“Did you happen to buy me a new dress? I'm going to need something to change into. I suppose I could put this one back on, but it's terribly itchy with the salt.”
She heard him say, “Just one moment. Don't move. Don't go anywhere.”
“As if I had anywhere to go like this,” she said to herself, looking down at her naked body.
A moment later she heard Robert running up the hall. “I'm back!” he said. “I have your dress. I hope it fits.”
“Anything would be an improvement over—” Victoria gasped as she saw the doorknob turning. “What are you doing?” she shrieked.
Mercifully the doorknob froze in place. She supposed even Robert knew when he was going too far. “Bringing you your dress,” he said. But there was a hint of a question in his voice.
“Just open the door a few inches and drop it in,” she instructed.
A moment of silence, and then: “I don't get to come inside?”
“No!”
“Oh.” He sounded like a disappointed schoolboy.
“Robert, surely you didn't think I would allow you to come in here while I am bathing.”
“I was hoping…” His words trailed off into a big heartfelt sigh.
“Just drop the dress inside.”
He did as she asked.
“Now close the door.”
“Would you like me to drop a pasty inside, too?”
Victoria judged the distance between the tub and the door. She would have to get out of the bath in order to get the food. Not an appealing concept, but then again her stomach was roaring at the thought of a meat pasty. “Could you scoot it across the floor?” she asked.
“Won't it get dirty?”
“I don't care.” And she didn't. That's how hungry she was.
“Very well.” His hand came into sight, about an inch above the floor. “In which direction?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“In which direction should I push the pasty? I wouldn't want to send it out of your reach.”
Victoria thought that what should have been a very simple task was turning into a most complicated endeavor, and she wondered if he'd found some insidious peephole. Maybe he was stalling as he watched her. Maybe he could see her naked body. Maybe—
“Victoria?”
Then she thought of the scientific precision with which he approached everything he did. The crazy man probably did want to know which way to scoot the pasty. “I'm at about one o'clock,” she said, lifting her left hand from the tub and shaking it dry.
Robert's hand twisted slightly to the right, and he sent the pasty careening across the wood floor. It came to a halt when it smacked into the side of the metal tub. “Bull's eye!” Victoria called out. “You can close the door now.”
Nothing.
“I said you can close the door now!” she said, her voice a little more stern.
Another heartfelt sigh, and then the door shut.
“I'll just wait in the kitchen,” he said, his voice small.
Victoria would have answered him, but her mouth was full.
Robert lowered himself onto a stool and let his head drop dejectedly onto the wooden kitchen table. First he'd been cold. Then he'd been hungry. But now—well, to be frank, now his body was in perfect working order, and Victoria was naked in a tub, and he was—
He groaned. He was not comfortable.
He busied himself in the kitchen, putting away some of the food he'd brought home. He wasn't accustomed to the chore, but he rarely brought many servants with him to the Ramsgate cottage, so he was a bit more at home here than he would have been at Castleford or in London. Besides, there wasn't much to unpack; he'd made arrangements for the shopowners to deliver most of his purchases. He'd only brought with him what was ready-made and could be eaten immediately.
Robert finished his chores by popping two rolls into the bread box, and he settled back down onto the stool, trying very hard not to imagine what Victoria was doing right then.
He wasn't successful, and he started feeling so warm he had to open a window.
“Keep your mind off her,” he muttered. “No need to think about Victoria. There are millions of people on this planet, and she's just one of them. And there are a number of planets, too. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars…”
Robert ran out of planets in short order and, desperate to keep his mind on anything but Victoria, started in on the Linnaean system of taxonomy. “Kingdom, phylum, then…”
He paused. Was that a footstep he'd heard? No, he must have imagined it. He sighed, then resumed.”…class, order, family, and then… and then…” Damn it, what came next?
He started pounding the table with his fist in an attempt to jog his memory. “Damn, damn, damn,” he said, punctuating each pound. He was well aware that he getting a bit too upset over his inability to remember a simple scientific term, but the task had taken on almost desperate proportions. Victoria was upstairs in the tub, and—
“Genus!” he fairly yelled out. “Genus and then species!”
“I beg your pardon?”
He whipped his head around. Victoria was standing in the doorway, her hair still damp. The dress he'd bought her was a hair too long and dragged on the floor, but other than that it fit her quite well. He cleared his throat. “You look—” He had to clear his throat again. “You look fetching.”
“Thank you very much,” she said automatically. “But what were you yelling about?”
“Nothing.”
“I could have sworn you were saying something about the genius of the three seas.”