The Rogue Not Taken

“Never,” a girl who was not Agnes replied.

“Only what we see in the gossip pages,” a third piped in. “He’s more likely to end a marriage than to start one.”

Laughter rang around the table, and Agnes shook her head as a footman entered the kitchens from the opposite end of the room. The housekeeper lifted her chin in his direction. “Are they ready for the next course?”

He nodded. “The lady left, and the men aren’t speaking.”

Agnes pointed to the goose. “Silence makes eating easier.”

“Eating makes not murdering each other easier, I think you mean.”

Sophie thought he made an excellent point, but Agnes, apparently, did not. The housekeeper looked sharply at the footman. “When I wish to know what you think I mean, I shall ask, Peter.”

The footman put his head down and went for the goose, as told. When he lifted the heavy platter to his shoulder and left, Agnes’s gaze found Sophie, shrouded in the dim light of the doorway. Sophie made to leave, but was stayed when the older woman noticed her, her eyes going wide in surprise before she offered a kind smile.

The conversation at the table continued, unaware of the silent exchange. “She left the table?”

“You wouldn’t want to do just that?”

Sophie nearly laughed. Most assuredly, anyone in their right mind would want to leave the table. “Of course I would,” came the reply, “But even I know you don’t leave a meal with a duke.”

“Two dukes, technically.”

There was a quiet pause, and then “Who is she?”

A young man replied. “The marquess introduced her as his future wife. Some lady nob.”

Of course, she was neither of those things. Not really.

“I helped her dress for dinner,” Sophie heard the maid whom she’d met earlier. “She don’t seem a nob. She’s wounded in the shoulder. And very tall.”

“Being tall don’t mean anything,” someone else piped up.

“Being wounded in the shoulder does, though. Does she have a name?”

Sophie had spent much of the last decade being disdainfully discussed as though she were an insect under glass, but always by aristocrats. It was a new experience entirely to be discussed by servants, and she was immediately aware that she belonged neither above nor below-stairs.

Her stomach growled.

Here, at least, she could eat pasties while being gossiped about.

“As a matter of fact, she does have a name,” she said, stepping into the light. Silence immediately fell and she would have laughed at the wide eyes around the table if she weren’t so hopeful that she would be welcome here, in this kitchen, with these people, who seemed more honest than anyone she’d known in recent years. “And since she left dinner without even finishing her soup, she’ll share it for the price of a pasty.”

There was a beat, during which the whole kitchen seemed to still, as though the words had come from up on high instead of from a woman wearing an ill-fitting dress. And then, they came unstuck en masse, moving and shuffling left and right, making room for her. She took her seat, a plate appearing before her, a warm pastry at its center. “It’s chicken and veg,” the maid to her right explained. “There’s also pork and veg.”

“This is lovely,” Sophie said, tearing the pasty in two, releasing a lovely whisper of steam alongside the magnificent scent of pie. Her mouth began to water, but she resisted taking a bite just long enough to say to the assembly, “I am Sophie Talbot.”

She almost did not hear the gasp of recognition from a collection of girls at the end of the table over her own sigh of enjoyment once the food was on her tongue. But she couldn’t not hear the excited “You’re a Soiled S!”

She stopped chewing.

“Ginny, you don’t just call her that,” another girl said. “It’s not flattering.”

The girl called Ginny had the grace to look mortified.

Sophie swallowed and pointed to the cask of ale at the end of the table. “May I?”

A gentleman nearby immediately filled a pewter mug and slid it toward her, golden liquid sloshing over the edge when she caught it. She drank. And brazened it through. “Some do refer to me as a Soiled S.”

“For your father,” said Ginny. “In coal.”

“How do you know that?” a young man across from her asked.

Ginny blushed. “I read the papers.”

“The scandal sheets are not the papers,” Agnes said.

The table laughed and Ginny dipped her head in embarrassment. Sophie took pity on the girl, taking another bite of pasty. “They’re more interesting than the papers, aren’t they, though?” She smiled when Ginny’s head snapped up. “I’m the youngest of the five.”

“The young ladies Talbot,” the girl explained to the table. “Daughters of Jack Talbot, who grew up ’ere, in Cumbria. Like us!”

“Except she’s a lady, so not at all like us,” the man at the end of the table said. What a strange world this was, where in one moment she could be too cheap for a duke, and in the next, too expensive for anyone else.

Without home.

She ignored the thought. “Actually,” Sophie said, “I am not very different. My father knows his way around a coal mine, as did my grandfather, and my great-grandfather.”

“My brother works in the mines,” someone piped up.

Sophie nodded. “Just like your brother, then. The only difference is that my father was lucky and bought a plot of land that eventually became the mouth to one of the richest mines in Britain.” Eyes widened around the table, as her carefully bred London accent gave way to her North Country brogue, and she relaxed into the tale, having heard it a thousand times as a child. “He dug and struck for days before he hit on something he could use. Something nobs in London could use.”