An Affair Before Christmas

by Eloisa James

  “Leave?” he said. “Why would I do that?”

  “Because this is very awkward,” she hissed, sitting down.

  He promptly sat down beside her.

  “Jemma is sitting there.”

  “Why should I leave?”

  “You cannot possibly be interested in things of this nature,” Poppy said. “And I am.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes, and I would feel awkward if you were here. Please, may I ask you as a favor to leave?”

  “You may ask but I’m not leaving.” He scowled at her and folded his arms. “After all, you said we were to be friends.”

  Poppy felt a pulse of anxiety that he was irritated. She gave herself a mental shake and said brightly, “Then of course you’re welcome to stay. Surely your friend Gill must be here? Isn’t he coming to greet me?”

  “He is not here. Why do you ask?”

  “Because you never do anything without Gill?” she suggested. “Because if you’re at an intellectual pursuit, it must be an interest of Gill’s?”

  “That’s quite an insult,” he said in a very even tone.

  “I don’t mean it to be. Look, there’s Dr. Loudan, and since I explicitly asked him to come, I must greet him. If you’ll excuse me, Fletch.”

  She was gone.

  Fletch stared after her in dumbfounded surprise. When he pictured meeting Poppy, he didn’t imagine her prancing away from him. Or smiling up at a young man with a long nose and…Fletch felt his fists curl and he was on his feet before he realized it.

  He walked through the crowd and eased behind Poppy where she couldn’t see him. For some reason he was quite certain that she wouldn’t welcome his presence.

  “I found the notes you sent me on the sloth’s hind feet fascinating,” she was telling this Dr. Loudan. He was short. Well, perhaps he wasn’t short but he was shorter than Fletch. I could take him, Fletch thought contemptuously. Then, eyeing his shoulders, it would be a fair fight too.

  But I could take him.

  I will take him, said a thrumming beat in his head as he watched the scientist beam at Jemma. They appeared to be talking about sea otters. What did Poppy know of otters? Oddly, she seemed to know quite a lot, given that she was comparing the beasts to common English river otters.

  Five minutes later, Poppy hadn’t looked up from Dr. Loudan’s face as he droned on and on about otters.

  Fletch fell back a pace. As far as he could tell, she hadn’t even glanced at him. He sat down, folded his arms, and waited.

  Sure enough, as the audience began to tumble into their places, she made her way back to him, fussing a bit about where Jemma would sit.

  “Jemma,” he said, “has made a new friend in Lord Strange. Wait until Beaumont hears that!”

  “Lord Strange has an astounding collection of curiosities,” Poppy told him. “I understand that he mostly collects art, but he has a number of fascinating scientific relics as well. I would give anything to see his collection.”

  “I wouldn’t let you within a furlong of his estate,” Fletch hissed. “You don’t know what goes on there, Poppy.”

  “I believe the word for it is orgies. I read all about them in a history of ancient Rome.”

  “Poppy!”

  “Surely you don’t think that I’d be tempted to join the festival?” she asked him. The edges of her lips tipped up but there was no humor there.

  Fletch opened his mouth but no words came out.

  “I didn’t think so,” Poppy said coolly. “That’s one thing you should be celebrating, Fletch. I’m unlikely to cuckold you, after all.” There was something so bleak in her eyes that Fletch’s heart dropped in his chest.

  “You—”

  She turned her head away and waved at Jemma, who had seated herself on the other side of the room.

  “It’s not a question of cuckoldry,” Fletch said, fumbling for words. “But Strange is a dissolute man.”

  “Oh, dissolute,” Poppy said. “I used to think that any man who took a mistress was dissolute. My sort of rank naïveté exists only to be dispelled, don’t you think?”

  At the front of the room, Mr. Moorehead was starting a discussion of a tribe called the Karamojong, who lived in Africa. Poppy and Fletch sat silently beside each other.

  “That was appallingly boring,” Fletch said when it was over.

  “I don’t agree,” Poppy said coolly. “I intend to buy his No Room in the Ark at my first opportunity.”

  “It sounds like a nursery rhyme.”

  “I have initiated a standing subscription for all travel and nature titles at Lackington’s. You pay for them.”

  “We never discussed books like that.”

  “What on earth would we have to discuss? Unless you’ve been hiding an interest in natural discoveries?”

  He opened his mouth but she wasn’t done.

  “I assure you that if I read an article about new designs for clocks on stockings or a revolution in satin embroidery, I will be sure to draw it to your attention.”

  “You rarely remind me of your mother,” Fletch said, “but all of a sudden I see a resemblance.”

  “I imagine that sort of event must be rather frequent, since you are living with her. How is everything with my dearest mama? I knew we’d get around to speaking of her. There had to be some reason you were here.”

  “I didn’t come here to talk about your mother!” He almost bellowed it.

  “You surprise me,” she said. But the so-called “lively debate” on the stage was quickly degenerating into a mud-slinging match between two bearded antiquarians.

  Since Poppy didn’t look any more interested in Eve’s bellybutton than he was—although who knew, given all the secrets she’d kept—Fletch felt free to continue their conversation under cover of the choleric debate.

  “God would never have placed false evidence on Adam’s body,” Mr. Brownrigg stated, looking as if he’d addressed the point with the Almighty just last week.

  “Your mother seems fine,” he hissed at Poppy. “But how are you?”

  She listened intently to Mr. Pringle’s infuriated response to Brownrigg and turned to Fletch with a brilliant smile. “I’m having a marvelous time,” she said. “I can’t remember being so happy in my life. I trust you are just as happy?”

  “Of course,” he muttered.

  “God has no need for false history,” Mr. Brownrigg said, going head to head and jowl to jowl with his opponent.

  “Jemma says that you gave a speech in the House of Lords,” Poppy said. “What was it about?”

  “It was about Pitt’s fitness for the position of First Lord of the Treasury.”

  “I didn’t know you were interested.”

  “It was an utter disaster.”

  She finally turned her head to look at him. “What do you mean? The paper reported that your speech was extremely lively.”

  “Lively, it was. And well received by the opposition,” Fletch said. “Halfway through I began arguing for my opponent’s viewpoint.”

  Poppy gasped and—to do her credit—managed not to smile. “How on earth did you do that, Fletch?”

  “Lord Temple asked me to present his point of view, and I thought it would be easy. Then halfway through my speech I realized that I didn’t quite agree with the line of argument I was making—so I turned it around.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “I did.” He grinned a little, remembering. “I thought wigs were going to start steaming.”

  “I would have never thought it of you,” Poppy said, staring at him.

  “What part of it? Making a hash of the speech? From what you said earlier, I’d think that was a natural for me.”

  “Speaking in Parliament. I never thought you cared about that sort of thing.”

  “Nothing but the color of my coat?”

  She was starting to look a bit guilty. “I know that you take excellent care of the estate, of course.”

  “I enjoyed it,” he told
her. “It became a farce, of course, when I realized that I was arguing the wrong side, but my fault: I should have taken the time to think it through.”

  “Well, I’m sure that took courage,” Poppy said, touching him on the arm. “Admitting you were wrong, I mean.”

  “I didn’t admit it,” Fletch said. “I just talked so much that no one had the faintest idea what precisely I said until I rounded into my conclusion.”

  “Adam was formed from dust with no scars!” one of the antiquarians said with huge emphasis.

  “I think they’re almost finished,” Poppy whispered.

  “How do you know? My guess is that they could go all night. They really hate each other, don’t they?”

  “Oh no, I don’t think so. I believe it’s staged. Why, in the last issue of Philosophical Transactions, Mr. Brownrigg quoted Mr. Pringle and said that his treatise on the trochus shell was one of the best of its kind.”

  “On the trochus shell?” Fletch asked.

  “Yes, I ordered the treatise on that basis, but I didn’t find it very interesting. Pringle argued that the concentric rings on the shell indicated the number of seasons a clam had lived.”

  Fletch just blinked at her.

  “That suggests that a clam grows a new ring every year,” Poppy explained to him.

  “Why not?”

  “It could be,” she said.

  On the stage Brownrigg and Pringle were glaring at each other in one final burst of scientific fury before they stamped off. Watching them, Fletch guessed that Poppy was right and they were about to retreat into some back room to swig a glass of brandy together. The whole event was like an odd shadow of debates in the House of Lords.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were interested in shells and slothes and that sort of thing?”

  She frowned at him, obviously puzzled. “You aren’t interested in the concentric rings on shells, are you, Fletch?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then.”

  “But you—you were in love with me!” For some reason, Fletch had the strongest desire to say it. To tell her again. To make her take back what she said before.

  Her eyes were clear and blue. “I wasn’t really, Fletch. We already discussed that. Neither of us was really in love. And anyway, this is—this is different from all of that life.”

  “What life?” Fletch felt as if he were desperately grasping at straws, trying to understand a foreign language.

  “This—this is my plea sure,” Poppy said, looking around. “Don’t you see how interesting it is?”

  Fletch looked around. The room was shabby and crowded, mostly with men but with a fair sprinkling of ladies. To the right several people were having a spirited discussion of flying squirrels.

  “They don’t really fly,” a short plump man said, jutting his round plump chin forward. He had rusty colored hair that began somewhere around the middle of his head. If Fletch had ever seen a man in need of a wig, it was he.

  “Yes, they do,” a big-boned man replied.

  “That’s a professor,” Poppy whispered, nodding toward the second speaker.

  Fletch noticed her eyes were shining and grunted.

  “Dr. Fibbin proved without a shadow of a doubt that squirrels can fly a distance of forty to fifty feet.”

  “Fibbin is a fool,” the half-bald one said.

  Though he hated to admit it, Fletch agreed with him.

  “They have a stuffed flying squirrel at the Ashmoleon Museum in Oxford,” Poppy said, settling back beside Fletch. “I have written for an appointment, and I’m going to the museum in December.”

  “Is that what you’ve been doing?” Fletch said, dumbfounded. “I haven’t seen you at any parties. You’ve been going to museums?”

  “Oh no,” Poppy said. “That is, I haven’t yet. But I mean to. You know, the only time my mother allowed me to visit Somerset House was for a lecture on the customs of polite society, even though the Royal Society was meeting here at precisely the same time!”

  “You’re married,” Fletch said. “You could have visited a museum any damn day you please, Poppy.”

  “Now I can,” she said. “Hush, Fletch. Mr. Belsize is going to speak.”

  Mr. Belsize did speak. And speak. But Fletch just sat there, staring at the worn carpet and wondering why Poppy never felt free to go to a museum, and why he never knew that she wanted to go to a museum. A tiny thread in the back of his mind was also thinking about the upcoming debate in the House over Fox’s East India bill.

  “You’re not traveling to Oxford with Jemma,” he said, as Mr. Belsize gulped a little water.

  “Of course I am,” Poppy said.

  “I’m not having my wife trot around outside London without me,” he said.

  She looked at him with clear amusement in her eyes. “Fletch, if I want to go to Paris by myself, I will do so. Tomorrow.”

  “I’ll take you to Oxford,” he said, folding his arms.

  “No.”

  “Poppy, if you don’t let me escort you to Oxford, I’ll tell your mother that you’re suffering from a rare blood disorder and you need her by your side.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “I should have known this would all come back to my mother.”

  “In more ways than one,” he muttered, and settled back into his chair. Mr. Belsize, refreshed, had launched into another lengthy tirade.

  Chapter 29

  On close observation, Jemma discovered that Lord Strange was as sleekly dressed as Fletch, and perhaps even more elegant.

  “Your Grace,” he said, sweeping her a bow.

  “Lord Strange,” she said, curtsying.

  “What an honor that you came to speak to me,” Strange said. “I see so little of proper women these days.”

  “I knew your wife,” Jemma said. “Sally was a dear friend.”

  His eyes changed instantly. “Surely you were not sent to school?”

  “No, but Sally’s godmother, Lady Fibblesworth, was a great friend of my family, and we happily visited as children.”

  “Lady Fibblesworth was an admirable woman.”

  “Yes,” Jemma agreed. “Sally used to visit us regularly until I married and then left for Paris. I wasn’t in En gland when she made her debut.”

  “She never really debuted. I was too wild, so they married me off. It was the luckiest day of my life.”

  “I am so sorry that she is no longer alive.”

  He hunched a little. “I share your feelings.”

  They appeared to have finished that conversation, so Jemma tried a different tack. “Do you play chess, Lord Strange?”

  “Yes.”

  She liked his brevity. Good chess players rarely squealed about their abilities.

  “But”—he added—“when I last played Philidor, he told me that you were the only person who has beaten him three games in a row. I have only beaten him once or twice, so you might not wish to waste your time with me.”

  “You played against Philidor?”

  He nodded. “Last year in Paris.”

  “We must have a game.”

  “I only play when I’m at Fonthill or in Paris.”

  Fonthill was famous for its beauty, three hundred acres that had been decorated at ruinous expense. Except that for a man with Strange’s fortune, nothing is ruinous. But she said: “Fonthill? You must forgive me; I’ve lived out of the country for the past eight years. Is that your residence?”

  “It is. You know, you’re quite interesting, for one of your sex.”

  “I make a habit of never returning compliments of that nature. Men are so prone to thinking they are more interesting than the common run of their sex, when invariably they are nothing out of the ordinary.”

  His eyebrow raised in appreciation. “I suppose I deserved that.”

  “I expect we all deserve a great deal that we are not served.”

  “I would like to play chess with you. A shame. But it is one of my foibles: I don’t play a game of chess that doesn
’t occur at Fonthill or Paris.”

  “I shall have to live without the experience then,” she murmured, letting a little edge tell him what she thought of his foibles and his vanity.

  But he surprised her and laughed. “I could invite you to Fonthill, of course.”

  “A lovely prospect.”

  “Virtuous married women never visit me. Let me see. Could it be that I’ve heard rumors implying that you are not quite so…virtuous?”

  “Rumors,” she said sweetly, letting her eyes slide to the golden-haired lady standing to his right like a clothes-peg waiting to be animated. “They can be so imprecise.”

  “And yet often so accurate,” he said, grinning at her. He was truly charming when he chose to be. “I leave for Fonthill tomorrow. Perhaps you’d like to pay a visit, Your Grace? I can promise you a great deal of entertainment, especially during the Christmas season.”

  Poor Beaumont’s political reputation would never survive such a visit on her part. “While I’d never discount the pleasure of playing chess with you, I would like to discuss another matter. I bought a chess piece from Mr. Grudner.”

  “You bought the queen, did you? The African Queen, I call her.”

  “I should dearly love to buy her counterparts.”

  He laughed and then swept a grand bow. “Has no one told you how remarkably obstinate I am? One doesn’t reach my place in life without nurturing stubbornness. When you visit Fonthill, Your Grace, they will be a gift from your host. In the meantime, I would suggest that you make the acquaintance of Mrs. Patton.” He nodded toward a tall woman standing in the middle of a group. “She is the only woman admitted to the London Chess Club. Presumably you could join her in those august ranks, and play chess whenever you wish.”

  “I shall certainly introduce myself,” Jemma said.

  “You do know what they say about reputation, don’t you?”

  “They say so much. One can hardly catalog it.”

  “A fair hit! I like to think of reputation as nothing more than a second maidenhead.”

  Jemma smiled faintly. “As with virginity…the loss quickly suffered and the fruits enjoyed thereafter?”

  “Precisely! I lost my reputation years ago. ’Twas naught but a word; the word is gone; the plea sure lingers.” He bowed.