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supposed. Something that Darragh O’Brien would likely drink.
    Forcing him from
her mind, she reached for the sugar and cream, added healthy dollops of each to
her cup.
    “We breakfast
casually most mornings,” Wilda explained, pointing to a row of silver chaffing
dishes on a nearby sideboard. “Please help yourself to eggs and sausages and
kippers. They should still be warm. Or if you’d rather, we can send down to
Cook for something else. Pancakes perhaps?”
    “Eggs and toast
will be fine, thank you.”
    When she made no
move to rise, Wilda took the hint and nodded to the footman to prepare a plate.
A second later, her cousin bit into the slice of toast still in her hand and
chewed, tapping a nail against her teacup whilst she did so.
    Was she making
her nervous? Jeannette pondered. She supposed with her London manners it might
be possible. Then there was the fact that despite her unmarried state she
outranked the woman socially. Mrs. Merriweather might be a relation of her
mother’s on the Hamilton side, but the connection was inauspicious at best.
    Cousin Wilda’s
father had been a mere baronet, and Mr. Merriweather, though descended from
good stock, was no more than the younger son of a viscount. A rather
impecunious viscount who hadn’t had the means to provide adequately for his
offspring in England. The reason her cousins Cuthbert and Wilda had moved to
Ireland nearly forty years before.
    The footman set
Jeannette’s plate before her. Improperly laden, she saw, with too many eggs, a
blood sausage for which she had not asked and only a single square of toast. Oh,
well, she was no longer at home and would have to get used to new routines and
customs, she supposed. Lifting her fork, she tried a bite of scrambled eggs.
    She had just
swallowed when a loud crash reverberated through the house. Jumping an inch in
her seat, her gaze winged across to her cousin. Wilda sat sipping her tea,
apparently not in the least disturbed.
    Wilda met her
look. “And how did you sleep, Cousin Jeannette? Well, I hope?”
    Hmm, how to
respond? Particularly with the nearly constant round of banging and pounding
that rang out more loudly than a harborful of shipbuilders.
    “My room is quite
comfortable, thank you, and the color most soothing.”
    Wilda’s thin lips
curved in a buoyant smile.
    “There is the
matter of the noise, however—”
    “Good day, my
dear, good day,” boomed an older man as he burst into the morning room on a
short but quick pair of legs.
    A puff of pure
white, his hair stood nearly straight up in a ring encircling his all but bald
head. His eyes were dark as mahogany and every bit as opaque, slightly
unfocused as if his thoughts were elsewhere. He wore breeches of brown worsted
and a plain blue waistcoat and jacket, his ill-tied neck cloth clean but
horribly wrinkled around his throat.
    Barely glancing
at her and Wilda, he made a beeline to the sideboard, clanged open one chaffing
dish after another until he found what he was seeking. Plucking a sausage out
of a pan, he ate the entire thing in a trio of bites. Jeannette watched in
amazement as the odd little gent picked up a plate and began to heap eggs,
scones, butter, jam, bacon and four more sausage links onto it.
    He gathered up a
fork and napkin, started back toward the door. “Can’t stay, m’dear, ever so
sorry, but I’ve got an experiment running and I mustn’t leave it long.”
    “What sort of
experiment?” Wilda asked, her usually even tones pitched high in suspicious
alarm. “You haven’t left a beaker of mercury heating again, have you?”
    The man, who
Jeannette concluded must be her cousin Cuthbert, turned an offended look upon
his spouse as though her question had wounded him to the heart.
    “Of course not,”
he said. “You know I promised I wouldn’t ever do that again, not after what
happened last time. If you must know, I’m timing the pollination cycle of my
Strelitzia
reginae.
”
    “Well then,”
Wilda declared on a