Venus by Jane Feather Read Free Book Online Page A

apron. Polly, wailing piteously, was seated on a low stool before the range whilst her ladyship, mouth set in an unyielding line, was pulling a steel comb through the tangled mass of honey-colored hair.
    “Lord of hell!” exclaimed his lordship. “Polly, stop bellowing for a minute; I cannot hear myself think.” The noise ceased with a suspicious immediacy, although the combing continued. “What is going on, pray?”
    “I’ll not have her bringing lice into the house,” declared her ladyship tightly. “Her head is crawling with them.”
    “It hurts!” Polly protested with a vigorous sniff. Matters were not proceeding at all according to her chosen plan, and at this point, she rather thought that life at the Dog tavern had a certain appeal.
    “Then it must be cut off,” announced Margaret with ill-concealed satisfaction. “It is the devil’s vanity anyway.”
    “No,” Nicholas said. “Devil’s vanity or no, sister, it is not to be cut. Why do you not send her to the hothouse? She may be bathed there and her hair washed.”
    “Bath!” Polly stared at him in horror. He could not surely expect her to immerse her entire body in hot water. “All of me? No, I will not. It is dangerous.” Infinitely more dangerous than life at the Dog tavern!
    “It will not kill you,” Nicholas said with an effort at patience. “Have you never bathed before?”
    Polly shook her head. Prue washed her hair for her when it became too itchy, and she occasionally took a damp rag to her body, but she could never really see the point; a little dirt hurt no one.
    “This is hardly an appropriate matter for you, brother,” Lady Margaret said. “You may safely leave it in my hands.”
    Polly instantly began to wail again, the soft, sensuous mouth quivering pitiably, her eyes fixed on Kincaid so that he thought he would drown in their liquescent green-brown depths. There was no resisting that appeal even though he was convinced that her distress was in some degree feigned.
    “Stop that noise,” he said softly. “You are not going to be hurt. I will take you myself.”
    “Brother! You cannot do such a thing.” Margaret, in her outrage, forgot the unseemliness of a brangle with her brother in front of the servants.
    “May I not?” He lifted an incredulous eyebrow. “I think I may be the judge of that, Margaret.” He turned to Susan. “You will accompany us. We shall stop at the Exchange for clothes on our way. You will know what to purchase that will be appropriate, and then you may assist Polly in the bathhouse.”
    Susan cast an anxious look at her mistress, uncertain whether obedience to the master’s commands would be construed as disobedience to the mistress. But Margaret knew when she was defeated, just as she knew that further protest would simply make her look ridiculous.
    “If you wish to burden yourself with such a task, brother, far be it from me to object. Susan will know what clothes I consider suitable for a girl in that position.” Casting Polly a look of loathing, she swept out of the kitchen.
    “Tom, have the carriage brought around,” Nicholas instructed the footboy. “Susan, find a cloak or some such to cover that smock; and some pattens for her feet.” He also left the kitchen, well aware that his intervention had done Polly no good with Margaret, but confusingly unsure what else hecould have done. It should have been simple enough to leave women’s work to the women, but when Polly had looked at him in that manner, he had become as putty. Now, instead of spending his morning at Whitehall in the leisured pursuits of a courtier, he was going to drive around the city with two maidservants, buying stuff gowns and petticoats, and encouraging one recalcitrant, lice-infested wench into the hothouse!
    “Lord love us!” Susan ejaculated, once the kitchen was returned to the sole use of its accustomed occupants. She regarded Polly with awed interest. “What you done for ’is lordship, then? ’E never