If a woman less inclined to welcome the address of Auntie existed, Ian was hard-pressed to imagine her. Straight of carriage, pale of skin, and dark of hair and eye, twenty years younger than his uncle, Lucinda Bell Cameron met them in the parlor prepared to offer tea—judging by the maid stationed at a serving tray. It had been good Scotch whisky his elders partook of in that room years ago. Swift reassessment forced Ian to admit that tea better suited the environs now. The once-masculine sparseness of his uncle’s parlor was transformed. Pillowed settles and needlepoint chairs vied for space with delicate tables cluttered with bric-a-brac of the fragile-looking sort.
He halted in the doorway, mindful of road dust and the dirt that caked his boots. His uncle’s wife gaped at him for a frozen second; then her gaze swept past him to Thomas, who’d followed them into the house. Her nose, both narrow and long, pinched in disapproval.
“Mr. Cameron, it is not our custom for servants to enter through the front door. Your boy may go around to the kitchen door. In back.” She cast a pointed look at Ian’s uncle—eliciting support or offering reproof, Ian couldn’t be certain.
His uncle smiled. “Aye, Nephew. Naomi will see him settled.”
Ian cleared his throat. “Settled where, exactly?”
Lucinda’s slanted brows rose. “The servants’ quarters, of course.”
“Aye,” Ian said, hating the need to test the woman’s forbearance so soon. “But if it’s no inconvenience, I’d prefer Thomas stay near me. In the house.”
“Slave quarter be fine,” Thomas murmured, loud enough for all to hear.
Mindful of the indignant color staining his aunt’s cheeks, Ian caught Thomas by the arm and marched him down the passageway, out of earshot of a whisper. “Ye don’t get a say in this. Not in front of them. We’ll discuss it later. Meantime keep your mouth shut.”
Thomas set his jaw. “I don’t need a nursemaid.”
Ian tightened his grip. “Look. Ye wanted this. Ye hounded me from Boston ’til ye got your way. Act like ye’re meant to.” Releasing Thomas, he added in a carrying tone, “Fetch our bags up to the house, all but what the mare carried.”
In the front hall his uncle’s wife took matters in hand. “Maisy, see Mr. Cameron’s boy finds the back door.”
“Yes’m.” The maid sidled out into the hall, headed their way. “Come with me,” she said to Thomas, with an echo of her mistress’s censure.
Uncle Hugh frowned after the pair retreating down the central passage that ran the house’s length, past a wide set of stairs leading to the rooms above, to a narrow back door at the far end. “Ye’ve not had him long, ye said. A body servant, is he?”
“No, sir,” Ian said as he rejoined them. “I don’t need a man to dress and shave me.”
Too late he heard the criticism implicit in the words, but his uncle’s expression showed only faint amusement. “Nor do I, though Mrs. Cameron has done her best to cure me o’ the sin.”
He cast his wife a wry smile. She failed to return it. “If he is not a body servant, why keep him in the house?”
There was no admitting the truth of the matter. Latching on to the implication his uncle had voiced, Ian managed a tight smile. “Considering he’s been in my service but a short while, I think, ma’am, it would be best I keep him close.”
His uncle showed him to a bedchamber above the back stairs, and to the storeroom across the passage, where Thomas, with some rearranging of trunks, might spread a bedroll on the floor. “Unless ye’d rather he had a pallet in your room?”
“This will do, Uncle.” At least for now it would. Ian turned from the cramped space and asked, “What of your stepdaughters? Are they not at home?”
“Rosalyn and Judith are verra much at home but ye willna see them before supper. No doubt the lasses wish to arrange themselves proper to greet ye—first impressions being a vital thing.” His uncle’s mouth twitched when Ian raised a brow in acknowledgment of his own failings on that front. “I take ye gladly as ye come, Nephew—quills and all. My wife, now . . . she was once accustomed to a grander living than she presently enjoys, but I dinna expect ye to bow to her airs and fancies should they go against your grain. This is your home now. I mean ye to be at ease in it.”
Warmed by the words, Ian lingered in the doorway after his uncle vanished down the narrow back stairs, until he caught the beginnings of a conversation not meant for his ears.
“For heaven’s sake, Hugh, is he what you expected? That coat . . . that belt . . . a tomahawk?”
Chilled by that cold dash, Ian shut the door and hung the offending garments on a peg behind it, where they were unlikely to incite further indignation.
The room he’d been given belonged to the newer wing. Though smaller than those at the front of the house, it remained untouched by the zealous hand that had had its way belowstairs. The walls were plastered. A braided rug fronted a small fireplace. There was a high-post bed with hangings, a clothespress of rustic make, and a cylinder desk of more elegant design with a drawer that locked; he found the key.
A spindle-backed chair and a washstand completed the furnishings.
It had been weeks since he’d been shut within doors, having camped rather than hire lodging during his journey south from Boston. The room was stifling.
Up went the window beside the desk.
Bathed in a rush of warm but moving air, he stripped off the hunting shirt and flung the garment over a chair, then recalled he’d sent Thomas to fetch the bags and had nothing to change into. While he waited, the sweat drying on his skin, he took in what prospect the window afforded.
Close by stood the kitchen, clapboarded and whitewashed, chimney smoking. Beyond it a wagon track curved between smaller outbuildings. It continued past the apple orchard, skirting a stand of oaks, under which a cluster of tiny cabins sprouted like toadstools. Slave cabins—servants’ quarters, as his aunt had called them. To the north of the house, cornfields, interspersed with stretches of broad-leafed tobacco, rolled up to the ridge in the west. Out in those distant rows tiny figures shimmered in the heat. His uncle’s field hands at work.
A tap at the door announced the housemaid, Maisy, who entered bearing pitcher and basin. She set them on the washstand, then with a put-upon air, bent to retrieve his saddlebags from the passageway—deposited there by Thomas, presumably. Another mark against him in the maid’s opinion, he could tell.
Ian hurried to the door before she could make a second trip and found his long rifle lying in the passage. He brought it into the room to find Maisy casting about as if for anything else left half-done. She frowned at the open window but made no comment.
“I’ll have my girl, Esther, air the tick for you, Mister Ian, soon as supper’s past,” she said. “Speak of supper, Miss Lucinda likes folk to be prompt.”
Mindful of his half-dressed state, Ian stowed his rifle behind the door, then gave the woman what he hoped was an engaging grin. “I’ve the impression Miss Lucinda generally has things arranged to her liking.”
His teasing hadn’t the intended effect. Wariness sharpened the maid’s features before they went a careful blank. “Yes, sir. She do. When the bell ring, come on down to table.”