Page 85 of The Mistress of Ashmore Castle

She smiled faintly. ‘Part of the boulder?’

‘It begins to feel a little less like a boulder, these days,’ he answered her.

‘Sisyphus was punished for hubris,’ she reminded him. ‘What was your crime?’

Kitty raised her head from the baby shirt she was embroidering, looked questioningly from his face to Nina’s.

‘Leaving the Underworld and having to be dragged back, I suppose,’ Giles said.

She shook her head. ‘You can’t really call this place the Underworld.’

The dowager made an impatient sound. ‘What on earth are you talking about, Giles?’

He turned his attention to her. Mr Cowling was still staring thoughtfully at Nina. ‘Sorry, Mama. It’s time for Moss to leave the cottage hospital, and most fortuitously someone has offered him a position. As butler, moreover, which will be a salve to his pride.’

‘Oh, that’s good,’ said Kitty.

‘It’s a much smaller household, of course,’ Giles said, ‘but as he couldn’t cope with the strain of a larger one, that’s just as well. My problem is solved with no effort or expense on my part – and it’s not often one can say that.’

‘You’re right,’ said Cowling. ‘It must be a relief to you.’

‘Well,’ the dowager interrupted impatiently, ‘who is it that has offered him a place?’

‘Miss Eddowes, of Weldon House. I believe Moss will be the only male servant, but she keeps a very small establishment so I don’t suppose the work will be arduous.’

‘No!’ said the dowager.

He looked at her, surprised. ‘“No” what, Mama?’

She pressed her lips together, realising that she could not say what she wanted to say in front of strangers. ‘I should like to speak to you in private, Stainton,’ she said, rising. Of course, Giles and Mr Cowling had to rise as well, and since he was on his feet, Giles thought he might as well get her objections over with at once. He followed her out of the room.

Cowling sat down again as the door closed, and said to Nina, ‘What was all that about boulders and the Underworld?’

She reached for a piece of work from the common basket to hide her face from him. ‘An old Greek legend. It was nothing – just nonsense.’

Cowling left it, and picked up the newspaper, but he didn’t read it. He was thinking of that exchange between Nina and the earl, of the sense he’d had of intimacy between them. He looked at her bent head, her beauty, and felt a pang of jealousy. She had looked at Stainton – well, she had never looked at him like that: as if they were of the same species, and everyone else somehow came from a different world.

It was not the first time he had noticed that Nina and Stainton talked to each other differently from everybody else, almost in a sort of code, referring to things no-one else knew about. They were a match intellectually. Nina was clever and well-educated – it was one of the things he loved about her. And he knew that her mind didn’t always get the exercise it needed. She could say things to Stainton she couldn’t say to him.

He had never felt jealous before, but now he stared unseeing at the newspaper, and brooded. Another man was making his wife smile, engaging her attention, stimulating her thoughts – his wife! He was angry, confused, and afraid – and because he was a wealthy businessman who had succeeded in commerce and risen to be an adviser to the King of England, all entirely by his own efforts, what he mostly felt was anger.

Giles followed his mother into the hall, and as she stopped and turned to him he said, ‘Now, Mama, what was that about?’

‘That woman,’ Maud said, with suppressed fury. ‘She has the audacity to offer a position to my butler? It shall not be! You will refuse, Stainton, and in terms that make clear such effrontery is not to be tolerated!’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Giles said impatiently. ‘It’s an offer that’s very agreeable to me. I can’t keep Moss at the cottage hospital for ever, and he can’t come back here. This seems an excellent solution, and no doubt she’s made the offer out of the kindness of her heart—’

‘Rubbish! She has done it to humiliate me! I will not be provoked in this way.’

‘I can’t see how it has to do with you at all,’ Giles said.

‘Of course not. You never see anything, even when it’s beneath your nose. You have always been selfish. You were a selfish, selfish boy, and you’ve grown up to be a selfish man. You abandoned your duty to your home and family to indulge your foolish hobby, and—’

Giles interrupted the tirade, knowing it could go on for minutes. ‘You had better tell me exactly what your objection is to this arrangement.’

‘I have told you. The Eddowes woman is doing it purely to spite me.’

‘I fail to understand how it can bother you so much. In any case, if it settles Moss comfortably, I can’t see that her motive matters.’