by Edith Layton
No one asked who “he” was. The viscount’s expression said it all. “I had an ogre of a nurse when I was a boy,” he said with a painful attempt at a smile. “As hard-hearted as she was hard-headed. She was fond of serving intestinal meats, kidneys, lights and livers. They were cheap and nourishing, and she was convinced that if a boy didn’t like something it meant it was good for him. And so I learned early on how to spread food around my plate, artfully distributing it so she didn’t know what I ate and what I did not. A strange skill, to be sure. I always thought it hard luck my own brother didn’t know me. But it was luck he didn’t, after all.”
“Still, you’d eaten of it enough to set your heart fluttering,” Maggie said indignantly.
“It was only the sight of you that set my heart fluttering, my dear.”
“You were very white,” she insisted, “and so though you protested, it was as well you drank all that was in the vial anyway.”
“Protested?” Lucian laughed, honestly this time. “But how could I? I couldn’t even speak to tell you it wasn’t needful. I downed it like a good chap, and then I was lucky I didn’t cast up my own kidneys at your feet.”
She nodded. “That was good. Because you’d eaten some of those kidneys, you can’t deny it.”
“Aye,” Will put in. “I hadn’t seen you smiling that wide since she dosed you with her tea. You were grinning hard enough to terrify me. I didn’t think all the purges in London would save you—though I didn’t dare tell the Mrs. P. that,” he added with a fond smile for Maggie, “because she terrifies me even more.”
“I thought I was just happy,” Lucian said almost wistfully. “The mystery of my uncle solved, the springlike air, I felt totally carefree. It may have been the belladonna, at that. You said I was sensitive to it. He kept a fashionable table, with everything put on my plate at the same time. Thank God for fashion. It gave me room to hide my preferences. Perhaps I did swallow more of that vile dish than I meant to because I was trying so hard to please him. I’m a monster of civility, I must learn to be less polite.”
They chuckled, for want of anything else to say.
Outside the tea shop window, a pale early spring twilight was casting pastel shadows on the pavements. A lamplighter trundled down the street, carrying his ladder and pole, delighting the populace by igniting the dazzling new gaslights there.
They’d finished all their little cakes and buns. The tea was gone, there was nothing left in their cups but messages only fortune tellers could read. The other patrons had long since left. Their waiter shuffled his feet in the corner. But none of the three rose from the table. Instead, Lucian asked about Boadicea. Maggie laughed and told him the most cunning thing she’d done just the other morning. Then Will told them a humorous thing Flea had said, as well. And then Lucian spoke of his new kitchen boy again.
The streetlights outside the window flared on one by one, as one by one evening stars came out in the night sky above them. But none of the three moved from the table. Because no one wanted to be the first to leave.
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