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At wits’ end, Hester finally appealed to the highest power that she knew.
“You summoned me, my lady?” asked the butler from the doorway.
“Willard, my old friend, shut the door and come in.” Hester gave him a rueful smile. “I’d have come to you, but I fear my knee can’t do the steps to your quarters any longer. You’ll tell me if they begin to wear on you, won’t you?”
Willard’s mouth, normally set in a professionally blank expression, relaxed a fraction. “All else may give out, madam, but my knees remain as solid as ever.”
“Ah, what must it be like…” Hester gestured to a chair opposite her. “Please, sit down. I have a problem, and it strikes me that you’re the only one who can help me.”
Willard’s eyebrows went up infinitesimally at this, but he sat, balancing on the edge of the chair like a youngster about to give a recital.
“How long has it been?” asked Hester, slumping back in her chair. “Since I was a little girl and you fished me out of the duck pond and I clung to your neck like a limpet?”
He smiled, very briefly, which would have stunned many of the younger servants. “Do you really want me to tell you?”
“No, probably not.” She sighed. “About our current houseguest, the Lady Evangeline…”
“Ah,” said the butler, packing a world of understanding into a single syllable.
“Yes. She seems very determined to latch on to my brother.”
“If I may be so bold, madam—”
“For the purposes of this conversation, Tom, I’m Hester. You and I share a single opinion on the matter, I think?”
Tom Willard, who had been sixteen when he fished a five-year-old girl out of the duck pond, rubbed his face in his hands. When he spoke, his voice had the smallest trace of accent, the vowels a tiny bit broader, an old man remembering the tones of his youth. “I don’t trust her.”
“Neither do I. And I suspect that if she gets her feet under the table, she’s not going to make either of our lives easy.”
He nodded glumly and sat back in the chair himself. “It’s not my place to judge your brother’s paramours, but she’s much too glittering and her daughter is much too frightened.”
“Yes. Exactly.” Hester paused. “You saw that about her daughter too?”
“Terrified of being any trouble, and no idea how anything works,” said Tom shortly. “The maids gossip.”
“Does she cause any problems?”
“Mostly the sort you cause by trying not to cause any. She wanted to help them clean the room, if you can imagine, which would make everything take ten times as long. But no, she’s very biddable.”
“Mmm. Has the mother done anything?”
“Nothing that one could nail down, no. She’s on her best behavior with the Squire, I think, and trying to come across as… oh, sweet and charming and a trifle naive. No one who’s been in service for more than ten minutes buys the act.” He stared at his hands, with their long fingers and carefully trimmed nails. “When she isn’t bothering to pretend, she’s a cold one. I’d be quite interested to speak to anyone who’s served belowstairs in her house.”
Hester snorted. “I can’t even figure out where her house is. Somewhere near Little Haw, apparently, but that’s a vast amount of ground, all of it out in the country and poor as dirt, I think. Which I wouldn’t care about, if she wasn’t so cold.”
Willard nodded gloomily.
“Right. So, Tom, how are we going to stop her from marrying my brother?”
He raised both eyebrows a proper amount. “I could push her down the stairs, but that seems a trifle drastic.”
“We’ll take murder off the table for the moment,” said Hester, not without a trace of regret. “No, I am more concerned with keeping my brother free of entanglements. Do you know if they have… ah…?”
“I don’t believe so, no.”
The servants would absolutely know, so… no. “She can hardly claim to be compromised, given that she’s a widow, but it would make things a good deal more difficult.” She folded her hands on her cane. “I fear that I interrupted something yesterday. Something that might have turned into, god help us, a prelude to a proposal. We need to keep such things interrupted. Can you help?”
“That I can manage. Your brother will never be so well attended.” He paused, then added, “You know that if he actually orders us out of the room, though…”