Chapter Text
Quilt wrapped tightly over her dressing gown, Audrey reached out with a shaking hand to touch the brass radiator Mr. Farnon had installed the other week. Her fingertips brushed against cold metal. Something was wrong, very wrong, with the new contraption, she thought, as her breath caught in the air. She did not like to begrudge Mr. Farnon and James in their quest for modernization of the practice, but at the moment she wished they had left her room alone. The old chimney might not have drawn particularly well, but at least it had worked.
There was only one thing to be done, though part of her dreaded the idea of doing it. She didn’t like waking Mr. Farnon in the middle of the night unless she had to—the man had his sleep stolen by cows in labor and sick ewes all too often. But Audrey reckoned he was the one responsible for this mess. Perhaps he knew something about the fixing of newfangled radiators she didn’t.
Trapsing down the hall, she rapped gently on the door and called out, “Mr. Farnon? Mr. Farnon, I need you.”
He always was a light sleeper, accustomed to being woken by the telephone at all hours. She wasn’t surprised when he stumbled to the door not a minute later, ginger hair ruffled and eyes bleary with sleep. “Yes, Mrs. Hall—is there some sort of emergency? I thought James was on call tonight.”
“It’s the radiator in my room. It’s not working. Could you take a look?”
A puzzled expression on his face, brain still half-asleep, he acquiesced with a short, “Of course. Let me fetch my dressing gown.” After he had thrown the garment about his shoulders, he gestured forward and said, “Lead on, Mrs. Hall.”
As they crossed the threshold into her room, he exclaimed, “It’s bloody freezing in here!”
It suddenly occurred to her the oddness of having him—a man—in her room. Oh, there was nothing to be embarrassed of in there. She was certainly not the type to leave her unmentionables lying about. Still, it was unusually intimate having him there, kneeling between her small brass bed and the radiator.
He muttered to himself as he poked and prodded at the metal. “Well, it is certainly set to on but I am not feeling any heat…the bleeding thing’s as cold as a block of ice, must have been off for hours.”
“I did try tinkering with it a bit myself, but I couldn’t get it to work,” she said, teeth chattering.
“Good Lord, Mrs. Hall, you’re practically turning blue! Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I didn’t like to wake you—it were your night off.”
“Let’s get you someplace warm,” he said, clapping his arms about her and bustling her down the hall to his bedroom. “There you are, nice and toasty.”
He went to the corner and stretched his hands over his own radiator, flexing his fingers. “Yes, everything seems to be in working order here. And you know if something were wrong in the boys’ room, Tristan would be the first to complain.”
Audrey’s body revelled in the warmth after hours in the cold—the difference in temperature made the air seem warm and moist, almost tropical, like an island in the Mediterranean instead of the ordinariness of her employer’s bedroom at Skeldale House. “If you’ll just give me a minute to get warmed up before I go downstairs. I can build up the fire in the sitting room and sleep on the sofa.”
He glanced at the clock and she could see him thinking. An almost bashful look came into his eyes, one she was fond of because she so rarely saw it. “Mrs. Hall, it’s three o’clock. In a few hours, we’ll both be getting up anyway…why don’t you just stay here and we’ll sort it all out in the morning. I’ll call the man first thing.”
“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Farnon. It would take some time to get a fire going.”
He moved over to the bed and began to grab at the blankets and pillows. “I can sleep on the floor if you like. Or…as it’s only for a few hours…we could share the bed?”
His face was turned away from her, but she could still see a blush creep up between the collar of his dressing gown and his hairline. Part of her knew she should protest for propriety’s sake—but she was all done in, and so cold, she didn’t have the heart to say no. And propriety didn’t have to be up at dawn to cook breakfast for three hungry veterinarians. “I’ll not have you sleeping on the floor on my account, Mr. Farnon.”
“Well, that’s settled.” He climbed into bed on the side that she knew was his, for it was the only side that was ever slept in, even five years after his wife had passed. Audrey slid under the blankets on the other side, trying to hold to the edge of the mattress as much as possible out of respect for her employer. She knew Mr. Farnon wouldn’t try anything improper—he’d always been a perfect gentleman to her. If anything, he seemed to forget she actually was a woman underneath her apron and cardigan. Better that than the alternative she supposed.
He tugged on the beaded pull of the small floral bedside lamp, another feminine reminder of his late wife. “I suppose this is goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Farnon,” she said. It was strange to say it again to a man after so many years; strange for him, too, she imagined
Audrey burrowed deeper and deeper under the covers, searching for a warmth she couldn’t find. Even in the warmth of Mr. Farnon’s room, her hands and feet still felt like ice—the cold and damp had gotten into her bones, the way it could on a cold Yorkshire night.
“Mrs. Hall, you’re still shivering,” Siegfried—Mr. Farnon—said in alarm. It was hard to think of him as Mr. Farnon when she was tucked next to him in his bed. “Come here,” he said, wrapping his arms about her and pulling her to his broad chest.
She wanted to say that she shouldn’t—that they shouldn’t—do this, but found herself too cold and too tired to protest. Her knees ached from a day of scrubbing floors and her back from scrubbing pig’s blood and muck and heaven knows what else out of veterinary whites. Her mind thought one thing, but her poor tired body had its own ideas.
“They told us back in the service that two were better than one at conserving body heat—they must have told you that in the Wrens, too, I expect,” he said, rubbing her back gently, easing her into the warmth.
Her head rested against his chest and she could hear his heart beat, feel the rise and fall of his breathing. “It were part of our training, yes.” She’d often thought of Siegfried, her Mr. Farnon, with his ginger whiskers and roaring rages as somewhat bear-like. Now he was as cuddly as a child’s toy in a shop window, more teddy bear than grizzly.
“Think of it as that…just two comrades in arms if you like,” he said. He was trying to reassure her, to quiet the voice that said this was somehow indecent, and turn it into something upstanding and normal and proper.
Siegfried’s dressing gown smelled of pipe smoke and the dried lavender she had put in with the laundry—a lovely mixture, fragrant and soothing. Her eyelids felt heavy, her body like it was slipping into a warm bath. So lovely.
On the verge of surrendering to sleep, she whispered into the dark, “This feels nice.”