Temptation Read online

  “But I thought you had a castle, and this house seems to be huge.”

  “Castle! It’s a ruin on the hill. We use the stone to repair the houses in the village. And as for this house, my great-grandfather built it.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “He married a pretty little thing that wanted the comforts of London, so he tried to give them to her and he built her a house that cost too much.”

  “So now you hate all women,” Temperance said with such sarcasm that her mouth turned downward.

  “Oh, no,” James said, wide-eyed. “I love them too much, but as I’ve told you, they can’t take the life here. Too hard for them. Now, I’ve no more time to explain my life to you. I think you should go back to my uncle and tell him you’d rather return to New York and take your chances. We have no jobs for ladies here.”

  Temperance didn’t move. “I somehow doubt that life here is more difficult than life in a New York tenement. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll remain here.”

  “Suit yourself,” James said as he walked toward the door, then turned back, his hand on the latch. “Do you mean to sleep with me every night?”

  “Certainly not!”

  “Ah, pity,” he said, then left the room.

  For several moments Temperance sat there blinking. “What an extraordinary encounter,” she said aloud, then got out of bed. And the only thing she had to put on were the still-damp garments she’d worn the day before.

  Six

  By two o’clock in the afternoon, Temperance was ready to admit defeat. She was sure she could clean up the tenements of New York City, but the household of James McCairn was already defeating her.

  The house was large, with many bedrooms and four reception rooms, and Temperance could tell that when the place was built, it had been beautiful. There was evidence of plaster ceilings, hand-painted silk wallpapers, inlaid floors. There were lighter places on the walls where she was sure paintings had once hung. Dents in the floors showed where furniture had once stood.

  But now the house was a filthy wreck. Cobwebs hung everywhere, mold crept up the once-beautiful wallpapers, animals had eaten holes in the floors. Four of the bedrooms had holes in the ceiling from the roof, and the rooms were full of pigeons and, in one room, chickens. What furniture there was, was grimy and damaged.

  But there wasn’t much furniture. In fact, there wasn’t much of anything in any of the rooms. And it didn’t take great skills of deduction to figure out that what had been in the rooms had been sold to pay debts.

  “Even the rich can be poor,” Temperance muttered as she closed the door of a bedroom where half a dozen hens were sitting on their nests. After seeing the state of the house, she had great sympathy for James McCairn and his attempt to remain living in the wreck of the house.

  She still hadn’t had anything to eat since the day before, so she went in search of the kitchen and the cook, but when she opened a door she found herself in a courtyard—and it was as though she’d stepped from hell into heaven. In contrast to the filth and neglect of the house, the courtyard was clean and beautiful. The paving stones sparkled as though they had just been washed, and there wasn’t a weed to be seen.

  Frowning in puzzlement, Temperance walked the short distance to what looked like a stables and peered inside. What she saw made her blink. Under a long slated roof were six horses, and although Temperance didn’t know more about horses than that they pulled carriages, she could see that, while two of the horses were for work, the other four were for something else. The four animals were divinely beautiful: sleek, glossy, radiant with health.

  In the hour and a half that she’d spent wandering through the house, she hadn’t seen another person, but here she saw three men and a tall, half-grown boy, each busy at the tasks of polishing a harness, cleaning an empty stall. One man was throwing buckets of clean water on the already clean stones. The boy was feeding apples to one of the horses.

  Not one of the people looked up at Temperance, or seemed to show any interest in her.

  “Excuse me,” she said, but none of the men looked up. “Excuse me,” she said louder, and the boy turned to look at her. One of the men glanced up from the harness, then spit before he went back to his work.

  Temperance walked toward the boy. “I’m the new housekeeper, and—” She stopped because one of the men gave a derogatory sound that made Temperance turn toward him.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said. “Did you have something to say to me?”

  The man glanced up at her with a half smirk on his face. “Housekeeper,” he said. “The new one.”

  Had Temperance been younger and less experienced, the man’s attitude would have made her turn away, but she’d dealt with hostile men for years. She moved to stand in front of him, and with her hands on her hips, she glared at the top of his head. “If you have something to say, I’d like for you to say it to my face.”

  The man looked up at her, a smirk on his face, and he opened his mouth to speak, but the boy put himself between Temperance and the man.

  “We’ve had a few housekeepers,” the boy said quickly, “and they don’t last long. McCairn throws them out.”

  “Or they run away,” the man said from behind the boy.

  This startled Temperance as she had been under the impression that she was the first woman to be offered the job since the former housekeeper had died. Ignoring the man behind the boy and the other men, who had now stopped working to look at her, she said, “How long ago did the other housekeeper die? The older woman? And how many have been here since then?”

  For a moment the boy blinked at her without saying a word. He was a handsome child, and for all that he was nearly as tall as Temperance, she didn’t think he was much older than about twelve. Obviously, he was being fed.

  “Six,” the boy said at last; but when the other men snickered, he blushed a bit and said, “More like a dozen.” He seemed to offer the words in apology.

  “A dozen women have tried this and failed?” Temperance asked, eyes wide. She wasn’t going to say so, but no wonder the men in the stable yard paid no attention to her. They probably thought she’d be gone by evening.

  “And what made them fail?” she asked, the anger that had risen in her now gone as she looked around the boy to the men and waited for an answer.

  “The McCairn,” one of the men said.

  Temperance looked at the man with a shovel full of horse manure. “Aye, the McCairn,” the man said.

  The third man just nodded, then swished the water on the stones with a wide broom.

  Temperance looked back at the boy. “The McCairn,” the boy said with a bit of a sigh, as though in resignation.

  “I see,” she said, but she saw nothing, and, suddenly, she felt that she should defend her entire race. “This morning Mr. McCairn told me that the women he met were too soft, that the life here for them is too hard. I think I should say that I’m not a soft woman, that I’ve seen and done—”

  She cut herself off because the men were laughing at her. At first they had just exchanged smiles with each other, as though they knew something that she didn’t; then they put down their shovels and brooms and harness, and flat out laughed at her.

  Temperance’s anger returned. Since the boy was the only one who wasn’t debilitated with laughter, she turned to him, her brows raised in question. But the boy couldn’t seem to say anything either. All he could do was shrug his shoulders and say, “McCairn,” and that seemed to be all the answer there was.

  With her hands made into fists at her side, Temperance turned on her heel and went back inside the house. And when she flung open a small wooden door, she found herself in what had once been a magnificent kitchen; but, now, like the rest of the house, it was dirty and empty.

  Pulling out a scuffed wooden chair from the big table that sat in the middle of the room, Temperance collapsed on it. There was nothing like extreme physical discomfort to make a person want to give up. She hadn’t had anything to eat in nearly twenty-four ho