Chapter Text
“Mauuuuuud!” Declan bellowed up the staircase. “How in God’s name can one woman have so many trunks?”
“Don’t disturb me, Declan, I am busy!” Maud screeched back at him, not budging from her seat in front of her dressing table mirror.
On either side of her, two young women winced at the volume of her yell.
“Taggie, find my shawl. Despite it being the first of May, this dank house has a chill,” Maud ordered, waving her hand.
Taggie, her auburn hair pinned into a loose bun at the nape of her neck, sighed, left her mother’s side, and began to unpack a trunk. Her father was right. Her mother’s things did fill endless trunks. It made Taggie grateful that they had only moved once in her short life, as she suspected she would be responsible for much of their unpacking.
Anne, their housekeeper’s daughter and Taggie’s closest friend, rolled her grey eyes at Taggie in the mirror as Maud began to frantically root through her jewelry box. “What type of earrings would be best, you think? Diamond or emerald?” Maud asked, holding one of each up against her lobes.
Anne tucked a strand of her black hair behind her ear and held Maud’s gaze in the mirror. “I would have thought pearl--or none--most appropriate for an afternoon indoors at home.”
Maud rolled her eyes and huffed. “You’re more of a bore than Taggie. You’d have us looking like paupers.”
She shoved the box at Anne, dropping the emeralds back inside. “I’ll wear the diamond. Find the other for me.”
“Oh, girls, what’s to become of us? I’ve always hated the country,” Maud whined as she made faces at herself in the mirror. “Permanently leaving town for this mouldering heap of stones is a fate worse than death.”
“Mama, you know we needed to sell the house in London,” Taggie said softly.
“Yes, because your father loves cards and that poetry rag more than he loves me.”
And because you love gowns, jewels, and parties more than you love him, Taggie added silently.
Maud was the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and Declan was an impoverished baronet who inherited an entailed estate. In the beginning, the match had suited them both. Maud and her family wanted connections to the nobility, even if only at the lowest rungs of the social ladder, and Declan needed money. However, as they aged, the union increasingly suited neither of them. The money had run out, as they both lived beyond their means, and Taggie was their only child--Maud had been left infertile after a difficult delivery. No money, no son. No peace for anyone.
Maud began to fuss with her hair, piling her long auburn waves in various configurations on top of her head. “We must be ready for callers. In a place as boring as this, I’m sure our arrival is the most exciting thing to happen in a decade. If only your father’s lands were in a more interesting part of the country.”
Maud gave Taggie a withering look as she draped the shawl over Maud’s shoulders, taking in her simple, white muslin dress and her lack of adornments. “I’m going to have to work twice as hard to find you a husband here, Agatha, as I did in the city. And since all my work there came to nothing, I despair to think of your prospects in the country.”
Taggie had long accepted that marriage was the only vocation she was able to have, and her mother constantly reminded her how she failed to meet expectations. However, she did have a certain level of sympathy for her mother’s fixation. As an only child on an entailed estate, her marrying well was her mother’s best hope for an old age that wasn’t on the streets or forcing herself on obliging relatives. The curse of womanhood, ever dependent on men and their whims. She just wished she had any sort of dowry to help the process along.
Suddenly Declan appeared in the doorway and chuckled as he watched Maud put on her diamond earrings. “Gods, woman. Are we headed to the opera, and you forgot to tell me?”
She beamed at him. “I’m simply preparing myself for the callers we’ll have, as you rode the circuit yesterday, introducing yourself to all the important families.”
“I did no such thing,” he scoffed.
“Am I the only one who thinks of the future of this family?” Maud wailed, tears (false or genuine, Taggie could never tell) welling in her eyes.
“I hear my mother calling for me,” Anne muttered, pushing around Declan and disappearing down the stairs.
“I’ll take a walk,” Taggie whispered, following close on Anne’s heels.
Taggie headed directly for the wood beside the house. It was filled with the most lovely bluebells--no better place to escape her parents’ quarrel. It was better to be out of sight anyway. Even when Taggie was perfectly silent, Maud always accused her of siding with her father through a tilt of her head or a too rapid or slow blink of her eye. To be fair, Taggie did usually side with her father, as he doted on her and was much gentler with her than her mother was.
Her mind wandered as she wandered the dirt path, now a bit soggy from recent rains, into the wood. It seemed the last few years were just one long quarrel that waxed and waned like the moon. Her parents had always argued, but with the ever-increasing stack of debts, Taggie felt like there was never a moment’s respite.
As Taggie rounded a bend in the trail, she happened upon two people in the clearing. She heard them before she saw them. It was a terrible sound--a ragged groaning, crying out, and slapping. Afraid someone was mortally wounded, Taggie picked up her skirts and hurried around the bend.
What she saw shocked her so that she stumbled over her own feet and found herself on all fours, the front of her white dress covered in mud.
Less than ten feet in front of her was a shocking tableau. A woman--a dairymaid based on her attire--was bent over at the waist, her hands pressed against a large oak tree to steady herself. Her skirts were thrown up over her head, and a tall, dark-haired man was quite vigorously rutting against her backside.
Taggie, who had not even had an introductory conversation about the birds and the bees was appalled. And fascinated. She couldn’t tear her eyes away. She couldn’t speak, she couldn’t move.
Her entrance into the clearing wasn’t exactly silent, what with the falling and the crying out in shock and the splashing down into the mud. The man, realizing he had an audience, never paused the pumping of his hips.
He simply grinned down at her. “Stay just like that, and I’ll come for you next,” he said, breathless from his exertions.
The moaning dairymaid, spared one hand to thrash about at her skirts in order to see what was going on. Upon noticing Taggie, the maid screamed in horror and ran off, stumbling and falling herself as she made her way over the fence and into the meadow that led to the adjoining estate.
Blushing furiously now, shocked into action by an awareness of what she had just witnessed and the risk to her own reputation, Taggie clambered to her feet and began to walk backwards.
This vile man, however, simply stood there with his hands on his hips--shirt open, trousers around his ankles, cock out. No hint of shame about him.
He nodded in the direction of the departed woman. “She’s more partial to barnyard-themed dirty talk than witnesses, so you see, you’ve quite ruined my afternoon sport,” he drawled.
Then he smirked as his eyes roved over Taggie’s body, lingering over the low neckline of her gown. “Or perhaps not. Perhaps my prospects have improved. I suspect you smell rather less like cow shite.”
Taggie’s mouth fell open. She felt naked under his brazen, direct gaze, and she hated the blush she felt overtaking her chest and face, turning both as red as her hair, nearly as much as she hated the sudden aroused throb between her own legs. Surely an animal, involuntary response to such a lewd, base surprise. “You are utterly ab--ab--”
He laughed, his eyebrows raised, clearly relishing how outraged she was. “That syllable suits you--you and your perfect mouth. I could watch you attempt to utter it all day.” To emphasize his point, he narrowed his eyes at her and murmured a very saucy “ab” of his own, fixing his full lips into a pout on the “b.”
“You’re ab-abhorrent!” she spat as she turned on her heel and ran back to the Priory as fast as her legs would carry her.
When Taggie entered the house, she was immediately greeted by her mother and a woman she didn’t recognize.
Maud’s smile froze in place, and her eyes went cold seeing the state of Taggie--muddy dress, flushed face and neck, heaving bosom, eyes full of tears, on the verge of hysterics.
“Good Lord, child. Tidy yourself up. We have a visitor. I can’t have my daughter looking like some violated dairymaid. You’ll never find a husband looking like that.”
“Thankfully Mrs. Vereker isn’t a suitor, Lady O’Hara,” Anne said sweetly, guiding Taggie upstairs. “We’ll be down directly.”
“What on earth happened?” Anne asked as she helped Taggie step into a new dress.
“I met the most terrible man in the wood.”
“Oh, perhaps you did meet a husband then?” Anne teased.
“Don’t say that. He was disgusting,” Taggie hissed as she splashed water on her face. Then, she gave Anne a small smile and a nervous giggle as she pulled her dress over her head and wiggled into the clean white muslin gown Anne dropped over her head. “He was violating a dairymaid, so Mama was rather close to the mark. This place seems to be…rather less wholesome than I anticipated.”
Anne’s eyes went wide with shock and both girls giggled, a little too high-pitched with the thrill of the taboo. “You must tell me. All of it,” Anne whispered urgently.
Taggie leaned in closer, ready to whisper all of it into her friend’s ear. She knew Anne knew more about coupling and congress than she did--a benefit of being of the serving class, was worldly knowledge--and Taggie wanted both to share this knowledge with her friend and also bask a bit in the glow of knowing something Anne didn’t about things sordid and improper. Anne might know things, based on talk she overheard, but Anne had never seen what Taggie had just seen.
Before Taggie could utter a word, Maud screamed for them both from the drawing room downstairs, demanding they stop being rude to their caller. Both girls sighed, smiled, then linked arms and headed back downstairs.