by Лорен Уиллиг
“And then there’s the little Lansdowne. When you look at her closely,” said Medmenham, suiting actions to words, “she’s not an unattractive thing. But she lacks élan. And there is that unfortunate grandmother of hers.”
“The Duchess comes as part of the deal,” said Robert quickly. If anything could kill passion, it was the thought of the Duchess lurking behind the bridal bed.
Medmenham brushed the Duchess aside. “She must be eighty, if she’s a day. I give her another five years, at most.”
Robert forced out an incredulous laugh. “The Dowager Duchess? She’ll outlive us all, and kick the Devil in the shins when he comes to fetch her.” With feigned nonchalance, he raised an eyebrow at his companion. “Besides, wouldn’t marriage rather put a damper on your subterranean bacchanals?”
Medmenham looked at him with genuine surprise. “I don’t see why. Fidelity is too, too crushingly bourgeois.”
If that was the case, then Robert was a bourgeois at heart. His father’s amorous adventures had brought him no happiness; only an empty purse, an emptier hearth, and a whopping case of the French pox. “Infidelity doesn’t seem to quite do the range of your activities justice. What does one call philandering on an epic scale?”
Medmenham raised his quizzing glass, turning it slowly in the light so that it winked like the star the wise men followed to Bethlehem. “Divinity.”
“I’ll vouch for that once I’ve met some of your divinities,” retorted Robert. “From my experience, fallen women tend to be more earthy than divine.”
“It depends on how one defines the divine. Some of the pagan goddesses were notoriously earthy jades. Venus herself was a tired old tart.”
“Is it Venus you worship, then?” The last time Robert had looked, the attribute of the goddess had been a dove, not a lotus.
Medmenham smiled blandly. “We are ecumenical in our devotions. And in our appetites.”
Robert bit down on a sharp retort as Medmenham’s gaze once again strayed towards Charlotte. To show irritation would be a fatal mistake; Medmenham controlled his followers by probing at their weaknesses.
Instead, Robert assumed an aggrieved expression. “Damnation. Duty calls. I promised this set to my cousin.”
Medmenham raised one well-groomed eyebrow. “And you mustn’t disappoint her.”
Robert pulled a wry face. “I mustn’t disappoint her grandmother. If the Dowager doesn’t come after me, her little dog will.”
As he had learned during his brief stay at Girdings, all the young blades of the ton went in mortal terror of the Dowager’s little yipping dog, which she employed to great effect among their ranks, like a capricious goddess unleashing plagues for her own amusement. It was said her dog could shred a new pair of pantaloons in about three seconds flat.
“If you’ll excuse me, Medmenham . . .”
Medmenham’s eyes glinted with his usual diabolical amusement as he waved a languid quizzing glass.
“Carry on, old chap, carry on. I’ll be here. Waiting my turn.”
Chapter Five
We went to the local pub for dinner. In the interval since my last relationship, I had forgotten that strange alchemy by which moonlight and roses turn into dropped socks and empty take-away cartons. Not that I was complaining, mind you. I liked take-away. I also liked pubs. Besides, how much more English could you get than ye olde country pub with ye not so olde local landowner? It was the sort of thing impressionable Anglophiles dream about. Admittedly, when I’d dreamt about it in the past, ye olde landowner had been looking a lot like Colin Firth and had been wearing knee breeches, but I had no complaints to make.
I had had more than my fair share of living in the past that afternoon as I read through Charlotte’s letters to Henrietta from Girdings. Henrietta’s arrival at Girdings had entailed a predictable gap in the correspondence, but I had been sufficiently caught up in the story by then to dig around in the wainscoting like a research-minded mouse until I found Henrietta’s journals.
As Colin maneuvered the Range Rover along a twisty country lane, I asked something that had been puzzling me all day: “How come all of Henrietta’s papers are here, instead of at Loring House?”
“Probably,” said Colin, expertly navigating around a rut, “because that line died out. No male heirs. One of Henrietta’s great-granddaughters married back into the Selwick side.” He frowned at the windshield. “Great-great-granddaughter?”
I did some hasty mental math. If a generation is generally considered to be about thirty-five years . . . “So that would be your grandmother?”
“Great-grandmother,” he corrected, braking briefly to avoid hitting a wayward rabbit.
“So you’re descended from Miles!” I exclaimed delightedly.
Colin was less excited than I was. “And monkeys, too, if you go back far enough.”
“I could tell that,” I said, with an exaggerated eye roll. “It’s just . . . It’s a bit like finding out that the characters in one of your favorite books are actually real.”
“Eloise, I hate to tell you this, but they were real. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
“I know. But . . .”
It was hard to explain. As a historian, I found myself all too often treating my historical subjects like fictional characters, malleable entities that could be made to do one thing or another, whose motivations could be speculated upon endlessly, and whose missing actions could be reconstructed and approximated based on assessments of prior and later behaviors. It was one of the hazards of working with a fragmentary source base. You had little scraps, like puzzle pieces, and you put them together as best you could. But no matter how faithful you tried to be to the historical record, there would always be that element of guesswork, of imagination, of (if we’re being totally honest) fiction.
“They lived and loved and died,” said Colin briskly, competently swinging the car onto a road that was mercifully paved. My posterior thanked him. Dirt roads might be picturesque, but they were hard on the backside. “They lost money, they died in wars, they suffered broken hearts. It isn’t all trumpets and glory.”
“I know, I know.” Although I sincerely doubted that Charlotte was heading for a broken heart. Her romance with the Duke of Dovedale was shaping up as prettily as a novel by Georgette Heyer. I wondered if he would propose on Twelfth Night? True, it was all very fast, but when you know, you know. I had a good feeling about them. So did Henrietta, which is probably why I did. That’s another pitfall for the historian, falling prey to the prejudices of our sources. “I think that’s why one sees more happily ever afters in fiction than in biographies. It’s not that the two trajectories are necessarily so different, but in fiction you can take the moment when everyone is happy and just clip off the thread of the narrative there, right at that trumpets and glory moment.”
“Even in fiction, isn’t it more interesting when you look at the whole picture, with the bad as well as the good?” argued Colin. “I’d rather know the whole story, even if it ends on a low note.”
“Warts and all?” I said, quoting the famous phrase about Cromwell. “Perhaps. It may be more interesting. But sometimes it’s less satisfying.”
Every now and then, you just need to believe that everything can be frozen in that one moment where everything is going right.
Like right now. Part of me would have given anything to freeze us as we were at that moment, before the blush could wear off the relationship. It might become something better as it went on, if we made it past the intermediary stages where mundanities take the place of philosophical discussions and shaving no longer seems quite such a necessity, but it would never again be what it was then, new and shiny and perfect.
I didn’t say that, though. What I did say was, “Oooh, is that the pub?”
My stomach grumbled, as if seconding my question.
“The very one,” said Colin, swinging around the side of the building.
Twisting in my seat to stare through the back window, I squint
ed at the sign hanging from a long pole stuck in the ground in proper ye olde pub fashion. It featured a decidedly potbellied deer. Picture Homer Simpson as Bambi’s fat old uncle (the one who likes to drink and smoke and refuses to go running with the rest of the herd) and you get the idea. The name of the pub was the Heavy Hart.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, pointing at the sign through the car window. “That can’t be the real name.”
“I think the real name was the Hart and Hare.” Colin brought the Range Rover to an expert halt in the anachronistic but very convenient car park that had been laid to one side of the building. “Something nondescript, at any rate.”
“I like it,” I said. “Nice little in-joke there. So is this your local watering hole?”
Aside from the name and the beer signs in the window, it was the very image of an Old World pub, a two-story building of white stucco with a roof that slanted down over chimneys on both sides. White lettering on the bottom of the sign proudly declared, EST. 1682. A chalkboard stuck beneath the inn sign advertised that Tuesday was Quiz Night. Despite living in London for three months, I’d never actually been to a pub quiz. Perhaps Colin would be up for going on Tuesday.
This, I thought smugly as I climbed out of the Range Rover, was the stuff of which real relationships were made. We wouldn’t be one of those couples who had to spend all their time in each other’s pockets. No, we could spend the day happily immersed in our own pursuits and then rejoice at coming together again for a pub quiz or a romantic tête-à-tête over bangers and mash. Because nothing says romance quite like a large pile of sausages.
Trip-trapping merrily along in the three-inch stacked loafers that were the closest thing I owned to sensible shoes, I followed Colin in through the suitably battered door of the pub, into a long room with all the dark wood and exposed beams my little heart could desire. And came to an abrupt halt as vague shapes formed into people, and recognizable people, at that.
What I hadn’t stopped to consider was that if this was the local watering hole, there would probably be locals in it.
“Sorry,” Colin muttered out of the side of his mouth, pasting on a big, friendly smile. “I didn’t know they’d be here.”
“S’okay,” I whispered back, pasting on a fake smile of my own.
I had met a smattering of the locals at a cocktail party my last time there, back in the days when I was still a tagalong American researcher rather than rehearsing for the role of mistress of the house. For the most part, I had found them incredibly friendly and welcoming.
For the most part.
The exception to that was sitting at a round wooden table set into the curve of the bow window. She had angled her chair out, to provide the best possible view of a pair of unfairly long legs tucked into a pair of trim tan slacks designed to put one in mind of riding gear without actually being riding gear. She had had a haircut since I’d last seen her; her straight blond hair was now jaw-length, with a curve at the end. In fact, she had my haircut.
From the nonplussed expression on her face, I could tell that Joan Plowden-Plugge was about as happy to see me as I was to see her.
If you’re wondering how I managed to alienate someone on such short notice, allow me to assure you, quite sincerely, that it wasn’t so much me as it was me-with-Colin. Quite simply, Joan would have hated any reasonably nubile female who appeared in public with the man for whom she harbored a decade-long crush that made Petrarch’s thing for Laura look like chump change. As you can imagine, I felt much the same way about her. It didn’t help that she was fashion-model thin and Revlon-commercial blond to boot.
To add to the fun, the first — and only other — time I had been at Selwick Hall, before we were dating, Colin had employed me as a sort of human shield to keep Joan at bay. Manlike, he hadn’t bothered to warn me beforehand, perhaps because he feared I’d refuse to cooperate and throw him right into the lion’s jaws. This had not endeared me to Joan.
We stared at each other for a long moment in complete mutual loathing before the silence was broken by the man beside her scraping back his chair.
“Selwick!” exclaimed the Vicar with the sort of forced cheerfulness you use when social bombs are going off around you. “When did you get back?”
“Just this afternoon,” said Colin. It had really been more like late morning, but who was being picky?
“Well, we’re glad to have you back,” said Joan’s sister Sally, doing her part to counteract the chilling effect of the human icicle sitting next to her.
Sally was what my Dresden doll-size grandmother would call a “big girl,” tall, big-boned, with a broad forehead, broad cheekbones, and an even broader smile, framed by a profusion of exuberant brown hair. Sally was about twice Joan’s width and, to my mind, twice as attractive.
Of course, that might also be because Sally was smiling a genuine smile of welcome while Joan was wearing the sort of expression Cruella de Vil might have bestowed upon a wayward dalmatian. If I were a dog, I would have put my tail between my legs and whimpered.
But I was stronger than that; I was bigger than that. And I had the man. Ha. Take that, Cruella.
I returned her glare with a benign smile.
From the corner of my eye I saw the Vicar wink at me. From what I could recall, he didn’t have much patience for Joan, either.
“You remember Eloise.” Colin slung a casual arm around my shoulders, adding, just as casually, “My girlfriend.”
Joan’s nose twitched as though she had suddenly smelled something very unpleasant. Sally bounced out of her chair and gave me a warm hug.
“Lovely to see you again,” she said, all but smothering me in her hair. It was part genuine nice person-ness, and part, I suspected, an attempt to give her sister time to compose herself. You may not always adore your siblings, but they are yours.
“Lovely to see you, too,” I sneezed, fighting my way through the mass of Pre-Raphaelite curls.
“I can’t say how utterly delighted I am to see you back so soon,” said the Vicar, kissing me on both cheeks in the Continental style. Since I didn’t see the second one coming, he got my nose instead of my other cheek, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“Ditto,” I said, rubbing my nose.
“Don’t you find it terribly dull after London?” asked Joan, the only one who hadn’t bothered to rise, in tones so terrifyingly posh that they couldn’t possibly be real. Especially since Sally didn’t sound like anything of the kind.
“Not at all,” I said cheerfully. “There’s plenty to occupy me at Selwick Hall.”
“I should think so,” said Sally, with a mischievous glance at Colin.
“It’s my ancestors who are the attraction,” he said, in mock woe. “Not me.”
I shot him a glance to make sure that there wasn’t a grain of truth beneath the mockery. It wasn’t that long ago that his little sister had emerged from a disastrous relationship with a man who had used her solely to gain access to the family archives. It was part of why Colin had been so beastly when we’d first met; he had seen me as yet another vulture trying to batten off the family history.
It all seemed to be okay, but I leaned into him a bit just the same, trusting the pressure of body to body to do more than a hundred reassuring words.
Joan’s face closed like a fist. “Anyone for a drink?” she asked in tones you could have used to cut glass.
“Guinness for me,” said Sally, and I saw her sister wince. “Eloise?”
I looked to Colin.
“Sit down, Joan,” he said easily. “I’m buying.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said quickly.
“Gin and it?” he said, nodding to the Vicar.
The Vicar cast his eyes towards heaven. “If only all my parishioners were like you. Who needs a flower rota?”
“Drinks rota, instead?” I suggested.
“That’s heresy around here,” Colin said. “We hold our flower arrangements sacred.”
“But we
also like our gin.” The Vicar made little shooing motions at Colin. “Go on, go on. Fetch.”
“You mean you like gin,” I heard Joan saying as I meandered with Colin over to the bar.
“Oh, we’re not going to start all that about gin being the drink of unwed mothers again, are we?” griped the Vicar. “Think of it as a good, imperial drink, the stuff the Raj was built on. That should tickle your fancy.”
From the tone of her response, it was clear that Joan was less than tickled.
I poked Colin in the arm. That’s one of the best bits of being in a relationship: all the legitimate little touches that let you know that you belong to someone and someone belongs to you. You can’t poke just anyone, after all.
I stood on the toes of my boots to whisper in his ear, “Do you think he’s flirting with her?”
Colin made a distinctly skeptical face at me. “Eloise, half the parish has a pool going on whether he’s gay.”
Considering I had wondered the same myself, it wasn’t exactly a surprise. “But if he’s not . . .”
Colin was already giving drink orders to the bartender, with whom, like everyone else, he appeared on extremely familiar terms. It seemed that this pub was the local equivalent of Cheers. “Vodka tonic for you?” he said to me.
“You remembered!” I exclaimed with pleasure. There had been a dreadful Thanksgiving party during which we stood at a bar pretending not to know each other. Well, maybe not so dreadful after all, since he had asked me out at the end of it. It had taken quite some time for me to figure out that I was being asked out, but fortunately my friend Pammy was there to interpret for me and prevent my botching it all too badly.
Colin’s ears turned slightly pink. “It’s not exactly the theory of relativity,” he mumbled.
“Still.” Rising on my tiptoes, I brushed a quick kiss against his cheek. “Thank you.”
Colin smiled down at me in a way that warmed me straight down to my toes. “You’re welcome.”
I would be lying if I said I didn’t hope Joan was watching. The kiss on the cheek was, to use a very homely metaphor, a bit like a dog peeing on its territory to ward of other dogs.