Fool Me Twice Read Online Free PDF

milk.” She grew thoughtful. Hot milk was said to be comforting. “Would you take him some? It might help.”
    Vickers clutched his pate. “You want me dead, do you?”
    “I agree with Mrs. Johnson,” Jones said. “Whisky will not aid him. But what of port? It is a gentleman’s right to enjoy his—”
    “Any intoxicant will do him ill. And he does not deserve our indulgence.” Really, Olivia thought. Must she persuade them all over again? “He threw a bottle at my head, sirs. That is not a gentleman’s right.” But her motive was not wholly spiteful. She clung to the virtue in it. “Besides, if it’s true what you say—if he was never violent before—why, then the liquor must account for it. You do him a service by denying it.”
    “Are you certain he was drunk?” Jones squinted into space. “I keep good track of the cellars, and I’ve not noticed—”
    “You can’t imagine how many bottles I found up there.”
    “And you can’t imagine what he’s been like,” Vickers said. “The liquor soothes him, I tell you!”
    “Soothes him!” Olivia sat back, gawking. “Do you call a bottle, hurled at the wall—”
    “At least he’s eating.” Cook looked bleary-eyed from exhaustion, her face as gray as her hair. Every time the bell rang, she shrank more deeply into herself, so that over the course of the last hour, she had gone from sporting two chins to three. “I can’t say the liquor accounts for it, but he’d barely touch his tray, this summer. He’s better now.”
    Better! Olivia thought again of the darkness, of his sudden savage assault today. Cook called that better ? She gripped her hands very tightly in her lap. “But surely you see that this is for his own good. Even if he is on the mend”— ha! —“liquor will not benefit—”
    Jones’s chair scraped as he stood. “You are new to this household, ma’am.” He lifted his voice to be heard over the clamoring of the bell. “I cannot fault your intentions. But you overstep yourself to imagine that you have any understanding—”
    Olivia lifted her hands in surrender. “Fine! Take it to him.” What did it matter to her anyway? For all she knew, the duke kept his dossiers somewhere logical, like the study. She would never need to go into his rooms.
    But the problem of the disobedient staff remained. “But how,” she continued, “shall I win the respect of the staff? Pray tell, Mr. Jones. For the servant follows his master’s example, does he not? And you see what this household resembles, when its master is playing the lunatic.”
    The bell fell still. In the silence, she found herself the object of three appalled stares.
    And then Cook gave a breathy sob and looked downat the tabletop, and Jones fell back into his chair like a sack of flour, and Vickers set his head into his hands.
    Olivia felt a brief wave of triumph. Finally, they saw her point.
    With the next breath, she felt sorry for them. Their employment here was no game, no masquerade; it was their livelihood.
    But should the duke perish, his heir might bring a new staff to replace them. She was doing them a favor.
    Cook was muffling sobs with her handkerchief. “I’ve known him since he was a boy. I never thought to see him brought so low. He was everything kind, you can’t imagine . . .”
    No, she certainly couldn’t. With a sigh, she said, “Perhaps what we need is a doctor.”
    Vickers scoffed. “His own brother is the finest doctor in England. Much good he did!”
    “Lord Michael tried his best,” Jones said with dignity.
    Olivia believed it. She had come to know Lord Michael during his courtship of Elizabeth Chudderley. He had not struck her as a man to do anything by halves.
    She had depended on Marwick’s estrangement from his brother to safeguard her masquerade here. But now, for the briefest moment, she wondered if he shouldn’t be summoned. “Do you think he might . . .”
    Alas, she was too self-minded to finish her sentence, for if he