by Rose Lerner
“Thanks,” she shouted.
When the postilion turned round to see what the noise was about, she gave him a friendly wave, and he grinned at her. What was it like to be so easy with people?
She popped back inside the carriage. “Just a moment, I want to take my hair down.” Honey-and-walnut waves did not precisely tumble over her breasts—they just brushed the upper curve of her bosom and, like all hair just let down, hung in frizzing hanks, rather. Simon was overcome anyway.
She dove back out the window. “Hold me tight, I’m going to let go!”
He seized her round the waist, and she threw her arms wide, shrieking with delight as her hair whipped about her face. “Faster!” she urged the postilion, who bent low over his horse and obliged her.
Which left Simon the only person not having fun. He supposed there was nothing to stop him pulling her back inside and taking a turn himself, except that it was dangerous and stupid and he wouldn’t trust her not to drop him.
He was so tired of being sensible and not enjoying himself, and somehow ending up doing stupid things anyway.
* * *
Clement bounded down the Throckmorton steps and kissed Simon full on the mouth. Simon tensed at the unexpectedness of it. But of course: Clement had seen Maggie dutifully hanging on Simon’s arm and wanted to assert himself.
“Pardon me, I’m terribly old-fashioned,” he said with a wave in Simon’s direction. “Did you know in our grandfathers’ time it was considered positively French to kiss on the cheek?” He looked very handsome in his mourning, romantically pale and only a little wilted in the summer heat.
Simon felt a pang of loss, that the scent of Clement’s soap and the familiar press of his lips—chapped a little from the sun—could produce such overwhelming annoyance.
Maggie, though, gave every appearance of being charmed. “I didn’t know that! I enjoy an antique flourish myself, as you can see.” Her curtsey showed off her billowing skirts.
“Miss da Silva, may I present Mr.—I mean, the Viscount Throckmorton.”
“A pleasure, Lord Throckmorton.”
Clement, obviously noting the dust on her glove, did not take old-fashioned manners farther than a kiss in the air several inches above it. “Good Lord, Simon, I thought you were taking a closed carriage.”
“May I speak to you a moment, Throckmorton?”
“Of course, Radcliffe-Gould.” Clement drew him happily into a corner of the hall. His eyes ran up and down Simon, lingering on that damn cravat knot. Simon flushed. “I’m so glad you could come down. I had them bring up your favorite wines for dinner, the 1805 Verdelho and—”
Simon almost gave up. Clement was in a good mood, and he took everything so hard that it always felt cruel to confront him. I’m glad I could come down too, he could say.
But in the end, he couldn’t say it. “What if I hadn’t told her?”
“Told her what?”
“You know what.” For a long, silent moment he thought Clement might really pretend not to know. If he did, the pressure in Simon’s head might actually levitate his hat.
“But you did tell her, evidently, so there’s no harm done.”
He tried to say it gently. “I didn’t tell her about you, because I thought you might like some choice in the matter.”
The happiness drained out of Clement’s face. His mouth shrank in on itself, almost disappearing.
Simon’s stomach churned. “Clement, please don’t sulk.”
“I just got carried away. I was happy to see you.”
“No you weren’t.” You were jealous. But he would deny that too, and Simon would feel so angry, and Clement would be hurt, and what was the point? He was stuck here until he could design a folly. He should let it roll off him, like water from a duck’s back. Why couldn’t he ever do that? Instead, Clement’s sadness clung to his skin and dug balefully in.
“Are you even happy to see me anymore?” Clement asked in a small voice, fidgeting with one cuff.
He had been. That was the worst of it. Even now part of Simon wanted to set all this nonsense aside and talk about the book he was reading, and the sheet music he’d bought, and the funny thing the girl at the shop said that morning.
And if he did, Clement would think it meant something it didn’t. “Of course I am,” he said, feeling as if the words were drawn out with pincers. “I’m always happy to see you. You know that.”
The moment hung in the air as Clement decided whether to push it. Then he smiled, relaxing. “I do, I’m sorry, I’m just being silly and thin-skinned. Now tell me all about Miss da Silva. She’s too pretty and Continental. How did you meet her?”
“I won her in a game of faro, actually.” Simon did his best not to preen hypocritically about it, even when Clement whistled.
* * *
Simon had already given a great deal of thought to the fact that he and Maggie would be sharing a room. He had imagined the darkness, and the sound of her breathing, and how he would have to stay turned resolutely on his side to keep from touching her.
He’d imagined the bed so vividly he’d forgotten about dressing and undressing. Now here she was in shift and stays and a clean sprigged petticoat, fussing over her wardrobe like a mother hen with her chicks. She’d brought two enormous trunks of clothes with her, insisting they were necessary both for the charade and to prevent them from being stolen in her absence. “I’m sorry, I know I’m disgustingly particular,” she told the maid who’d come up with the trunks. “But all these petticoats have got to be hung up, and not pressed all together either.” Maggie darted a ruthless smile at Simon. “If you’ve got to squash something, squash his things.”
The maid smiled hesitantly, unwilling to risk annoying Simon.
The threat to his clothes did not annoy him. Nor did it annoy him that it looked as if a muslin factory had exploded over half the bed. Spangles, embroidery, stripes...all of which Maggie ignored to set out her hairpins on the dressing table, and her hairbrush and jewelry. Unwinding a shawl from around a little painted cut-glass perfume bottle, she set the bottle by the mirror as carefully as if it were a Crown Jewel. Simon felt dizzy, remembering the scent of tuberoses.
Men were supposed to be annoyed at being surrounded by a froth of femininity, weren’t they? But he wasn’t sure why. In this case froth was not a strong enough word—the room was rapidly becoming a whipped custard, a meringue, or perhaps a many-layered trifle of femininity—and Simon just wanted to roll her into that cloud of muslin and kiss her.
But he had resolved with himself not to. That was what annoyed him.
He stood awkwardly by the right side of the bed—his side, he supposed, as she’d left it mostly empty. Even dusty and hot as he was, he hesitated to remove his clothes. Ridiculous, when she stood there in her corset, a ladder of thin drawstrings shaping each breast. Like her hips, her bosom was more generous than it had looked beneath gowns and gauze kerchiefs.
At last Simon took off his coat. His sleeves emerged, wrinkled and sweaty. He dug through his trunk for a fresh shirt. Dinner, damn, they’d have to go to dinner. That meant evening clothes. His evening coat was a mess of wrinkles.
A soupçon of tuberoses told him she was beside him. “Oh, dear. Remind me when we leave, and I’ll show you how to fold your coats for traveling. Doesn’t your valet know better?” The maid seemed to have departed, probably with a tax-roll’s worth of instructions.
Simon had a valet only in the loosest sense of the word. The man’s talents extended to grilling a steak, answering the postman’s knock, and carrying a basket to the laundress, and there stopped. “Obviously not.”
Her little grimace drew attention to her full lips. “I can see why you left him at home.”
“I left him at home because I didn’t want to make him ride on the outside of the carriage, or waste a fortnight being poked at by the stuck-up menservants of our fellow guests. I can do for myself well enough, and if I can’t, Clement will lend me his man.”
She giggled.
“What?”
“He’ll lend you his man,” she repeated drolly, making a juvenile double entendre of the words. “I thought you didn’t approve of that sort of thing.”
“I never said I didn’t approve,” he said evenly. “I just said I wasn’t interested. People should do what makes them happy. At least—to be honest, I do think people ought to avoid liaisons with their servants.” He felt sad, and annoyed, and tired. “Miss da Silva, I’m going to spend the next two weeks with people telling me I’m a stick-in-the-mud, and imagining I disapprove of them because I don’t want to join in whatever little game they happen to be playing. I’d rather not face it in my own room, if you don’t mind. Haven’t you ever just not wanted to do something?”
She took a step back, the odor of tuberoses fading, and he wished he hadn’t said anything. “I’m sorry. Of course. I didn’t mean...I don’t think you’re a stick-in-the-mud.”
“Oh no?”
When she shook her head, a bit of road dust drifted down to her bare shoulder. Without thinking, he leaned forward and blew it off.
She shivered. Her breast was inches from his eye as he drew back, golden and his for the taking. Why wasn’t he taking it, again?
“I think you know what you want, and you hold fast to it,” she said. “Some people can’t manage to do either. I can’t, sometimes. I admire it.”
That was a joke. This whole damn house party was a joke, in fact. Simon knew what he wanted, all right: the absolute worst thing for himself, as always. First Clement, now her, and in between, a thousand reckless extravagances of the heart and pocketbook. He was five-and-twenty, an adult, a man of business, and paying Henney’s passage to Rotterdam would have emptied his bank account.
She was a creature of extravagance from first to last. He couldn’t afford her.
Chapter 3
* * *
Simon evaluated the crowd at dinner. Three women and seven men, counting himself and Maggie. The other two women were courtesans, brought in both to oblige the guests and to provide them with cover. The men were mostly Clement’s usual awkward assortment: Reggie Skeffington, with a knack for always saying the wrong thing and not noticing he’d done so; Danny St. Aubyn, a gangly, brown-skinned young man fond of enthusiastically recounting amusing anecdotes about his own misadventures; Harry Palliser, who got into so many irritating arguments that no one wanted to talk to him; and Geoff Trollope, who mostly stayed quiet and laughed pleasantly at other people’s jokes. Simon didn’t hate any of them and actually liked St. Aubyn and Sir Geoff, so all in all, it might have been worse. Most of them were in love with Clement, but everybody was at one point or another.
Clement had once confided that when he was a little boy, he’d always befriended the children no one else liked, because he thought they’d never abandon him. Simon hadn’t pointed out that Clement still did the same thing.
A few days afterward, it had occurred to him extremely painfully that perhaps Clement had chosen him on the same principle. He tried not to think about that.
Aloysius Darling, Clement’s new lover, must have been chosen for his looks, because he didn’t fit in with the others at all. He was by far the oldest man in the room, probably over forty, with curly blond hair and a smile so pleased with himself that it bordered on the beatific. Simon hated him already. He was currently arguing a red-faced Palliser into a corner for the fun of it, about something he obviously did not care a jot about himself. St. Aubyn was trying in vain to distract them with a story about setting himself on fire while making toast, which had Geoff in stitches. Clement was not trying to rein his lover in at all; instead, he was trying to attract his attention by talking loudly to Simon, who he’d put on his other side.
Simon sighed and tried to talk mostly to Maggie. Unfortunately, she wasn’t saying much.
* * *
Maggie never felt shy at Number Eighteen. She was never intimidated there by titles, or Mayfair accents, or ruddy English faces. She even felt sorry for them sometimes, bleeding money in elegantly bland little clusters, eager for scraps of her and Meyer’s glamor and daring.
Here, in the lofty-ceilinged dining room of an English country house, not knowing where to put her elbows as footmen leaned past her to remove and place platters for course after course, she felt like a brightly colored bug who’d flown in the window by mistake, at once insignificant and conspicuous.
She wondered if the other women, who’d introduced themselves to her as an Italian opera dancer and an Irish brothel girl, felt self-conscious too. If so, they didn’t show it. Maybe they’d been places like this before.
These houses had seemed like museums when she and Meyer toured them together. A collection of beautiful objects for her enjoyment. She now realized sharply that people lived here: were born here, played here as children, slept and ate here. The huge scale she and Meyer delightedly wondered at was nothing to them. They drank and talked about horses and made jokes about their cocks just as comfortably here as they did in her cozy parlor.
She had never felt quite so keenly how the cozy shabbiness and the cheap wine must be part of Number Eighteen’s charm. Something to laugh privately at even while you enjoyed it.
“No, thank you,” she told Simon for the twentieth time as he tried to fill her plate with things she couldn’t eat.
He lowered his voice, frowning. “Are you well? The journey, perhaps...”
Infatuations were a dreadful thing that turned a girl’s brain to porridge. Even though she was feeling annoyed with him for bringing her here and (at this particular moment) holding a pie that reeked of oysters under her nose, she was touched by his concern. “I’m fine. I don’t eat shellfish.”
“Oh.” He picked up the French beans in cream.
“And I’m not eating milk or cheese tonight.”
He blinked. “Why not?”
She sighed. This conversation. “I’m Jewish. I don’t eat milk and meat together, and tonight I’m eating meat.”
Miss Abrami, across the table, rolled her eyes. She was eating whatever she liked, and to all appearances having a lovely time talking to a gentleman with the improbable name of Skeffington and the biggest ears Maggie had ever seen.
Maggie narrowed her eyes at Simon. If he said anything the slightest bit derisive—
“I didn’t realize you were so...devout.” Not derisive exactly. Dubious, maybe.
“I’m not. If I were really devout I couldn’t even eat off these plates. I just—I’m Jewish.” She didn’t know how to explain. “That matters to me. My...I’m from Portugal.”
“I know.”
“Did you know my grandmother’s father was burned at the stake for being a Jew when she was twelve years old?” She spoke more sharply than she’d meant to, angry because he was her only ally here, and he didn’t understand at all.
“No,” he said, plainly shocked. Was it her imagination that he was a little bemused too, that she’d raise the subject at dinner? “I’m very sorry to hear it.”
“So was she, I’m sure. My family in Portugal couldn’t publicly keep our laws. But we are in England, are we not?”
He nodded.
“Then I’ll eat whatever I like.” She was flushed and flustered, and wishing she hadn’t said anything, and at the same time there was so much more she wanted to say.
“My mother was Jewish,” Skeffington offered. “She says you can’t eat leavened bread during Holy Week, either.”
Maggie’s heart pounded. If Skeffington’s mother had been Jewish, she must have converted on her marriage. Been baptized so as to be properly English and have properly English children. Maggie’s grandmother and great-grandmother had been baptized too, become Catholics, turned their backs on their people—but they’d have gone to the stake otherwise. That was different, wasn’t it? It was all right to feel this furious at Mrs. Skeffington?
She tried to smile, brush the moment off. “That must be where you get that lovely nose from.”
There was laughter around the table. Skeffington sheepishly fingered his large nose. “This hideous thing? I suppose so. It looks better on a woman, doesn’t it?”
Maggie fisted her napkin in her lap. She shouldn’t have come. She wished Meyer were here to say something rude. She glanced at Miss Abrami, who rolled her eyes again, but Maggie thought it was at Skeffington this time.
Lord Throckmorton leaned across Simon to ask, “But Radcliffe-Gould’s uncircumcised cock doesn’t violate your laws?” He didn’t say it unkindly, exactly. He said it like any other harmless witticism, with a cheerful laugh and a glance at his friends. If Maggie hadn’t already been on edge, she might have thought it was funny herself. God knew she and Meyer had made the same joke a hundred times, generally with a reference to sausage.
But Simon stiffened beside her. “Shut up, Clement. Shut up, all of you, and let her eat.” He turned to her, and infatuation made it so the rest of the room fell away when she met his eyes. “What are the rules?”
“No shellfish,” she said as quietly as she could. “No dairy tonight.”
“The roast beef you’re eating was probably rubbed with butter,” Lord Throckmorton helpfully pointed out. “Or lard.”
Maggie felt like crying. She had to eat something.
“Ignore him,” Simon said. “Everyone else does.”
Throckmorton did not think that was funny.
“No pork,” she went on. “No rabbit. That’s—that’s all, I think? I’m not very devout.”
He nodded and looked over the table seriously.