"The Maid", "A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel"

[fiefoe]

Nita Prose's Molly the maid is instantly likable with her old-lady vocabulary and dedication to cleanliness, despite her dubious taste in men.

• Your polished mirror reflects your face of innocence back at you. It’s as though you were never here. It’s as though all of your filth, all of your lies and deceits, have been erased.
• I often pause to take in the grandeur of the lobby. It never tarnishes. It never grows drab or dusty. It never dulls or fades. It is blessedly the same each and every day.
• Every day before I arrive at work, my uniform is hooked on my locker door. It comes wrapped in clingy plastic, with a little Post-it note that has my name scrawled on it in black marker. What a joy it is to see it there in the morning, my second skin—clean, disinfected, newly pressed, smelling like a mixture of fresh paper, an indoor pool, and nothingness. A new beginning.
• But then something out of the ordinary occurs—such as finding Mr. Black very dead in his bed—and suddenly the day crystalizes, turns from gas to solid in an instant. Every moment becomes memorable, unique from all the other days of work that came before.
• His head was resting on one pillow, not two, and the other two pillows were askew beside him. I would have to locate the mandatory fourth pillow, which I most certainly put on the bed this morning when I made it, because the devil is, as they say, in the details.
• “As low to the ground as a squirrel’s behind,” is what Gran said when I told her about Cheryl and the toilet cloth.
• Tears came to his eyes then. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to look at any more pictures of his family. Every time I did, I felt an odd sensation in the pit of my stomach, the same feeling I got when I once accidentally knocked a guest’s earring into the black hole of a drain.
• Not that I’m prejudiced. I’m just saying that if a man I fancied was hairy, I’d get the wax out, and I’d rip the strips off him until he was clean and bare.
• I’m not sure what the protocol is for greeting a detective. I’ve received training from Mr. Snow on how to greet businessmen, heads of state, and Instagram stars, but never did he mention what to do in the case of detectives. I must resort to my own ingenuity and my memories of Columbo.
• While I have a great appreciation of bright white in décor and clothing, this style choice is definitely not working. White only works when a room is clean. And make no mistake: this room is far from clean.
• The yellow pad is askew, approximately forty-seven degrees off from being square with the corner of the table. Before I can stop them, my hands move to rectify this untidiness, shifting the pad so it’s parallel with the table. The pen is also askew, but there is no power on Earth great enough to make me touch it.
• “A beau. A bad egg. You talk kind of funny, you know that?” She took a big gulp from her glass. “Like an old lady. Or the queen.”
• She began using the brush on my face. It felt like my feather duster, but in miniature, like a little sparrow was dusting my cheeks.
• This was something I valued much more than any makeover. I couldn’t believe it was now mine, to cherish and polish from this day forth. It was filled with sand from a far-off, exotic place that I would never see. And it was a generous gift from a friend.
• As time passes, the wound doesn’t hurt as much as it did at first, and that’s always a surprise—to feel a little bit better and yet to miss the past.
• Monday, floors and chores.
  Tuesday, deep cleaning to give meaning.
  Wednesday, bath and kitchen.
  Thursday, dust we must.
  Friday, wash-and-dry day.
  Saturday, wild card.
  Sunday, shop and chop.
• Who ate powdered doughnuts without a plate? And these big, fat fingerprints. No offense, but how could you not notice those? They’re all over the glass top. I’ll have to polish every doorknob too.” <> I took a spray bottle and paper towel from my trolley and began spritzing the table. I cleaned up the whole mess in a flash. “See? Isn’t that better?” <> The behemoths’ faces mirrored each other—their long mouths agape. Clearly, they were quite impressed with my efficient cleaning techniques. Juan Manuel, meanwhile, was obviously embarrassed. He was still staring at his shoes.
• “Of course I can keep a secret,” I said. “Especially yours. I have a locked box near my heart for all of your confidences,” I said as I mimed locking a box on my chest.
• “Molly, I could kiss you. I really could.” “That would be wonderful. Shall we wait until after you swallow?” He laughed then and quickly gobbled the rest of his pasta. I didn’t even have to ask: I knew he was laughing with me, not at me.
• “A tissue for your issue,” I say. “Oh my God, Molly,” she replies. “You’ve got to stop saying that when people are upset. They’ll take it the wrong way.”
• Perhaps the police vacuumed, sucked up the traces—the microfibers and particles of the Blacks’ private lives, all caught in the confines of a single filter.
• I unzip the vacuum bag and take out the dirty filter. I grab a brand-new filter from my trolley and slip the gun inside it. I push the fresh filter into the guts of my vacuum. I zip it up. Out of sight, out of mind. I give the vacuum a shove forward and back. Not a sound does it make, my secret, silent friend.
• “Does what ever bother me?” “Cleaning up after rich people. Taking care of their messes,” I say. The detective pulls back as though I’ve sprouted the head of Hydra and one hundred serpents are hissing in her face. What pleases me, though, is that her elbows are no longer on the table.
• That’s the trouble with pain. It’s as contagious as a disease. It spreads from the person who first endured it to those who love them most. Truth isn’t always the highest ideal; sometimes it must be sacrificed to stop the spread of pain to those you love. Even children know this intuitively.
• We sat like that, Gran and me, on the floor, drinking tea, surrounded by Swarovski crystal animals and silver spoons. My mother’s photo was beside us, the absent third person at our tea party.
• I can’t believe it. Here we are in Gran’s sitting room, all four of us. Mr. Preston and I are on the sofa, and in front of me are Charlotte and Juan Manuel. Pleasantries are exchanged, as if this were a friendly tea party, though we all know it is not.
• She’s about to press Send when Juan Manuel stops her. “That doesn’t sound like Molly at all. She’d never write that.” “Really?” Charlotte says. “What’s wrong with it?” “You have to make it more pretty,” Juan Manuel offers. “Use respectful language. Maybe use the word ‘delightful.’ Molly uses this word a lot: deelightful. So nice.”
• “You think I know what that means?” he asks. “I feel like I’m on that TV show where you call a friend and they give you the answer and you win big money. But Molly, you called the wrong friend!” He pauses. “Wait. Hold on.” I hear some rustling on the end of the line.
• “Not Rodney,” he says. “His friends. The big ones. But Rodney gave the orders. Mr. Black burns Rodney, so Rodney burns me. This is what I get for complaining, for saying I don’t want to do Rodney’s dirty work. And for having a family I love when he doesn’t have one.”
• He smiles again in that way of his, and he grabs Gran’s apron from behind the kitchen door. It’s blue-and-pink paisley with flowers, but he doesn’t seem to care. He loops it over his head and hums to himself as he ties the string. I haven’t seen that apron on anyone in so long; even Gran herself was too ill to use it in her final months. And to see it become three-dimensional, to see a body give it shape again…I don’t know why, but it makes me look away.
• I couldn’t look at the pillow. I concentrated instead on her hands, a worker’s hands, a maid’s hands, hands so much like mine—clean, nails trimmed short, callused knuckles, the skin thin and papery, the blue rivers beneath them receding, their flow ebbing. Once, they extended out, her fingers grasping, reaching, but it was too late. We’d decided. Before they could reach anything, they relaxed. They let go. It didn’t take long. When all was silent, I moved the pillow away. I hugged it to my chest with all my strength.
• We have a new maid on our team. His name is Ricky, and he is Sunshine’s son. Cheryl was quick to point out that he has a lisp and wears eyeliner, two facts which, to be perfectly honest, are so irrelevant that I failed to notice either over the entire course of his month-long training.
• But I knew nothing else I said would matter. I knew this because I could see Charlotte on the bench. And she was smiling, a smile that was new for me, one that I would add to the catalog in my mind, filed under A for “awe.” I’d surprised her, shocked her completely, but I had not made a total mess of things.
• I am learning to be less literal, less absolute about most things. The world is a better place seen through a prism of colors rather than merely in black and white. In this new world, there is room for versions and variations, for shades of gray.
• A dark shadow fell across the person’s face, but I could see their hands clearly, and a pillow, clutched close to their heart. This figure reminded me so much of myself, and of Gran. It was as if I was seeing myself reflected twice in the mirror. That’s when I fainted.

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KJ Charles's characters are always so comfortable with their sexuality -- and that might be the biggest anachronism in her numerous historical romances. The audiobook narrator's voice pretty much carried the whole thing.

• “You speculated my mother bore a girl and switched me at birth with an orphan boy, as though she were a Bourbon queen, not a draper’s daughter,” Rufus said with all the patience he could muster, which was scant. “Then you said I was an impostor who’d stolen a dying man’s identity on the battlefield.”
• Conrad plastered on a sympathy-shaped smile. “Or such is the allegation. Oxney.” She always enunciated his title as if handling it with tongs, to convey her doubts that he owned or deserved it.
• Doomsday rubbed a hand over his face in a thoughtful manner that hid his mouth. It did not hide the malicious amusement that brimmed in his eyes, and Rufus looked at him and thought, This man likes trouble.
• He gestured around him at eight hundred years of dark, damp, chilly history. “It matters!” “Does it?” Odo straightened. He had a scholar’s stoop, or possibly a younger son’s cringe, but when he stood properly he was several inches over Oxney’s height. It transformed his appearance from a surprised owl to a tall surprised owl.
• “Yes, to both,” Luke said with a modest smile. “I like order and organisation.” Odo’s eyes rounded as though he’d said I like sharp spikes and mantraps. “Really? Could you—I don’t suppose—”
• “I’m sure I just said red. My mouth moved, and I distinctly heard sounds emerge.”
  “Yes, but you were guessing.”
  Oxney choked. He generally had a rather grim expression—Luke wasn’t sure if that was natural to his face, habitual after the war, or just the effect of Stone Manor—but when he laughed, the effect was transforming. It made him look like a man you’d laugh with, shoulders shaking, eyes meeting, joining in pleasure.
• Lord Oxney was so obviously a man who gave people chances: there was a very kind heart under the thick muscle and temper. It made him staggeringly easy to manipulate. Luke made a silent vow that nobody else would be doing that while he was here.
• “It’s long,” Doomsday said. “And involved. Would you prefer to read it first? Or if you wanted to refer to the plan of the estates at the same time, I could go through it, and take notes on your comments?” <> He knew. He had to know, because that was close as dammit to Shall I read it out to you?, so why the hell wasn’t he saying anything? Rufus had a strong urge to snatch the papers from his hand just to show him he didn’t need any bloody help, and enough self-discipline to recall that, in fact, he did.
• “Mr. Smallbone had a great deal of respect for your grandfather, and was badly affected by the change in his character. If you approach this, not as repairing your grandfather’s gross neglect, but as restoring his life’s work, I think you’d have Mr. Smallbone’s enthusiastic support.” That was exactly the kind of thing at which Rufus was dreadful. It made perfect sense when he was told, but he never seemed to think of it before someone told him.
• “No,” Rufus said flatly. “I’m not dismissing people because they’re caught between me and Conrad.” So many of his men were jobless now, soldiers abandoned by the country they’d spent years serving, returning to find themselves placeless and unwanted. <> “It would help them,” Doomsday said. “The threat would constitute the excuse people need to ignore Mr. Pauncefoot. If they can say ‘I have to do my job properly, I need the pay’—”
• He had at least resisted the temptation to describe Doomsday’s eyes as they deserved, although in fairness their deep brown was more than anything the shade of a cup of long-brewed tea, which probably wouldn’t sound any better than ‘bread’. The colour didn’t matter: it was their expression, the laughter and intelligence and occasional wariness, the life and light and just sometimes a flicker of something that Rufus could very easily persuade himself was desire.
• “Is there something I can give Odo, that you can delegate to him, when he finishes searching for the—” He waved a hand. “Non-existent needle in a very boring haystack? Why?” “Well, you saw him. Poor fellow just wants to be useful—second son of a third son, can’t blame him—
• “Why aren’t your paintings all over the house?” “Mother finds them vulgar,” Berengaria said, with precision.
• It showed the Marsh, an endless plain of grey-green-brown, studded with gnarled black thorn trees and cut by dull grey dykes. It looked like February, a dead water-land in a dead month, except that over it stretched a rainbow so strong and bright that its stripes were reflected in the water below. Flashes of colour leapt from dyke to dyke, setting the Marsh aglow. It was just a painting. Just the Marsh, lit with imaginary beauty. All the same, he looked at it for a long time with a feeling he wasn’t sure how to interpret, and moved on because he had the oddest feeling, just for a second, that he wanted to cry.
• The bull was simultaneously and rather unfairly being attacked by a dog, a snake, and a scorpion. The last of those had affixed itself lobster-style to the bull’s prominent scrotum. Oxney made a choking noise, suggesting he had also noticed that detail.
  “What did you call it, Miss Berengaria?” Luke asked.
  “Tauroctony. Bull-slaying. Do you know about Mithraism?”... “Tauroctony. It’s the essential image of the cult, as the crucifixion is to Christianity. The scorpion always goes there, by the way.”
• “Yes. I see. The lines—a little further, maybe.” Oxney’s voice was rough and his grip had tightened almost painfully. “I get lost when they’re close. God damn it, Doomsday, are you proposing to change your hand for me?” Luke knew he should find a secretarial way to reply, some mass of polite words. What he said was, “Yes.”
• At the age of thirty-three, Rufus thought he might be set in his ways, and wasn’t troubled by the fact. It was his body and he’d use it as he pleased, whether that was with men or with nobody at all.
• Luke grinned sleepily. “There’s a book, a cross between a Gothic novel and Fanny Hill, but for men’s men. The hero goes through many tribulations, including spending about half the story in a castle at the mercy of a wicked earl. And also the earl’s henchman, and occasionally his groom. Sometimes all three at once.” “Good God.”
• “I’m not a Gothic earl, and this isn’t a castle. It’s a Norman manor house.” “If I wanted accurate historical detail I’d fuck Mr. Odo, and don’t ever make me have that thought again.”
• Not that Gareth would want to do that, but he wouldn’t understand, not properly, because he wanted Luke to let go of the past, whereas Luke wanted to put a stake through its angry, miserable heart. <48%>
• “But I didn’t see how to do it without you. We make things work together. This is your place along with me, and you ought to be here. You ought to be here and safe and loved, and ruling the roast like the overreaching little swine you are, and I will do anything in my power to give you that if you just stay with me. That’s an order. I’m begging you. Please.”
  Luke swallowed. “Truly?”
  Rufus cupped his face. “My Doomsday. The end of my world.”