‘So he’s taken to the stew?’
The nursemaid paused, a guilty look on her face, then hastily wiped the babe’s soiled chin with her apron as Lavinia bent down to kiss her son.
‘The master instructed me, madam. I would have waited for you but he was most insistent.’
The cook hurriedly cleared a place for Lavinia at the oak table. Mrs Jobling was a laconic skinny creature, one of the few servants who had warmed to the young wife, correctly perceiving her abrasive arrogance as a way of masking her lack of confidence.
‘You think me a fool for feeding my own child?’ Lavinia sat down and took an apple from a pile waiting to be peeled and baked into a pie.
‘No, madam,’ the nursemaid replied carefully, acutely aware of the dispute between husband and wife. ‘However, it is a most unconventional choice for a mother of your social standing. But the child is happy; it was time he finished on the breast, madam.’
‘We all hate letting them go, madam,’ the cook interjected as she hovered over a scullery maid who was chopping fruit. ‘I had to let mine go to the baby farmer—’course she neglected them something terrible. My two newborns died of the colic and I had to send my son to work at six year old. It’s hard for a mother, it is. But they grow so fast, and before you know it he’s a rake with three bastards of his own.’
As if in reply, Aidan belched loudly. All four women burst into laughter and a classless unity fell momentarily over the kitchen.
It was only when Lavinia noticed the nursemaid blushing and straightening her apron that she realised someone else—most likely a man—had entered the room. Then she smelt him; the sharp tang of horse manure interwoven with tobacco and saddle soap. It was a familiar aroma that she associated with Ireland and the farm of her childhood. Lavinia did not turn; instead, she waited for him to announce himself—as would be the protocol of servant to mistress. But the silence lengthened until it threatened to become sullen in its obstinacy. Finally, the nursemaid gestured towards the stranger.
‘Madam, have you met the new coachman?’
Lavinia remained seated, her spine a ramrod. Coachmen were the Colonel’s domain, and she was convinced the man’s insolence was an indication of her husband’s lack of support for her own authority with the servants.
‘I have not.’
‘Please excuse my rudeness but I fear to tread mud around the kitchen.’
The voice was young but mellow and Lavinia instantly recognised the accent. He stepped around the table to face her.
‘You’re from County Kerry?’ she said.
‘I am indeed, originally from the McGregor estate.’ He bowed, his hair a thick helmet of dark locks that tumbled almost to his shoulders. Beneath his riding coat he wore the vertically striped waistcoat that defined him as a coachman.
‘Aloysius O’Malley of Dingle, at your service.’
‘We call him John, madam, as we do all the head coachmen here,’ the cook added, worried that the serv
ant’s manners might be considered audacious.
The young coachman looked down truculently. Lavinia guessed, correctly, that he resented the anonymity.
‘Then you shall be the first coachman called Aloysius,’ she replied.
The young man grinned, a smile that entirely transformed his otherwise grim countenance.
The nursemaid looked sharply at Lavinia, then knowingly at the cook. Typical of the new mistress, she thought, not to know her own place and that of others.
Ignoring her disapproval, Lavinia turned back to the coachman. ‘I know Dingle well. There is an excellent blacksmith there.’
‘That would be my second cousin, madam.’
‘You are very young to be head coachman.’
‘My credentials are excellent, madam, and I have been in service since I was six years of age.’
He looked directly at her now and she saw that he had barely reached manhood. The wizened cast to his features gave him a deceptively older appearance. A third of the indentured workers of the McGregor estate had starved to death and it had been one of many places that Lavinia had visited with her father, bearing paltry gifts of clothing and food. She recognised the aged appearance of the coachman’s face as the legacy of childhood malnourishment—the stigma of the Famine.
The young Irishman’s green eyes were set below a heavy brow and his slender face was a medley of angles placed crookedly above one another, thus creating a jaw, a chin, cheekbones and so forth. A thin mobile mouth twitched beneath a long broken nose, giving the tentative smile a certain vulnerability. His broad shoulders jutted out like awkward coat hangers from which the rest of his body fell like a cascade of bony planes. His livery—obviously inherited from his corpulent predecessor—was loose around his waist and hips, the wide leather belt buckled tight in an attempt to keep his trousers up.
‘You’re not long in England?’ Lavinia asked, breaking into a brogue that made the cook’s jaw drop.