Barbara Metzger Read Online Free PDF Page B

lord?"
    The viscount was still muttering, though. “A daughter?"
    * * * *
    While Mrs. Kane bathed the baby, the viscount tried to clean himself with the jug of hot water Byrd had brought up to his room. Fresh clothes and a hurried shave made him feel more human, and the coffee and another slice of bread made him almost confident that he'd live through the rest of the morning. Now all he needed was a nap while Byrd went to the hiring agency, Lesley decided. Unfortunately, the baby was screaming again. Now, wasn't that just like a female to be complaining when a chap was in queer stirrups? A daughter, bah! No wonder King Lear was so mad. No wonder Prinny was such a jobbernowl.
    Mrs. Kane looked up when he entered the kitchen. A few honey-brown tresses had come out of her mobcap and were lying along her cheek, curling from the heat of the infant's bath. She was singing to the crying baby, rocking it in her arms. Damned if the woman wasn't looking more human too, Lord Hartleigh considered. Then she glared at him. No, he must be foxed still, to think he'd glimpsed a Madonna-like loveliness in the dried-up housekeeper.
    Carissa was angry with the viscount for being turned out bang up to the mark—except for a smudge on his cheek—while his daughter was in such distress. The infant did not even have a change of clothes, and his lordship was dressed to the nines. And she did not like the way he looked at her, as if he was measuring her and finding her wanting. Well, in truth, she was wanting—to plant him a facer! “Your daughter is hungry, my lord,” she snapped.
    "Then feed her!” The noise was bringing his headache back.
    "I am as ill equipped as you are, my lord, and shouting at me will not help. What you need is a wet nurse."
    "By Jupiter, ma'am, you'd give a drowning man directions to the nearest lighthouse! I know I need a wet nurse; Byrd is out looking. Can't you do something until he finds one?"
    Carissa hated to think where Mr. Byrd might be looking. The docks, she supposed, where some gin-soaked doxy would let her own child go hungry for a few coins. Cow's milk would have to be better than that. “I'll need a glove."
    Hartleigh found one on the floor in his study. She wouldn't touch it. “No, my lord,” Carissa said in a voice she might have used on her four-year-old. “It has to be clean.” Cleaner than anything she'd seen in this house so far. “Do you have any new ones?"
    Hartleigh was gone long enough that she feared he'd gone out to purchase a pair, leaving her with an infant who was beyond comforting. He returned eventually with a butter-soft pair of York tan leather. “I recalled these were delivered last week, but could not locate where Byrd had put them."
    The gloves were more expensive than every pair Carissa had owned for the last five years, combined. They would have been custom-cut, of course, from patterns made from the viscount's hands. No store-bought, ready-made, ill-fitting gloves for his lordship. Of course not. With no compunction whatsoever, Carissa took her sewing kit out of her reticule, found her embroidery scissors, and cut off the soft thumb from the right hand.
    Lesley winced, but acknowledged the justice in the sacrilege. If he'd had a glove in Vienna...
    With her needle, Mrs. Kane poked a tiny hole in the thumb, then she wrapped thread around the whole, fixing it to a bottle filled with milk that she'd been warming in a pan of water. With great slurping sounds, the baby started suckling.
    "Ah, it has to be warm! That's the secret."
    Carissa just shook her head. The man's ignorance was astounding. So was his arrogance, as he tilted his beaver hat just so and turned to leave the kitchen. “Where are you going?"
    "Why, I thought I would see what's keeping Byrd and the new servants. Take a ride there, clear the cobwebs from my brain, don't you know."
    "You'd do better to clear the cobwebs from this place. Besides, you need to stay here to learn to feed the baby."
    "Me? I?” This