaded wallpaper, even though it had faded to a depressing shade of beige years ago. Before today, its best feature had been the blue velvet curtains covering the wide, west-facing windows. Rachel found Susan on her knees beside the fallen fabric, contemplating it with a jaundiced eye.
    "They come down right in my hand, Mrs. Wade," she complained, blowing a damp lock of orange hair out