“You want Mr. McKenna for your own, I think. Just like Papa wanted Maggie. He’s learned that there’s no separating those two—best you learn the same, mum.”

“You are an impudent little scrap, do you know that?” Eleanor jutted out her chin. She was not used to being insulted.

“Yes, mum. My name is Tad and I’m the eldest son, so someday I’ll own most of Papa’s property. Won’t you come in now and make us some lunch?”

Eleanor pushed a strand of damp hair back from her forehead and bent to grasp the handles of her suitcases. “You’ll inherit, all right,” she replied under her breath, “if some deranged cook doesn’t poison you in the meantime.”

“Beg pardon?” Tad asked sunnily, looking back at Eleanor over one thin shoulder.

Eleanor smiled a winsome smile and ignored the question. “Show me the way to the cookhouse, lad, and I’ll see that there’s a fine meal awaiting your father at midday. I’d like you to go and tell him so, in fact. That way, he won’t be eating at the McKennas’ when he needn’t.”

Tad grinned. “First let me show you to your room, miss. You look some the worse for the walk, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Would it matter if I minded?”

The obnoxious grin widened. “No, mum.”

Tad Kirk was a challenge, but Eleanor had dealt with far worse in her lifetime. “At least we understand each other, don’t we, Master Kirk? That’s more than a lot of people can say.”

In a hurry to begin cooking, and thus impress Duncan with her skill and assure herself of a place a stone’s throw from Seven Sisters, Eleanor set her suitcases down in the room Tad indicated without even looking around.

Duncan arrived at noon, covered in a mingling of soot and sweat. As he washed up at a bench in the corner of the kitchen, Eleanor was, for the first time, aware of him as a man rather than a means to an end. He was a well-built specimen, she reflected, watching the play of muscles in his back as he splashed water over himself and then shrugged back into his filthy shirt.

He grinned at her from beneath a thatch of soot-blackened hair as he sat down at the trestle table to eat the stew and biscuits she’d prepared for him. “So, you’ve made the same discovery as I, Miss Kilgore,” he observed not unkindly. “Do sit down and have a bite of lunch—I can’t abide people pacing while I’m trying to eat.”

Eleanor sat, but she hadn’t the appetite for stew and biscuits or anything else. “What discovery is that, Mr. Kirk?” she responded.