Storming the Castle (4 page)

“Oh, you did flee from someone awful,” the princess said, with evident delight. “Do you want to boil him in oil, or is it even worse than that?”

She was so charming that Philippa couldn’t help smiling back, but just then the princess gave a huge yawn.

“You really must sleep, Your Highness,” Philippa said. “Jonas is going to cry a great deal. Every time he’s fed, in fact, and much of the time in between, and that might go on for months. At the least, several more weeks, given his age. We must make certain that you eat and sleep sufficiently. I can hold Jonas, but I cannot feed him.”

“I’m Kate,” the princess said, yawning again.

“Oh, but I couldn’t—”

“Of course you can,” she said. “I want to hear all about the troll of a man you’re fleeing, but I think I will go to sleep for a bit. What did you say your name was?”

“Miss Damson,” Philippa said desperately.

“Really, Miss Damson, you and I just stood shoulder to shoulder and examined my son’s nappy. I’m Kate, and you’re—”

“Philippa,” she said, defeated. “But it just doesn’t seem appropriate.”

“Nonsense. We’re all strange birds here in the castle. There’s Wick, of course, and I was something of a maid-of-all-work to my stepmother for years before Gabriel came along and tried to make me into a princess.”

“Tried?” Philippa asked, just stopping herself from inquiring what Kate meant by
There’s Wick, of course
. “By all indications, you
are
a princess,” she pointed out.

“It didn’t take,” Kate said, with another huge yawn. “Princesses swan about in satin-lined carriages. What’s more, everyone knows that when a princess has a child, it has a rosebud mouth and sunny blue eyes. Whereas I have birthed the ugliest baby in all Christendom.”

“He’s not that ugly,” Philippa said, feeling defensive on behalf of poor little Jonas.

“Yes, he is,” his mother said, leaning back over the cradle. She put a finger on his nose. “A little potato here.” His eyes. “Currants are bigger than his eyes.” His mouth. “Well, his mouth isn’t bad. But have you ever seen a baby open his mouth wider or make such a frightful noise?”

“Never,” Phillipa said truthfully. “You return to bed, and I’ll bring you the baby after your nap.”

“But what about you? Shouldn’t you be getting settled? Oh no, what am I thinking? You’ll be sleeping right through this doorway, at least as long as you’re pretending to be a nursemaid. I’m too selfish to let you stop yet.”

Philippa smiled. “I’m happy to be a nursemaid, Your Highness. Truly, I love babies.”

“
Kate,
” Kate insisted, straightening up from the cradle. “I think it would be best if you brought Jonas to the dining room when he wakes up. We eat at eight, and I wouldn’t think he’ll be hungry again before then. You needn’t change, by the way.”

“I shan’t change,” Philippa said, shocked. “Nursemaids don’t eat in company.”

“Nursemaids don’t call their mistresses Kate, so you are obviously an exception.”

“What about the baby?” Philippa asked. “I wouldn’t want to leave him.”

“He will be with us, of course,” Kate said. “I don’t like to have him out of my sight.” And with a last touch of Jonas’s nose, she went out the door.

Chapter Four

T
hree hours later, Philippa was reconsidering her chosen profession. It seemed impossibly exhausting and boring. Jonas had woken, cried for an hour or so, taken some water, and gone back to sleep. Then he’d woken again, and cried again—but had fallen back to sleep just when she’d been trying to decide whether he was hungry.

She unpacked her tiny bag in the room next to the nursery, and, during one of Jonas’s quiet spells, brushed and rebrushed her hair, thinking all the while about Mr. Berwick.
Wick,
the princess had called him. He had lovely eyes, rather brooding, as if life wasn’t giving him what he wanted.

That had to be because he was a butler. He didn’t seem like a butler.

Jonas whimpered from the nursery, and she hastily pinned up her hair and went back into the room to soothe him.

She thought her uncle would be quite pleased with the way the baby now looked. The pinched look was gone, which meant that he had some water in him. What he needed now was more milk. And when she didn’t instantly produce it, he started crying again.

“I’m sorry, little scrap,” she murmured to him. “It’s going to hurt your tummy. But we just have to do it.”

She wrapped him in a light blanket and wondered what to do. She hadn’t the faintest idea how to find the dining room. By the time she opened the door and headed into the corridor, Jonas was wailing so vociferously that his face was purple.

A tall, yellow-haired footman with a nice open face was waiting for her. “Oh, thank goodness. What’s your name?” she asked over Jonas’s sobs.

“William, miss,” he said. “Mr. Berwick said I was to escort you to the dining room. It’s awfully easy to get lost in this castle.”

“It’s big, isn’t it?”

“Huge,” William said feelingly. “The time it takes just to bring the linens round about, well, you wouldn’t countenance it.”

They made their way down some stairs, through the portrait gallery, down the main stairs. “Shouldn’t we be going down by the servants’ stairs?” she asked.

He glanced at her. “Not you, miss.”

Philippa didn’t know quite what to say to that, so she jiggled Jonas against her shoulder—which had no effect whatsoever on his wails—and followed William through the vast entrance hall to the dining room.

When she entered the room, she was very relieved to find that it wasn’t a cavernous formal space but a tidy little room with a table set for six. What’s more, Kate was the only person in it. She rose the moment the door opened and hurried toward them. “I wanted to come to the nursery, but my foolish husband forced me to wait for you here instead. How is he?”

“Just fine,” Philippa said. “He’s hungry, as you can hear, but I think he feels a little better.”

Kate cocked her head. “You can hear a difference?”

“Yes,” Philippa said, though in reality she wasn’t at all sure. Being a nursemaid was making her into a terrible fibber. “He’s saying he’s hungry, but not in pain.” She said it firmly, the way her father would say,
England’s coast is undefended.
A fact.

Kate reached out and took her baby. “There’s my sweetheart,” she cooed. “I’ll just take him to my sitting room and feed him.”

She left, and Philippa drew in a long breath and reached up to check her hair. She’d pinned it on the back of her head, but it felt as if it might all tumble down her back any moment.

Just then the door opened, and Mr. Berwick entered.

“William left me here,” she said, feeling foolishly out of place.

“Where’s Jonas?”

“The princess took him to her sitting room in order to feed him. She’ll bring him back in a moment, then I’ll go straight back to the nursery,” she promised.

“You won’t,” he said, walking around the table and straightening a napkin. “You are eating with the prince and princess tonight.”

“I really shouldn’t—”

“A place for you has already been set,” he said, cutting her off. “We’ll be joined by Princess Sophonisba, the prince’s great-aunt, who will undoubtedly appear in an inebriated state, which is merely a hint at what will happen after she has had more to drink during supper.”

Another princess? She, plain Philippa Damson, who had only rarely been out of Little Ha’penny, and never even to the city of London, was to dine with not one princess but two? “I couldn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m just a nursemaid.”

“I forgot that!” he said. His eyes laughed at her. “You’re a nursemaid. I suppose you don’t know how to use a knife and a fork.”

Philippa drew herself upright. “You may jest, Mr. Berwick, but I certainly do know how to use proper cutlery—as does every well-trained servant.”

“
Are
you well trained?” he asked cordially. “We never quite got around to that part of the interview.”

“Of course!”

He walked around the far end of the table and back toward her. “Do you know that there are a thousand things I ought to be doing at this moment?”

“I quite believe you,” she said. “Please feel free to attend to them.”

His dark eyes met hers, and he cocked a mocking eyebrow. “I can’t leave new staff alone in a room with the silver.”

Philippa suppressed the impulse to give him a set-down, reminding herself that she was now a servant—
just
a servant— before saying, as haughtily as she could, “Do be sure to count the forks after I leave the room.”

He came a step closer. “You would make an enticing thief. How did you hear of our need for a nursemaid, by the way? You simply appeared out of thin air, and the footman whom I sent to Manchester hasn’t even returned yet.”

“I didn’t come from Manchester,” Philippa said. His eyes made her feel rather hot, a feeling that Rodney’s gaze had never aroused. Though the very thought of Rodney was dispiriting.

“Then where did you come from?” He drifted a step nearer, and now he stood directly before her. Mr. Berwick wore beautiful claret-colored livery with frogged buttons. Somehow on him it didn’t look like livery but like the uniform of the Queen’s own Hussars. And, like them, he was broad-shouldered and muscled and immaculately kempt.

Philippa pulled herself together, and said, “I grew up in a village not far from here. When I heard about the baby, I thought I might be able to help.”

“You did?”

Perhaps he was more like a magician than one of Her Majesty’s Hussars. Something about his eyes was making her feel quivery. “And I
have
helped,” she stated, confident that this, at least, was not a fib.

“You are a mystery.”

“There is nothing mysterious about me. I’m a very ordinary girl.”

“You can sing in Italian—”

She began to explain, but he held up his hand. “Kate told me all about it.”

He was like no butler she’d ever heard about. And he knew she was thinking precisely that because he gave her a slow, naughty grin. Philippa barely stopped her mouth from falling open. No one had ever given her a smile like that, not to Miss Philippa Damson, the future bride of the future baronet.

Except . . . she wasn’t a future bride anymore.

Without taking a breath, she raised one eyebrow, in just the same manner as the innkeeper’s wife in Little Ha’penny—whom everyone agreed was no better than she should be. “
Kate?
” she said, purring a little. “What an odd way to refer to your mistress.”

For a moment she feared she’d overdone it, but his smile only deepened, causing a shiver to go right down her back. “Ah, but Kate’s not my mistress,” he said. “At least, not in the most important meaning of the word.”

She blinked, then frowned at him. “You shouldn’t even suggest something like that!”

He threw back his head and laughed. “A very young pigeon, aren’t you? A very, very young—”

“I’m not so young,” she said hotly.

“How old are you, Miss Damson?”

“Twenty. Which is quite old enough for—for all manner of things.”

“Too old to debut,” he said. But she was wise to him now.

“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “After my family fortunes fell, we never considered such a thing, of course.”

“Ah, the fall,” he said, sighing melodramatically. “Ever since the first fall, it’s just been downhill all day.”

“Are you talking about my family or Eve?” Philippa inquired, barely suppressing a giggle. “Because I’ve always thought that poor Eve was more sinned against than sinning.”

“Why so?” he asked, leaning against the wall next to her. It was scandalously casual. A butler never—but never—leaned against the wall. And yet, there he was.

“Eve wasn’t responsible for the sinful enticement of the serpent,” Philippa told him, feeling her heart speed up even further. “She merely offered the apple to her companion, which demonstrated good manners, not to mention generosity.”

“I don’t think that good manners are an acceptable excuse for all that trouble she caused,” Mr. Berwick observed.

“It’s true that she probably should have avoided that particular tree,” Philippa conceded. “Still, no one ever seems to notice that Adam ate the apple as well. It’s half his fault.”

“I blame them both,” Mr. Berwick said. “Just think, if they hadn’t been so foolish, we’d all be living in Paradise.” He leaned a bit closer. “Very warm, I’ve heard. None of this English rain.”

Philippa didn’t move back even though he was close enough that she could smell him. He smelled delicious, like lemon soap and something else, like the wind on the moors. “I like rain,” she said, unable to command her mind to come up with anything else.

“You wouldn’t,” Mr. Berwick said, “if we were both wandering about in it quite naked, without even a fig leaf to our name.”

That hung in the air for a good second. Or ten.

Then she heard it: down the corridor came a thin, protracted wail, an agonizing sound.

“Ah, bollocks,” Mr. Berwick muttered.

It was such an English expletive—and said in such a velvety, accented voice—that Philippa couldn’t help laughing.

A smile spread over his lips too. “You really aren’t worried about Jonas’s survival, are you?”

She shook her head. “He’s crying because milk doesn’t agree with him. But it’s not a mortal condition, and his stomach will eventually get used to it.”

“Fancy yourself a doctor?”

“No, but any person with common sense can see when a baby has colic,” she said. “It’s always better to do nothing in such cases.” She hesitated.

“What?”

So she told him, in a rush, about her fear that Jonas had intussusception. “But I’m sure that my uncle told me that there would be blood in his nappy,” she finished. “And there isn’t.” Jonas’s persistent wails were coming closer.

“It sounds to me as though you’re right,” Mr. Berwick said. “Still, we need your uncle to come take a look at the baby. Where is he? I’ll send a carriage immediately.”

“You couldn’t!” Philippa gasped, horrified. “He would—
no!
”

“But he’s the best doctor you know. We need him.”

The door opened, and Kate reentered, carrying Jonas and followed by a man who was the prince, presumably. A tottering elderly lady clutched his arm. She wore so much face paint, topped by a fuzzy and rather shabby wig, that she resembled a Chinese dog that had gone through Little Ha’penny along with a traveling fair.

But it was the prince who caught Philippa’s eye. She stood rooted to the spot and looked from Mr. Berwick’s eyebrows to the prince’s, at their hair, their eyes, their chins . . .

“Her Highness, Princess Sophonisba, and His Highness, Prince Gabriel Albrecht-Frederick William von Aschenberg of Warl-Marburg-Baalsfeld,” Mr. Berwick announced. Turning to them, he said, “May I present Miss Damson.”

“Most irregular, being introduced by the butler,” the old lady said irritably. “Well, who are you, then?”

“I’m—”

“She’s a friend of mine,” Kate interjected. “She’s come to help with Jonas.” She smiled at Philippa, and Philippa realized, rather to her surprise, that it was true. Even though she’d known Kate for only a matter of hours, they were friends.

“I can’t hear a word over that howling,” Princess Sophonisba said. “I never heard of a lady nursing her own baby before. I’m sure that’s the problem.” She leveled a thin finger at Kate. “What that child needs is the milk of a hardy peasant. Yours is probably thin and blue. Though now I think on it, you’re practically a peasant yourself.”

Philippa’s eyes met Kate’s, and Philippa said hastily, “I’ll just walk Jonas in the corridor until he calms, shall I?”

“Yes, do,” the elderly princess said. “He sounds like one of the devils they like to talk about in church, the kind who have nothing to do but yowl. Wick, why aren’t you offering us something to drink? Just because Rome is burning doesn’t mean we needn’t fiddle. This screeching is terrible for my nerves.”

Philippa settled Jonas into the crook of her left arm and nodded to the footman, who opened the door for her.

In the hallway, Jonas waved his tiny clenched fists and wailed. He was pulling up his legs again, so his stomach must be aching. Philippa settled him on her shoulder and patted his back gently as she walked.