Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Annette.” Bernard took the place beside her at the tea table, having waited half an hour for the girl’s mother to abandon guard duty. Sorcha could not forbid him to address his own cousin, though she had given a very good account of herself in a verbal sparring match.
Painfully good, and Sorcha wasn’t even half wrong in her reasoning. Her intransigence broke Bernard’s heart—no moonlit drainpipes for him, not tonight, probably not ever—but it had also inspired some cogitation on the subject of females who felt they had few options and little support.
Such females, such people, could be led into poor choices, such as, for example, marrying an ass like Lord Barclay, or bullying a small boy who’d done nothing to deserve the abuse. Sorcha would not appreciate the analogy, but Bernard took some small comfort from it.
“You’ve recovered from your swim?” he asked.
Coraline had decamped, perhaps to heed the call of nature, the call of the buffet, or to attend to the thankless patrol duty of a wife with a handsome husband loose in polite society.
“A gentleman would not tease me,” Annette said, “but yes. I am quite recovered. I am a capable swimmer, as it happens. Papa taught us, but Mama says we mustn’t mention it. One cannot actually swim in proper attire. Jessica is part selkie, not that she’ll need that skill when she’s married.”
Bernard did not particularly like Annette, but he increasingly understood why Sorcha pitied her. “Was it your papa who suggested you take the boat out today?”
Annette’s prim visage shifted. They sat in the shade afforded by the tea tent, little company about. The rest of the ladies had apparently taken their refreshment and gone back to other entertainments, leaving Annette alone and uncertain.
“Papa? He does fancy the sight of pretty young ladies at the oars. He’ll tell anybody that.
Duchess Lilly took a boat out earlier with Mrs. Edgars, and Papa said Her Grace made a very fetching sight, all feminine beauty and repose, gliding along in the sunshine.
Mama agreed with him. I do know how to row a boat, Cousin, if you’re about to offer me lessons.
Eglantine does not know, but she should have come with me anyway. ”
“Because she’d have made a pretty picture too?”
“Because she is my sister, and taking a boat out by myself would have looked pathetic. The duchess had a companion on the water. Nobody goes boating alone. It’s not sociable. Jordy should have been a good sport and come along when I asked him to.”
Asking hadn’t come into it. “Jordy cannot swim.”
Annette took a sip of tea that had to be tepid at best. “I know. Auntie Sorcha was wroth with me when I was already unbearably mortified to have required Richard’s aid. Richard is odious, according to my mother, and Jordy has recovered perfectly well.”
Said a bit plaintively.
“Annette, would it relieve your mind to know I have no intention of proposing to you?”
She inflicted upon him a startlingly adult perusal.
Frank, dispassionate, unimpressed. “Mama says you’d ‘do.’ Papa concurs.
He doesn’t agree with Mama outright, but he doesn’t argue.
Papa would argue if he disagreed. He picks his battles with Mama and humors her otherwise.
For me, he’d gainsay Mama if he believed we wouldn’t suit. ”
She scooted about on her chair. “My children can inherit the earldom,” she went on. “That title can be preserved through the female line. Mama has quoted the letters patent for me.”
Annette was avoiding his question—more proof that the girl was drowning in expectations she could not manage.
“A Scottish earldom would be very prestigious,” Bernard said. “You might even someday be a countess in your own right.” He was goading her, testing the theory that Annette was easily and often goaded.
“I might, but then there’s Jordy, ruining everything.
If he were a girl… but he’s not. Papa says I’m not to wish Jordy harm, that Jordy can’t help it that he’ll be the duke and the earl and all the other things, but even Papa admits the unfairness.
Here I am, with three sisters to lead into good matches, and there’s Jordy, a title dangling right over his hard little head. ”
Papa doubtless admitted the unfairness at every opportunity when he and Annette had no audience.
Bernard called on years as a vicar, when judgment of others had been forbidden to him, and every confession had to be met with kindness and understanding—or a credible facsimile thereof.
“Annette, Jordy knows you thumped the lid of the oat bin down on that hard little head.”
“He can’t know. He can’t have seen…” She fell silent, and pink flooded up her neck and across her cheeks.
“He knows, and you know, and now I know too. You must promise me, on the hope that you make an excellent match, that you will never again menace your younger cousins. Jordy knows it was you who failed to take up the girth on that fat pony last summer. He said nothing until now because he didn’t want to tattle.
His silence has apparently only encouraged you.
” Jordy’s silence and Tallister’s dubious paternal sympathy. “You must stop.”
“Why does Jordy have to inherit everything? It’s not fair.”
“He won’t inherit everything. He will inherit whatever is entailed with the Chanderton title, which, I can assure you, will include mostly acreage and debts. He very likely won’t see much of his mother’s wealth. He won’t be able to touch your settlements. He will have no ability to—”
“I barely have settlements,” Annette snapped. “That’s the problem. If you offered for me, I’d have to accept. You haven’t a title, you are in trade, you aren’t even legitimate, I most assuredly don’t even want to kiss you, and Mama says…”
She picked up her tea cup, peered at the dregs, and set it down with a sigh. “I don’t dislike you, Cousin, but I hardly know you, and you are a serious sort…”
“Also doddering, and I occasionally deliver impromptu sermons. I’m stodgy.
I know. Can’t be helped. Whatever else is true, Annette, I will not offer for you.
You are lovely and comely and all that is bound to turn a bachelor’s head, but my sentiments toward you are purely cousinly and always will be. ”
Her sigh was worthy of Mrs. Siddons at her die-away best. “I should be mad at you. Please convey your unavailability to Mama. She regards you as the solution to the whole problem of what to do with me.”
“You should be angry with your mother, whose own consequence will rise and fall based on the match she can secure for you.” Bernard was certainly displeased with Cousin Coraline.
“You should also be angry at your father, who has apparently done nothing to augment your modest settlements. You should not, for one moment, direct your wrath at little Jordy.”
She took the table napkin from her lap, balled it up, and pitched it onto the table. “I know. I don’t hate him, but he can be a brat, and I apologized for the boat, and that wasn’t my fault.”
“Very well done of you, to apologize. Now that you’ve hit that practice ball, see if you can muster up the courage to apologize for the other instances of cruelty.
” Not pranks, not jokes, not teasing. Cruelty.
Dangerous cruelty, in fact, despite Sorcha’s need to believe otherwise.
“Listen to your better angels, Annette, not to those who remind you constantly of what can never be yours and would only make you unhappy anyway.”
“That’s what Eggie says. She says Lilly is a duchess, but not a very happy one. Lilly was supposed to have sons. Mama says it’s not Lilly’s fault, because none of Uncle Chandy’s duchesses have ever conceived.”
“And none of that is our concern, is it? Work out your apologies to Jordy and find a time to pass them along when no adults are around. He will be gracious, I assure you.”
Bernard used Annette’s own word—gracious—to drive home the point.
He could not remove every impediment to the children’s safety and happiness, but he could blunt the weapons that had already been turned against them. Sorcha would doubtless disapprove, but he’d likely earned her eternal enmity with the day’s earlier argument.
He’d left the Church, where he’d spent ten years of his life, without anything like the ache that the thought of parting from Sorcha caused.
She wasn’t wrong. She knew Mayfair, the Dolforths, and peerage family politics far better than Bernard ever hoped to, and she was safeguarding her offspring and their future to the best of her ability.
“You won’t tell anybody?” Annette said, folding her table napkin into a neat, if wrinkled, triangle. “I should not have picked on Jordy, but I get so mad… A lady never yields to temper. I had to stitch that on a sampler once.”
Burn the damned sampler. “I am in the habit of respecting confidences. You are entitled to your frustrations, Annette—much is expected of you—but your aunt Sorcha would remind you that if Jordy does eventually become the duke, you will want his kind regard. You might have some trouble finding him alone for the next while, but be patient and persistent, and the right moment will arise.”
She smoothed her fingers over the abused napkin.
“Is this how an older brother would talk to me? A little bit scolding, a little bit consoling? I’ve always thought that if Mama had had a son, then she and Papa would not always be so anxious.
My brother would be Uncle Chandy’s heir, and everything would be as it should. ”
How many times had her parents burdened her with that wish? “Any older brother of yours would be much wittier than I am and better-looking too.”
“Now you do tease me. Has it been a quarter hour yet? Mama said I was to find her in a quarter hour unless a suitable bachelor decided to keep me company.”
Leaving Annette like a staked goat to face the perils of the social wilderness all on her own. Though, to be fair, Coraline would doubtless come swanning back—
“There’s Mama. What do I tell her?”