Temptation Read online

  Temperance was already tired and fed up, and she had no courtesy left inside her. “You want some, you help me,” she said in a tone that would take no argument.

  In the next second, she was brushed aside as the three stablemen began to pull the big parcels from the tubs of ice. But when the men left her trunks in the wagon, she stood there with her hands on her hips and glared at the back of them so hard that they turned around.

  Manus pulled a heavy trunk to the edge of the wagon, then bent and slid it onto his back. “Where you want it?” he said to Temperance.

  “She’s stayin’ in the queen’s bedroom,” old Eppie said, amusement in her voice.

  At that Temperance looked aghast. That horrid old room she’d found after that first night was the queen’s bedroom? What queen? she wondered. Which century?

  The other men took the remaining trunks inside, then carried them up the stairs to the dirty bedroom that Temper-ance had made her own. There was an empty room off the kitchen that Grissel called the housekeeper’s room, but Temperance refused to stay in there with the broken window and absence of furniture. So she’d found a room upstairs that had an old four-poster bed, and she’d fallen into it at night, too tired to care whether it was clean or not.

  “Only four of the others stayed this long,” Ramsey said softly to Temperance after the others had entered the house.

  “Four other what?” she asked.

  “Housekeepers,” the boy said. He was as tall as Temperance, so she looked him directly in the eyes. “Most of ’em left after the first day. When will you leave?”

  “When I finish my job,” she said quickly, then clamped her lips shut.

  “Ah. . . .” the boy said. “So you do have a reason for being here. Do you want to—”

  “So help me, if you ask me if I want to marry McCairn, I’ll deck you right here.”

  At that the boy smiled in such a way that Temperance knew that someday he was going to cause a lot of problems to a lot of females. She narrowed her eyes at him. “Do you think you know how to wash kitchen floors, or must there be horse manure spread on it before you Scots males will wash it?”

  Ramsey lifted his hands, palms up, in surrender. “Only two housekeepers ever washed anything.”

  “Then it must have been years ago,” she snapped at him before returning to the house.

  Inside the wagon was another letter from her mother, informing her daughter that Miss Charmaine Edelsten would be arriving in two days.

  She knows her role and about the secrecy, her mother wrote. I believe you will find that she is exactly what you asked me for.

  At that Temperance had to think about what she had asked for in a wife for a man she’d never met. Ah, yes: pretty, not too smart, and little to no education. Now, looking about the place, Temperance hoped the young woman was nearsighted as well.

  So for the next two days, Temperance scrubbed and cleaned and scraped as best she could. She ordered the three men, two old women, and the boy about as much as they would allow her, and she paid them with the beef her mother had sent. And it seemed that her mother was right, that the way to get a man to move was through his stomach.

  Temperance thought about this as she took the sharp edge of an axe to the kitchen table to scrape off the hardened bits. Maybe when she returned to New York, she could use this knowledge to get some funding from some of the more difficult residents of the city. Or maybe she should use this technique on the straying husbands of abandoned women.

  Suddenly she stopped scraping. What about cooking courses for women in the tenements? Maybe they could learn how to use what little they had to better advantage. Mmmm, she thought as she began scraping again.

  It certainly was odd that her mother had come up with this cooking idea. Temperance hadn’t realized that her mother could be of help in some situations. In her eyes, since she was fourteen and her father had died, Melanie O’Neil was someone who needed to be taken care of, not the other way around.

  As the day dawned that Miss Edelsten was to arrive, Temperance began to grow nervous. She’d managed to get four rooms clean: the kitchen, the entrance hall, the dining room, and one small bedroom in case the woman was to spend the night. Of course it was good that the rooms would be lit only by candlelight or she’d see the state of disrepair they were really in.

  Although, Temperance had to admit, now, as she looked at the clean rooms, she was proud of what she’d accomplished, and the old house seemed prouder now that parts of it were cleaned.

  Standing in the doorway of the entrance hall, Temperance ran her hand along the doorpost. Beautiful, she thought, looking at the ceiling where she could now see that cherubs peeped from around painted clouds.

  “This is a house a person could love,” she said softly, then shook her head to clear it. She had too much to do to think of beauty.

  Now she had to get Miss Edelsten together with James McCairn and . . .

  When it came to that part, her mind was a blank. What did she know about love? She’d never come close to feeling that “falling in love” sensation that seemed to make morons of people. Truthfully, Temperance didn’t understand the feeling, and from what she’d seen of it, she had no desire to understand it.

  However, get James McCairn together with his future bride, she must, and if the cooking worked with the men in the stables, why wouldn’t it work with their master?

  But Temperance didn’t know anything about cooking, and, as far as she could ascertain, neither did the two maids; but, she thought, how hard could it be, especially since she had a set of directions? Using Miss Farmer’s cookbook that her mother had given her, Temperance sat down and—using the steel pen her mother had sent her— she wrote out a menu, then had Ramsey deliver it to Mr. McCairn, wherever he was.

  Cream of Watercress Soup

  Fricassee of Lamb

  Riced Potatoes Stewed Tomatoes

  String Bean and Radish Salad

  Apple Pie

  An hour later, Ramsey returned, breathless, to say that the McCairn would be here for dinner as soon as it was dark. The boy then pulled a cute little lamb from across his saddle and tossed it into her arms. “For dinner,” he said, then turned the big horse he was riding and rode away.

  Temperance looked at the lamb, it licked her face a couple of times, then she set it down on the clean stones in front of the stables, but it followed her into the kitchen. When the lamb looked up at her with big eyes, she poured out a bowl of milk and set it before the tiny thing.

  Temperance took her copy of the menu for that night, crossed out “Fricassee of Lamb” and wrote, “Salmon with Cucumber Sauce,” then called to Ramsey to find a fishing pole and bring her back a fish.

  Temperance then set about figuring out how to follow a recipe.

  By the time the sun set and James McCairn arrived for dinner, Temperance was in a bad temper and quite nervous. Where was the woman her mother was sending? she kept wondering. Had she encountered the residents of Midleigh and given up? If no woman ever showed up, then Temperance would never get a wife for McCairn, so she’d never get out of this place. She’d spend her life living with these people who thought she was a joke. Or would she have to return to Edinburgh and live under the rule of Angus McCairn?

  When James entered the kitchen, slamming the door open and letting in a great draft of wind, she snapped at him. “Close that door! And why did you come in through the kitchen? Don’t you know that you’re the laird, so you’re supposed to enter through the front door?”

  “I thought you said you weren’t applying to be my wife,” he said, his voice amused.

  Temperance couldn’t help but laugh. She had on an apron, but she still had flour and pieces of salmon skin on her clothes. One thing was for sure: She wouldn’t be giving cooking lessons.

  For a moment James stood blinking at the kitchen as though he’d never seen the room before. There was a fire in the hearth of the huge old fireplace, and the old oak table in the middle of the room was sp