“Well, we have had other alarming guests before,” she said cheerfully. “And they turned out just fine, didn’t they?”
Delilah and Angelique froze.
Angelique ventured, “Are you suggesting this man is alarming? And if so, what sort of alarming?Is he swinging a shillelagh in the foyer? Is our chandelier at risk?”
She felt she could afford to be somewhat glib given that Captain Hardy and Lucien Durand, Lord Bolt (Angelique’s husband, the formerly infamous illegitimate son of an awful duke), would make short work of any alarming man. Their husbands were in the smoking room at the moment, which was lovely, as they’d been so frequently away recently, traveling up the coast to supervise repair of their damaged ship and the outfitting of their new one, Delilah and Angelique were beginning to ironically feel as though they and their husbands were ships passing in the night. Their absence, too, was part of the reason the sitting room had been less spirited at night.
As for Ben Pike, if they had to guess, he was likely doubled over, catching his breath and scowling after losing a race to the door. He was also perfectly capable of thumping a man in the jaw, should the need arise.
“Dot?” Delilah pressed worriedly, when Dot didn’t reply.
Delilah reached over to right Dot’s cap, which had collapsed over her brow.
She discovered Dot’s enormous blue eyes had gone starry.
“What is a... what is a... sillylaylee?” she breathed.
“ShiLAYLee. It’s an Irish word for a versatile sort of cudgel. A cudgel is a club.” Angelique made a swinging gesture. “The sort you hit people with inorder to defend yourself. It can also be used as a walking stick.”
Angelique was a former governess who had never lost the impulse to instruct, and Dot’s mind was a vast, fertile plain (or a howling tundra, or an attic full of cobwebs and mysterious, broken toys depending upon whom one asked). Dot considered every new word a gift to be displayed proudly and liberally in her sentences for weeks thereafter, the way someone else might set out their best china plates.
“I think it’s the most beautiful word I’ve ever heard. ShILLAAAYLEEE.”
“Dot, please. Is this gentlemantrulyalarming? Is he truly a gentleman? Did you feel alarmed as you spoke to him? Do we need to get a pistol? Is he that sort of alarming?”
Delilah hung up her apron on the hook inside the door. Her husband had made sure everyone knew how to shoot, including Dot, even though she had not yet mastered the aiming part of shooting.
“Well, no. It’s more about how he looks. But he’s also a bit friendly. Polite, like.”
“Alarming and friendly could conceivably describe Mr. Delacorte,” Delilah pointed out.
As they both tacitly agreed this could also easily describe Dot, Angelique and Delilah carefully did not meet each other’s eyes.
“Well, he’s not the jolly sort of friendly, like Mr. Delacorte. But he said ‘thank you’ to me when I said I would need to go and fetch you for an interview.And men don’t usually say that to the people who open doors, do they? Especially the men who have engraved buttons on their waistcoats.”
This was both inarguable and a poignant glimpse into the world as seen through the eyes of the former worst lady’s maid in the world, current valued member of The Grand Palace on the Thames staff, even if she had dropped a tea tray yesterday because she’d seen a ladybird land on the flowers in the sitting room and wanted to wish on it before it flew away.
“And he’s taller even than Mr. Pike.”
Angelique and Delilah exchanged a swift glance. This marked the third time they’d heard Dot use her nemesis, the gray-eyed, hard-jawed, vast-shouldered Mr. Pike, as a unit of measurement. And while “He’s tall enough to reach the sconces, like Mr. Pike,” could conceivably be excused as a fair way to describe a guest, idly commenting that the fire screen was only half as wide as Mr. Pike’s shoulders (as she had done yesterday) worrisomely suggested her brain was so brimful of Mr. Pike that he would now be sloshing over onto everything she saw.
“And the gentleman’s expression is very—” Angelique and Delilah took involuntary backward lunges when Dot glowered as blackly as the little gargoyles that lined the roof of The Grand Palace on the Thames. “He stands very straight, like Captain Hardy. And he has a skinny white scar right here.” Dot touched her eyebrow. “I think I would say that he’s the sort of man youwould turn to stare at on the street because he doesn’t look at all like anybody else.”
The beloved bodies of their own husbands bore the marks of battles fought before they’d found their way to The Grand Palace on the Thames. And that ramrod posture was often a giveaway of a military man—as was (possibly) the glower and the “thank you.” Taken together, they suggested a man who had achieved some stature and wealth—hence, the engraved buttons—and had acquired manners but had not been raised a gentleman.
Dot was a savant when it came to noticing such things, and Delilah and Angelique indeed liked to be prepared before they ventured downstairs to confront someone who could either become a cherished fixture in their lives or someone who would need to be forcibly removed by the British army. The latter had happened only once before, however, and they liked to think that surely, like a lightning strike, it couldn’t happen to them again.
Still, it never hurt to be too prepared.
“And the lady with him looks as though she wants to be anywhere else and with anyone else,” Dot concluded.
They stared at Dot.
And then Angelique pulled in a long, long breath, which Delilah knew from experience was the sound of her patience unraveling.
“The lady seems to be a new character in this narrative, Dot,” Delilah suggested carefully.
“Well, she looks like a lady, only a bit...” Dotleaned toward them and whispered, “. . . worse for wear.”