Victoria was in no mood to be mocked, and she could see by the gleam in his eyes he was doing exactly that. With as much dignity as she could muster, she stood up, smoothed her skirts, and tried to walk past him.
His hand shot out and caught her arm in a firm but painless grip. “Aren’t you going to finish milking?”
“You’ve already seen that I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Victoria put her chin up and looked him right in the eye. “Because I don’t know how.”
One dark brow lifted over an amused green eye. “Do you want to learn?”
“No,” Victoria said, angry and humiliated. “Now, if you’ll remove your hand from my arm—” She jerked her arm free without waiting for him to acquiesce. “—I’ll try to find some other way to earn my keep here.”
She felt his narrowed gaze on her as she walked away, but her thoughts soon shifted to Willie as she neared the house. She saw the dog, lurking just inside the woods, watching her. A chill skittered down her spine, but she ignored it. She had just been intimidated by a cow, and she adamantly refused to be cowed by a dog.
Jason watched her walk away, then shrugged off the memory of an angelic-looking milkmaid with sunlight in her hair and went back to the work he’d abandoned when Northrup rushed into his study to inform him that Miss Seaton had gone to milk the cows.
Sitting down at his desk, he glanced at his secretary. “Where were we, Benjamin?”
“You were dictating a letter to your man in Delhi, my lord.”
Having failed to milk the cow, Victoria sought out the gardener who had directed her to the barn. She went up to the bald man, who seemed to be in charge of the others, and asked if she could help plant the bulbs they were putting in the huge circular flower beds in the front courtyard.
“Stick to your duties at the barn and get out of our way, woman!” the bald gardener roared.
Victoria gave up. Without bothering to explain that she had no duties at the barn, she went in the opposite direction toward the back of the house to seek the only kind of work she was actually qualified to do—she went to the kitchen.
The head gardener watched her, threw down his trowel, and went to find Northrup.
Unobserved, Victoria stood just inside the kitchen, where eight servants were busily preparing what appeared to be a luncheon of stew complemented with fresh seasoned vegetables, flaky, newly baked bread, and a half dozen side dishes. Disheartened by her last two attempts to make herself useful, Victoria watched until she was absolutely certain she could actually handle this task; then she approached the volatile French chef. “I would like to help,” she said firmly.
“Non!” he screamed, evidently believing her to be a servant in her plain black dress. “Out! Out! Get out. Go attend your duties.”
Victoria was heartily sick of being treated like a useless idiot. Very politely, but very firmly, she said, “I can be of help here, and it is obvious from the way everyone is rushing about that you can use an extra pair of hands.”
The chef looked ready to explode. “You are not trained,” he thundered. “Get out! When Andre needs help, he will ask for it and he will do zee training!”
“There is nothing the least bit complicated about making a stew, monsieur,” Victoria pointed out, exasperated. Ignoring his purpling complexion at her casual dismissal of the complexity of his culinary skills, she continued in a bright, reasonable tone, “All one has to do is cut up vegetables on this table here—” She tapped the table beside her. “—and toss them into that kettle there.” She pointed to the one hanging above the fire.
An odd, strangled sound emerged from the apoplectic man before he tore off his apron. “In five minutes,” he said as he stormed out of the kitchen, “I will have you thrown out of this house!”
In the crackling silence he left behind, Victoria looked around at the remaining servants, who were staring at her in frozen horror, their eyes mirroring everything from sympathy to amusement. “Goodness, girl,” a kindly, middle-aged woman said as she wiped flour from her hands onto her apron, “what possessed you to stir him up? He’ll have you thrown out on your ear for this.”
Except for the little maid named Ruth who looked after Victoria’s room, this was the first friendly voice Victoria had heard from any of the servants in the entire house. Unfortunately, she was so miserable at having created trouble when she only wished to help that the woman’s sympathy nearly reduced her to tears.
“Not that you weren’t right,” the woman continued, with a gentle pat on Victoria’s arm, “about it bein‘ that simple to make a stew. Any one of us could carry on without Andre, but his lordship demands the best—and Andre is the best chef in the country. You may as well go and pack your things, for it’s certain-sure you’ll be turned off the place within the hour.”
Victoria could scarcely trust her voice enough to reassure the woman on that head. “I’m a guest here, not a servant—I thought Mrs. Northrup would have told you that.”
The woman’s mouth dropped open. “No, miss, she did not. The staff isn’t permitted to gossip, and Mrs. Northrup would be the last to do it, her bein‘ related by marriage to Mr. Northrup, the butler. I knew we had a guest stayin’ at the house, but I—” Her eyes darted to Victoria’s shabby-genteel black dress and the girl flushed. “May I fix you somethin‘ to eat?”
Victoria’s shoulders drooped with frustrated despair. “No, but I’d—I’d like to make something to ease Mr. O’Malley’s swollen jaw. It’s a poultice, made of simple ingredients, but it might lessen the pain of his infected tooth.”
The woman, who said her name was Mrs. Craddock, showed Victoria where to find the ingredients she asked for and Victoria went to work, fully expecting “his lordship” to come stalking into the kitchen and publicly humiliate her at any moment.
Jason had just started to dictate the same letter he’d been dictating when he learned Victoria had gone out to the barn to milk a cow, when Northrup again tapped on the door of his study.
“Yes,” Jason snapped impatiently, when the butler was before him. “What is it now?”
The butler cleared his throat. “It’s Miss Seaton again, my lord. She ... er... that is, she attempted to assist the head gardener with his planting of the flower beds. He mistook her for a servant, and now he wonders, since I informed him she is not a servant, if you are displeased with his work and sent her there to—”