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admit it, but she’d been a bit worried about Ethel herself. The girl just wasn’t acting normally. She never had been as lively as Gertie and sometimes moved at a snail’s pace, making Mrs. Chubb feel like screaming. But she’d always been dependable. Give Ethel a job and she’d get it done, albeit in her own time.
    But lately the girl had been dithering about so long that half the jobs hadn’t been completed. Mrs. Chubb had finished them herself, hoping the lapse was only temporary. It was time she had a talk with the young lady, she thought, watching Gertie stride to the door.
    Just as the housemaid reached it, the door flew open, narrowly missing the loaded tray. “’Ere,” Gertie yelled indignantly. “What’s your bleeding hurry, then?”
    Michel bounced into the kitchen, waving his fist in the air. “He ’as the nerve to complain about breaking ze dishes,” the chef announced in his fractured French accent. “
Moi,
the most superb cook in the whole of the British Empire. Howcan I create ze masterpiece if I ’ave to worry about ze dishes,
s’il vous plaît
?”
    “Oh, blimey, he’s orf again,” Gertie muttered, lunging through the door and letting it swing to behind her.
    Mrs. Chubb winced as Michel grabbed a saucepan and crashed it down on the cast-iron stove. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. Sometimes she wondered why she kept working at the Pennyfoot at her stage in life. Surely there was an easier way to make a living. Then she thought about Arthur Barrett. There were some compensations, after all.
    She wondered if the new doorman had ever been married. A man as handsome as he was surely must have had scores of women after him. She’d ask him. The very next opportunity she got.
    The thought of talking to Arthur again gave her so much pleasure she actually smiled when Michel threw a colander onto the tiled floor, no doubt putting a dent in the side of it.
    She didn’t smile, however, when she carried a sack of flour across the kitchen, pouring a white trail from the hole cut in the bottom. When she picked up the jug of fresh milk in the larder and found a dead mouse floating around in it, her yell of wrath echoed across the kitchen yard.
    Master Stanley Malton was up to his tricks again. He deserved a smacked bottom. Her hand itched to do just that. She should feel sorry for the child, she knew, him having just lost a parent. Apparently his father’s untimely demise, however, had not affected the child’s penchant for mischief.
    She could only hope that someday the little scalawag would grow out of his ill behavior before he did something really terrible and caused someone harm.
    Shaking her head, she began clearing up the mess, determined to put Stanley out of her mind and dwell on a more pleasant subject. Like Arthur Barrett, for instance.

CHAPTER
4
    The George and Dragon had stood for more than two hundred and fifty years on the sharp curve of what was still called the Dover Road, so named for the route the stagecoaches took in the mid-nineteenth century.
    Although the more modern horse-drawn carriages and traps had replaced the coaches, and the years had added height to the oaks and elms that shaded the roof, the interior of the inn had changed little since the Cavaliers raised their tankards in support of Charles I.
    The same solid oak beams still supported the ceiling, hung with tankards, jugs, and assorted brass pots, making it treacherous for a man of above average height to cross the floor without bowing his head. In fact, more than one man had received a crack on the noggin when a belly full of ale had dimmed his eyes and his attention.
    Sir Frederick Fortescue was no exception. Some said that it was due to the constant bashing of his head that the colonel was off his rocker. Others more charitably attributed the man’s decidedly bizarre behavior to extreme pressure under gunfire while serving in the army during the Boer War.
    Whatever the reason, the colonel was blissfully