For All Eternity by Heather Cullman

Author:Heather Cullman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-05-19T03:57:11+00:00

Chapter 13

The Beast wasn’t jesting when he said that she’d need a good hand with a scrub brush and a firm knowledge of delousing. Miss Mayhew was beyond filthy, a veritable walking paradise for hair and body vermin. Why, she’d seen gutter water cleaner than that in the tub following the first of the girl’s three successive baths.

Grimacing at the remembrance of that water, brown as muck and afloat with dead lice, Sophie stretched her arm farther from her body, holding her charge’s gown as far from her as possible. Like Miss Mayhew’s person, it, too, crawled with heaven only knew what.

Wondering how the girl could live with herself, she started up the dark back steps, lifting her candle aloft to light her ascent. But stand herself Miss Mayhew did, and quite cheerfully at that. Indeed, she was actually pleased with the way she smelled, proudly referring to her foul odor as “angling aroma.”

Angling aroma, she had stammered out, came from the natural body oil that only one lucky woman out of a million was able to secrete. That oil, when allowed to accumulate for several months, created a scent much like that excreted by mating female fish, thus acting as a powerful aphrodisiac on the males.

According to her aroma blessed charge, male fish, sturgeon and salmon in particular, found her fragrance so enticing that they swam up to the shore and practically hurled themselves at her.

Sophie sighed. Why the viscount allowed his daughter to go about as she did, she couldn’t imagine. It wasn’t as if he himself were dirty, or that he’d failed to notice her poor hygiene. By the girl’s own admission he’d once mistaken her odor for that of a creel full of fish … a creel he’d misplaced three days earlier.

Shaking her head in bemusement, she climbed the last three steps to the attic. Could it be that he, like the fish, preferred the reek of “angling aroma” to sweet, ladylike scents like French Violet or Heliotrope?

Unable to believe that anyone, even the rattle-pate viscount, could have such a loathsome predilection, Sophie made her way down the corridor toward the room she shared with Pansy. Were it not for her candle and the light seeping from beneath the closed doors on either side, the hallway would have been blacker than oven soot.

As she walked through the gold-hazed murk, Sophie gave thanks for Mrs. Pixton and her competence. Not only had she concocted a most effective delouser, she had cunningly persuaded the girl to part with her precious “angling aroma,” thus allowing for its use.

Unsporting, the Pixie had pronounced Miss Mayhew’s odorous fishing advantage. It was extremely unsporting not to mention out-and-out fraud to call herself an angler using such unqualified methods. A true angler depended only on her skill with rod and tackle to hook her catch. Everyone knew it was so. When the housekeeper then slyly expressed doubts that Miss Mayhew possessed such skill, the girl bit at the bait and took the challenge.

From then on Sophie’s abigail duties went smoothly enough.

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