“I’ll show you the rooms, then leave you to get settled,” Annie said. “There still is some work to do, but we made up the beds, so you’ll have someplace comfortable to sleep.”
Miss Murray asked about fetching water, the condition of the hearth, and half a dozen more practical questions. Annie answered them all, leading them downstairs to the lower floor which had a dining room, kitchen, dairy room, and another room that might have been a study.
“I figured you’d be hungry so there’s some hodge podge,” Mrs. Chandler said as she brought them into the dining room. It was a bright room that, while modest in size, had a sort of faded elegance and an excellent view he found appealing. On the small table there was a pitcher of raspberry shrub, bread, bowls, and a large terrine.
All the while, he felt Annie Chandler’s appraisal. He was long accustomed to having the eye of everyone in the room, something he normally appreciated. But this was different. Did she know about the charges against him and was too polite or afraid to mention them? Was she merely curious about the long-lost connection to this house reappearing after so long? Or, most likely, was she not pleased with the thought of having her life up ended by the sale of the property?
“Thank you,” Miss Murray said, her manner one of detached politeness. “That’s very kind.”
“There’s a pump in the kitchen, and the water is potable,” Daniel said. “We’ll be just next door. Teddy will be by tomorrow to see if you need anything.”
The Chandlers left, and Beau, famished, walked to the small feast prepared for them. He pulled off the lid of the green-and-white porcelain terrine and stirred the contents, bringing colourful chunks of young carrots, peas, green beans, and new potatoes to the surface as the rich smells of butter and cream reached his nose. It reminded him that he hadn’t eaten in hours.
“Neither business nor adventure can happen on an empty stomach,” he said, ladling the hodge podge to his bowl. “Come, Miss Murray, so we do not leave Mrs. Chandler’s efforts wasted. Unless you think she is trying to poison us.”
He said that last bit as a bit of a throwaway remark, but when he looked over to Miss Murray, he wondered if she was, in fact, entertaining that very notion.
“I don’t know,” she answered, her gaze still fixed on some point out the window. “She was looking at you just a little too closely for my liking.”
“No need for jealousy,” he tsked, before helping himself to a long drink of tangy shrub. “It’s entirely unnecessary, I assure you.”
She turned her head, her eyes narrowed, clearly irritated with him.
“She was staring at you.”
He shrugged. “Look at this face. I can’t help it.”
“That face is in half a dozen newspapers between Saint John, Moncton, and Halifax,” she said, clearly unimpressed with his attempt at humour. “You gave everyone within fifty feet of us a reason to gawk in town.”
Beau blinked. “He insulted you.”
“Yes, he did. But they were just words, and no one else heard them.”
The lack of emotion with which she answered took him aback. Why was she so indignant?
“I did.”
“You are not my protector, Mr. da Silva,” she said. “Quite the opposite. And if you’re not careful, which you apparently have no interest in being, that face will be attached to a man hanging from the gallows.”
Silence fell like a stone between them, leaving a heaviness in the room. Sarcasm and humour had been weapons he’d used in equal measure as a shield—and occasionally as a rapier— to his father’s unending disapproval. After one of Frank’s usual tirades, Beau would cut him off with a jibe or a bad joke, and then leave the elder da Silva and his cloud of insults for drinks with his friends in his club, or a rendezvous with one of the local society widows.
But here, with Madeline Murray standing silent and goddess-like, laying out the stark reality Beau now found himself in, his deflection fell flat. Whether she was aware or not of his internal struggle, he wasn’t certain.
“If you don’t think for a moment I do not appreciate how serious this is, I can assure you, I do,” he said. “But I am not prepared to unload my anger on Mrs. Chandler. No doubt they are simply curious—and perhaps a little suspicious—about a person encroaching on property they’ve probably used as their own for some time. We are the interlopers here, Miss Murray, not them.”
Miss Murray crossed her arms. “Too many people will sell their soul, or someone else’s, if given the opportunity and the right inducement.”
There was something about the way she’d said it that struck Beau as more than simple paranoia. And of course, he knew that to be absolutely true in the business world. Still, he found it difficult to automatically think the worst of people unless, like Nelson Taylor, they’d proved themselves to be.
He ladled some of the hodge podge into a second bowl and beckoned for her to sit. “Have you always gone through the world thinking everyone is a threat?”
“No. And that was my mistake,” she said.
Something in Beau’s chest twisted at the idea of a Madeline Murray who, once upon a time, went through the world with an open, trusting heart. A heart that had been clearly damaged so badly that she would look upon a genuine offer of hospitality with suspicion. It inexplicably saddened and angered him. Perhaps his misplaced concern was merely a way to keep his own worries at bay. Miss Murray was right. He’d noticed Annie Chandler’s attention, and it had made him uneasy. She seemed to be studying his face, of all things. And it wasn’t because she found him attractive, measuring his character. He’d brushed off the sensation as merely an overactive imagination, but apparently he wasn’t the only one.
Chapter Nine
A marathon of chores dominated the days immediately after Beau and Miss Murray’s arrival at The Grove. While the Chandlers had done them the blessing of airing out the mattresses which, by some miracle, had not become home to several generations of mice, Beau and Miss Murray’s hasty arrival at a house mostly unoccupied for the past twenty years did not give the caretakers time to get the place entirely in order. The chimneys needed a thorough cleaning, and the rest of the place was in dire need of a good wipe down. While Beau prided himself on his physical fitness, he’d gone about it in the way of his upper class peers—rowing, boxing and other sports condoned as appropriate for a man of his stature. It was a life, he realized, his grandparents, who were by all accounts simple, hardworking people, might have found suspect in the extreme.