Page 44 of Trouble

The matter of the key would have to wait for another day. Emily dealt with the fire and was halfway to the next room when she heard something fall heavily to the floor in the ground floor hallway below.

She froze, listening, wondering if she had accidentally discovered an intruder, or if Oliver had sneaked out to the pub and come back too soused to remember that he was an employee of this house, rather than its master.

When somebody spoke it was not Oliver.

‘Shit.’

It was instead, unmistakably, Captain Edwards.

Emily thought she might have misheard him, but then he said it again: the long, drawn-out, half-whispered ‘shiiit’ of somebody who had recently made an error in judgement.

She crept to the top of the stairs and then abruptly stopped attempting to be discreet when she saw the state he was in.

He was crouching down, attempting to right the candelabra he had knocked to the floor, but seemed to be having some trouble remembering where his own fingers were and what he was supposed to be doing with them. He gave up the candelabra as a bad lot and sat fully down on the floor, with a heavy, childlike ungainliness that was so out of character Emily laughed.

It was a quiet, slightly unkind laugh. By all rights, he shouldn’t have heard it. He was clearly very drunk. But he had also presumably been drilled in the Royal Navy to be alert to potential threats, and apparently this meant he had a very good ear for muffled laughter.

‘Oliver?’ he said, squinting up at her.

This, Emily found deeply offensive.

‘No,’ she said reluctantly. ‘It’s .?.?. Miss Laurence, sir.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Of course it is.’

‘Should I .?.?. go and fetch Oliver?’ Emily asked, hopeful that this suggestion might bring a swift end to this encounter.

‘No, no, don’t bother Oliver, I am perfectly .?.?.’ Captain Edwards trailed off. What hewas perfectlywas in evidence. Perfectly, entirely drunk. The Platonic ideal of three sheets to the wind. Perfectly incapable of standing up.

Emily did not want to help Captain Edwards. She didn’t want to talk to him, or even to be within a twenty-foot range of him. She did, however, wish to stay employed long enough to earn good money from his downfall, and this was what she kept her mind firmly fixed on as she descended the stairs and went to offer him a hand.

‘Oh,’ he said affably. ‘No, I couldn’t possibly .?.?.’

‘It’s just a hand, sir,’ said Emily.

‘It’syourhand,’ said Captain Edwards.

The best that could be said of this statement was that it was accurate. Emily was starting to get rather annoyed.

‘Well, if it is somehow repulsive to you, I will retract the offer and leave you here to—’

Captain Edwards took her hand. He wasn’t wearing a glove. Emily wasn’t wearing a glove. After her insistence that it wasjust a hand,and that grasping it did not require extensive deliberation, the feeling of his fingers on hers was far more complex than she had anticipated.

It was thewayhe did it. It wasn’t brusque and practical, as he usually was. He was being .?.?. gentler than he had any right to be. Careful, as if she should be handled delicately. It was the way someone might take your hand before they leaned over to press a kiss to the fine skin over your knuckles, or before they ducked their head and led you out on to the dance floor.

It was horribly intimate, and Emily wanted to shake him off at once. Instead, she dug her heels in and helped pull him to a stand, trying not to notice the way he rested his weight on her for a second before he stepped away and released her, and very much noticing it anyway.

‘Thank you,’ he said, his voice low and confidential despite the fact that there was nobody around to bear witness to any of this.

‘You’re bleeding,’ said Emily.

He held his other hand up in front of his face and frowned at it. His knuckles were bruised, the skin split in a way that Emily recognised as a sure sign that they had recently connected with somebody’s face.

‘It’s nothing,’ said Captain Edwards. ‘Only that .?.?. some people are determined to fill their leisure time passing judgement upon others .?.?. absolutely incapable of extending the humanity they cling to as an inalienable right to .?.?. toanybodywho is not their perfect mirror. It is all so very dull, and sometimes to break up the monotony you just .?.?.’ He trailed off, still looking at his hand.

‘I see,’ said Emily, not really seeing at all. ‘If you come into the kitchen, I think Meera keeps things there for when Joe slices off prime cuts of his fingers.’

‘Ha,’ said Captain Edwards. ‘Yes. All right.’