Page 8 of The Bachelor Spy
Four months later
War was terribly inconvenient.
But stray cats were an absolute catastrophe, decided Grace Percy, Lady Astley.
Especially when one had a houseful of convalescing soldiers and a cat-hating dog.
“Zeus!” Private Aaron Beckett’s voice rang out from the drawing room, speaking to the family dog with an urgency likely reserved for military campaigns or something akin to them.
“Somebody catch that blasted cat!”
Grace looked up from the menu she’d been reviewing with the housekeeper, Mrs. Powell, just in time to see a blur of orange fur streak past the doorway, followed immediately by an overly enthusiastic English setter.
“What on earth!” Grace gathered up her skirts and rushed down the hall in pursuit … behind Beckett, who followed Zeus, who was evidently in chase of some unfortunate feline.
The chase had left disaster in its wake: a chair overturned, Dr. Shaw pressed against the wall in desperate escape, and Mr. Long batting his cane in the air as if he hoped it might land on something to abate his agitation.
If Grace had thought turning Havensbrooke into a convalescent hospital in Frederick’s absence had been a good idea, this moment may have caused her to question herself.
A crash sounded from the direction of the drawing room. Then another. Then what sounded suspiciously like a medical tray full of instruments hitting the floor, followed by a long string of words Grace was fairly certain she never should have heard. She rounded the doorway into the drawing room and came to a complete stop at the utter pandemonium.
An orange cat, a mangy, one-eared creature that looked like it had survived several wars of its own, was darting among the patients’ cots with Zeus in pursuit. And although the cat dashed and turned with amazing efficiency, Zeus did not. He bumped into Nurse Simpson as she attempted to wrap Corporal Jones’ leg, which led to a great unraveling of bandages across three cots like streamers at a particularly violent birthday party.
Lieutenant Ashford jumped back to avoid the dog, forgetting about his injured ankle, and was now hopping on one foot while clinging to Private Jenkins for support. Jenkins, in turn, dropped the book he’d been reading directly into Corporal MacLeish’s tea, which then spilled across the cards they’d been using for their afternoon game.
The medical tray that Grace had heard? Currently scattered across the floor in a constellation of bandages, scissors, and what appeared to be an entire bottle’s worth of iodine, creating an alarming rust-colored puddle across the stone floor.
And then, in all its feline glory, the cat leapt up onto the nearest mantelpiece and stared across the chaos as if it were quite above it all.
Which, in all honesty, it was.
Zeus poised on hind legs, barking and attempting to change the cat’s fate through sheer volume and enthusiasm.
And in the middle of it all stood Nurse Clarissa Wilson, the head nurse. Her usually impeccable uniform now sported a suspiciously iodine-colored paw print on the skirt, and she was holding a jar of cotton wool while looking as though she’d seen a real ghost.
Not just the fake ones in Grace’s sleuthing history.
The formidable woman had arrived only three weeks before and taken over the running of the hospital like an avenging angel on a rescue mission. Or at least that’s what Grace supposed an avenging angel might look like, except instead of Nurse Wilson’s dark hair, Grace had supposed an angel, even an avenging one, would have gold.
Nurse Wilson’s preferred expression always seemed to make her look older than her thirty years. The deepest set of wrinkles marked her brow to the point Grace felt certain one of them could hold a shilling upright. Grace had always associated such intensity with a lack of imagination or perhaps a stomach ailment or a general feeling of discontent.
But Grace wasn’t certain about the reason for Nurse Wilson’s wrinkles.
Even when she’d offered the woman some of her favorite reads, the nurse had seemed terribly uninterested and appeared to have no sense of humor at all.
Not enjoying reading certainly had to give the woman a dreary outlook on the world. Especially a world at war.
If Grace didn’t have other places to travel through her reading—places much sweeter or more delightful than the current rooms of hurting men—while missing her very darling hero, she’d probably wear an expression like Nurse Wilson’s too.
She touched her forehead just to check for any gathering wrinkles.
Grace attempted to keep away from the nurse as much as possible.
Because first, what did one talk about with a person who didn’t like to read, had no imagination, and lacked the buffering quality of humor? Even Brandon, the dear butler, had a little humor tucked away somewhere beneath his stern exterior.
And second, she suspected the woman found Grace to be offensive … and it had nothing to do with her red hair. In fact, Grace was fairly certain it was just because Grace was … who she was.
“Lady Astley,” Nurse Wilson said, her voice carrying the tightfisted control of someone terribly close to losing hers. “There appears to be a cat in the sickroom.”
