8. Winnie
CHAPTER EIGHT
WINNIE
Winnie, it’s Ken, your mother’s neighbour. Love, are you coming over soon? She’s getting out of hand again. There’s a giant pile of plastic dolls by the letterbox – Barry came home from work late last night and nearly had a heart attack when he saw them leering at him. I’m afraid we’re going to have to call the council again.
W ith my playlist blasting, Alaric and I get into an organising groove. By the time I glance at my phone screen, we’ve sorted over half the enormous pile and it’s past midnight. As if on cue, my stomach rumbles. All I’ve had since lunch was those pastries in my room.
I stifle a yawn. “I think we should call it a night.”
“Of course – your feeble body requires rest.”
I stick my tongue out at him.
“Who are you calling feeble? I moved all those heavy locomotives by myself, thank you very much.” Although Alaric was fitter than I expected, lifting antique tables with one hand and rushing about with cacti-filled terrariums without ever being out of breath. I try not to imagine the muscled, fit body beneath those stuffy, old-fashioned clothes, but I fail. I smile at him. “You need rest, too.”
“I prefer to rest during the daylight hours.” Alaric glances out the window, his expression unreadable as he regards the moon.
“Even so, it’s not easy to be ruthless with your stuff like this, but you’ve done amazing tonight.”
He really had. With the exception of my mum, who doesn’t count, Alaric is the messiest client I’ve ever had, just a few rungs below full-on hoarder. But unlike many clients, he’s engaging with the organising process. Once he got over his initial grumpiness, he genuinely seems to enjoy making decisions about his stuff. We already have several bags of rubbish – mainly broken tools and materials he’d been keeping ‘just in case.’ His mind enjoys categorising things, but living all alone in this huge castle has allowed him to get so distracted by his imagination that he hasn’t noticed things piling up.
I’ve been surprised at how fun it’s been for me, too. A lot of my clients are condescending and defensive about their habits. Most of my first day is spent convincing them that I’m not judging them.
But Alaric’s face lights up whenever I held up a train or painting that he was particularly fond of. He places them lovingly in their respective piles, sometimes offering me details about their construction that he was particularly proud of. Honestly, I never found trains particularly interesting until tonight, but Alaric could talk about paint drying in that deep voice of his and I’d listen.
Actually, he did talk about paint drying for a bit.
It’s surprisingly hot.
So hot that it’s nearly 1 AM and I haven’t even been to sleep yet, and this is usually around the time when…
“I am heading to the sitting room for a nightcap,” Alaric says stiffly. “Would you care to join me?”
“I’d love to.” I stand up, brushing dust and bits of train off my purple suit. My stomach rumbles again. “Will there be food?”
Alaric rings the call button on the wall in the hallway and speaks into an intercom. “Reginald, I am ready for my nightcap. Ms. Preston will be joining me, and she requires sustenance.”
A weird way to phrase that, but Alaric’s odd, old-fashioned way of speaking has endeared itself to me over the evening. I follow him as he shows me into an opulent bathroom to wash my hands (electricity! And running water! Such luxury!), and then escorts me up a narrow flight of stairs to a small sitting room decorated in jewel tones and hung with some of his intricate tapestries.
The room is surprisingly bare of Alaric hobbies, with only a small stack of ceramic mugs and a couple of half-finished embroidered cushions on a folding table beside the blazing fire. A wobbly stack of books teeters beside it.
Alaric folds his long, lean body into a well-worn wingback chair beside the fire, and indicates for me to take the chair opposite. I sink down gratefully, not realising until this moment how tired my limbs are and how cold I’d become. Castles aren’t exactly designed to capture the summer sun. I turn my hands to the fire, enjoying the warmth soaking into my bones.
“You were cold,” Alaric frowns.
“Weren’t you?”
“I do not feel the cold as you do. Ms. Preston, you must tell me when you feel a chill. I will have Reginald light the fire in my office when we work tomorrow.”
“That would be brilliant.”
Reginald appears in a blink, as if he were hiding in the shadows the whole time. “I have prepared dinner, Ms. Preston. It is not much, I’m afraid, but I hope it will suffice. Would you like a red or white wine, or do you prefer a hot drink?”
“I’ll have a white if it’s going, thank you, Reginald.”
“My pleasure.” He turns to Alaric. “Your usual, my lord?”
Alaric nods. Reginald slinks back into the shadows and appears a moment later with two bottles of wine. He uncorks the white and pours a generous amount into a crystal goblet for me. He then moves to Lord Valerian’s side and pours him a red, the wine sloshing nearly at the rim.
I raise my glass to Alaric. “Here’s to the first successful day of Operation Organise Alaric’s Life.”
He raises his glass in return. “To many more such evenings to come.”
Beneath the intensity of his stare, the butterfly in my stomach dances a little jig.
Reginald arrives and places a tray over my knees.
The food is nothing fancy – roast beef with a dark gravy, vegetables so perfectly cooked that they’re caramelised around the edges, and some kind of salady thing made with grains and sharp goat’s cheese.
But the flavours dance on my tongue. I don’t recognise a single one of the herbs Reginald has used, but everything tastes incredible. I finish the plate and wonder if Alaric will think I’m rude if I lick the rest of the gravy.
I look over at him. He has one of his books open on his knee, those fathomless eyes devouring the page with a hunger that made me wish I was made of paper and covered in diagrams of locomotive engines. The cat, Mirabelle, luxuriates across the back of his chair. He raises an eyebrow at me and sets his book aside.
I notice he doesn’t have a plate. “You’re not eating?”
“I am not hungry.”
“How can you not be hungry? We just sorted enough stuff that we could open our own eccentric art gallery and model train museum. I’m so starving I’m going to eat this plate.”
I hold it up and mime taking a bite out of the side.
He laughs, the sound startling for its unbidden mirth. I beam back at him. This guy is nothing like my other clients. Too bad there’s no permanent job out there for organising castles filled with art for eccentric, grumpy, hot AF peerage, because I think I’d nail it.
As quickly as his laughter began, Alaric snaps his lips shut. “Forgive me, Ms. Preston. I was not laughing at you. I merely…”
“You don’t have to apologise for having a good time. This work is quite personal. I’m digging around in the objects that make you who you are. It helps both of us if we can be friendly.”
That’s why I’m having dinner with you, even though it’s wildly inappropriate. Even though I’ve never eaten dinner with a client before. It’s for the good of the job. That’s the only reason.
It has nothing to do with the way you kissed me at the pub.
“So you live here by yourself?” I ask. “Just you and Reginald in your medieval bachelor pad? No…Mrs. Brooding Artist or Mr. Sexy Jazz Fan?”
I shouldn’t be so flippant with a client, but in my defense, he laughed at me first.
I like it when he laughs.
Lord Valerian doesn’t acknowledge my wit. His mouth forms a firm line. “I have sworn an oath never to marry lest it be for love, and it is difficult to fall in love in a lonely castle.”
“Are there other reasons to marry?”
“ Obligation, ” he growls. “Political alliance. Punishment, if you have a family like mine.”
“You might be surprised.” I dig my fingers into the soft leather of the chair. He’s a peer. You can’t even imagine his life. “You could try the dating apps. There’s someone out there who loves dusty old castles and model trains, I know it. I could help you with your profile if you want. I write all the marketing copy for Clutter Queens.”
(Mainly because Faye is too busy hanging out at long lunches to do it.)
“That is enough about me. I wish to speak no more of things that cannot be. Tell me of yourself, Ms. Preston. How did you come to do this work?” he asks me. “I didn’t know Professional Organiser was a métier until Reginald found your website.”
“You mean all little girls don’t dream of tidying up after rich people?” I smile to hide the blood rushing to my face. I’m not used to clients asking about me . The kind of clients I work for aren’t used to considering other people in the room, especially not the people they employ. “I went to university to study archaeology. I loved history, exploring different times and places, and how people lived. I thought my calling was to explore dusty tombs and dig up skeletons and solve the mysteries of the past.”
“And it was not?”
“Ew, nope. Too much dirt.” I screw up my face. “But I had this professor I adored. Professor Ciara Lewicki. Professor Lewicki was brilliant, but she was hopelessly disorganised, always late to class and losing her phone or important pieces of paper. I won a summer scholarship to work as her research assistant, and stepped into her office on the first day and nearly had a heart attack. It was a complete shambles, with papers and books everywhere. She couldn’t find a thing.”
I shudder, remembering the piles of paperwork in Professor Lewicki’s office and other, much taller piles that had taken over my mother’s kitchen, and the way the floor sagged and squelched beneath every step from the water damage.
“I knew I couldn’t work the whole summer in that mess, so I offered to organise everything for her. I’ve always liked things to be tidy.” I suck in a breath as the old shame comes flooding back. We’re skirting around the edge of things I don’t want to say in front of a client. Just because he kissed you doesn’t mean he cares about you. He’s merely being polite. “I don’t like owning a lot of stuff. I thought I could help her. I spent the first week of my internship cleaning her office and researching ways to help her stay organised. She was so impressed that she told me I had to meet a friend of hers, Faye Arnold, who was starting her own interior design business. Professor Lewicki invited Faye to have tea with us at uni. She showed Faye the office and explained the system I’d created for her paperwork. Faye looked me up and down through a pair of cat’s eye glasses and said, ‘I’ve been trying to get this woman to tidy up for years. You have a gift. You should work for me.’
“I dropped out of uni the next week, and I became Faye’s first employee at her high-end interior design studio, and then later, when I created the Winnie Wins System, we became business partners. In the early days, we worked out of a pokey front room in Faye’s Fulham flat. Faye’s parents were dignitaries and she had lots of wealthy contacts. I helped the clients organise their designer shoe collections and create Instagram-worthy children’s bedrooms, and Faye did all the design work and schmoozed the clients. A couple of years ago, we did a penthouse design for a celebrity influencer, and she and Faye hit it off and started creating design and organising content together. Now Faye has more followers than that influencer, so she focuses on building our online brand profile while I’m in charge of the design and organising team.”
And everything else.
I shove the accounts out of my head.
“Influencer? Content? Brand profile?” Alaric’s lip twists as he takes another sip of wine. “None of these terms are familiar to me.”
“That’s right, I forgot that you live in a Poe story and eschew technology. Influencers are people who make a living posting about a certain topic on the internet. My boss, Faye, makes videos showing people how to organise their designer purse collections or use scheduling software to make sure they don’t miss a single Botox appointment. I bet there are model train influencers on TikTok arguing about who built it best, Stephenson or Brunel.”
“There’s no argument to be had,” Alaric says, not a trace of irony on his stern features. “It’s Brunel, all the way.”
It’s my turn to laugh. “Exactly. And Brunel had the best fashion sense. Why stovepipe hats aren’t still in style, I’ll never know. You know, you could be an influencer yourself, if you ever fancy a career change from brooding, reclusive lord of the manor. You could make videos about your hobbies, like learning how to weave and—” Reginald appears to take my plate. “Reginald, that was delicious. I refuse to believe you simply whipped that up from leftovers you had lying around. Would it be possible to have that hot drink now?”
“Certainly, ma’am. I can offer you coffee, a selection of teas, or hot chocolate made from a recipe my grandmother passed down to me.”
One never passes up an opportunity for fancy chocolate. “I’ll take the hot chocolate.”
Raw pleasure crosses Reginald’s face. “I’m so happy. I hardly get to make Granny’s hot chocolate these days. I’ll be right back.”
“What time would you like to begin tomorrow?” I ask a few minutes later, raising the hot chocolate to my lips. “I’m here to work with you, so I’ll fit into your nocturnal schedule.”
“I usually arise around 5 PM.”
Wow, he wasn’t kidding about being a creature of the night.
“It might take me a few days to adjust to that time.” Especially given my sleep issues. I long to ask Alaric why he has chosen those late hours, but he’s my client – it’s none of my business why he does the things he does. I’m paid to indulge his whims.
I sip the hot chocolate. It’s amazing .
Before I can stop myself, a small moan of pleasure escapes my lips.
Exactly the same sound I made at the pub when he kissed me.
Alaric jerks back, his dark eyes flashing. His wine splashes down the front of his old-fashioned shirt. He does not attempt to wipe it. Instead, he glares at me as though I’m some wild creature who has found its way into his castle and he doesn’t know what to do with me.
My cheeks flare with heat. I slam my hand over my mouth, but it’s too late. The moan hangs in the silence between us.
Alaric breaks the silence. “Ms. Preston,” he says stiffly. “You should retire to bed.”
“I’m not tired!” I insist, taking another sip of hot chocolate. It’s also spiced with flavours that I don’t recognise. As I drink it, my eyelids droop. “It’s like battling jet lag. I’ve gotta stay up so that I can reset my body clock…”
Alaric rises from his chair just as my eyes fall completely shut, and the world fades into shadow and slumber.