Chapter Fourteen
When Georgie arrived at the breakfast table the following morning, Sebastian was nowhere in sight. Papa and Abigail were already seated at the table, which gave Georgie pause; Papa usually beat her to breakfast, but Abigail almost never did, and it was only half eight.
“You’re up early,” she said to her sister, sitting down and smiling gratefully at Mrs. Fawcett, who slid a plate containing two poached eggs and a couple of slices of thick, streaky bacon in front of her.
Abigail, who had been staring into her teacup in a listless sort of fashion, glanced up at her. “I’ve started leaving my curtains open at night,” she said, which seemed like a complete non sequitur, until Georgie’s tired, overstimulated mind caught up a moment later.
“So… the sun woke you?” she asked. She reached for her fork. Abigail’s room faced east, and she’d sewn thick, dark curtains for her bedroom windows years earlier, blocking out much of the morning light during the long days of summer.
“Yes,” Abigail said, taking a fortifying sip of tea. Now that Georgie looked at her more closely, she saw that her sister did look rather tired; there were faint purple circles beneath her eyes, marring her otherwise flawless complexion.
“Why don’t you keep your curtains drawn?” Georgie asked, slicing into her egg and using a piece of bacon to mop up some of the runny yolk. “That seems a simple solution.”
Abigail suddenly looked a bit evasive. “I heard… somewhere… that it is good for the body to let natural light awaken it.”
Georgie was instantly on alert, with an elder sister’s keen instincts. “ ‘Somewhere,’ is it?”
“Yes,” Abigail said airily, not quite meeting her eyes. “I can’t recall where.” She reached for a slice of toast from the rack before her and began buttering it. A moment later, she frowned. “Papa, have you been using the butter?”
Georgie glanced at their father, whose face was, per usual, hidden behind a newspaper. The top of his head was visible, however, and Georgie could see the skin reddening beneath his thin layer of hair.
Abigail, too, seemed to spot this, and take it as confirmation. “You know Dr. Severin said you should be careful about how much butter you eat!”
Georgie opened her mouth, then shut it again, curious to see how Papa would handle this scolding from his younger daughter.
Papa lowered the newspaper and gave Abigail his best attempt at a stern stare (which, to be clear, was not very stern).
“Dr. Severin is young enough to be my son,” he said. “And he seems prejudiced against the finer things in life. It must be that austere Scottish upbringing.”
“He’s from Hertfordshire,” Abigail said smugly. “He merely studied in Edinburgh.”
“Regardless,” Papa insisted, “a little bit of butter on my toast won’t kill me.”
Abigail’s and Georgie’s gazes dropped to the butter dish—where a substantial quantity of butter appeared to have been hollowed out from Mrs. Fawcett’s carefully crafted medallion—and then to their father’s plate, where a half-eaten piece of toast provided clear evidence on what he considered to be a “little bit of butter.”
Abigail reached out her hand and neatly plucked the remaining half of his toast from his plate without asking.
She took a bite. “Delicious,” she said, smiling at Papa. Papa, for his part, swelled like a bullfrog for a moment before rapidly deflating beneath the force of her smile. Within a few more seconds, he was smiling fondly back at her.
And Georgie had not had to say a word.
Hmm.
She cleared her throat. “I think I’ll take Egg on a walk this morning,” she announced, then immediately winced in regret as there was a sudden, frantic scrabbling beneath the table (where Egg had been lurking in hopes of dropped crumbs), and a moment later her beagle was at her side, her soulful eyes staring pleadingly into Georgie’s own.
She should have known better than to utter the word “walk” aloud unless she was ready to immediately slip her shoes on and depart.
“In a few minutes,” she informed Egg, then offered her a bit of her namesake on a piece of bacon by way of mollifying her.
“I’ll just go wake Sebastian,” she said reluctantly; she had come to the conclusion that she owed him an apology, after leaving things on such an uncomfortable note the evening before, although it was not an enjoyable prospect.
“He went out already,” Abigail said. “He was finishing breakfast just as Papa and I arrived.”
“He did,” Georgie repeated blankly. She had assumed that a man like Sebastian would like a good lie-in.
Why did he insist on not behaving the way she expected him to?
“Well, that’s… good,” she managed, ignoring the shameful bit of relief that came with the knowledge that she could avoid him for a while longer.
“You know, Georgie, I quite like Sebastian,” Abigail said.
“Based on five seconds’ acquaintance?” Georgie asked waspishly.
“No,” Abigail said, not rising to the bait, “based on all our midnight chats.”
“Midnight chats?” Georgie asked, incredulous.
Abigail nodded, taking another bite of toast. “He’s fond of a late-night biscuit, it turns out, and you know I love a midnight cup of cocoa. We’ve run into each other in the kitchen the past couple of nights.”
Georgie turned to her father. “Papa, do you hear this?” A sudden thought struck her, and she added cannily, “Don’t you think it would be better for Abigail to be in London with Aunt Georgiana, where she’s not likely to run into unmarried men in the kitchen in the dead of night?”
Papa cocked his head thoughtfully. “Given your aunt’s colorful love life, I don’t know that she’d be any safer from that there than she is here.”
This was undeniably true, and Georgie supposed she should have known better than to expect any help from Papa in her attempts to encourage Abigail to spread her wings.
“Besides,” Abigail added serenely, “Sebastian was a perfect gentleman. We simply talked about baked goods—a mutual interest of ours.” She tilted her head at Georgie. “And I do not think that I am the Radcliffe sister who is at risk of falling prey to his charms.”
Georgie took that as her cue to leave. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, rising to her feet. “I’m old enough to withstand a bit of flirtation from a bored man with nothing better to do.”
“I’m not being ridiculous,” Abigail called after her as she made her exit, Egg trotting eagerly at her heels. “And Sebastian doesn’t strike me as being the slightest bit bored.”
Georgie did not deign to reply, and instead led Egg down the stairs into the kitchen.
A nice long walk with the dog and then a morning spent in the garden were exactly what she needed.
It would be good for her—remind her of the important work she had to do around here, which would fill her days after the Sebastian Fletcher-Fords of the world, and all the Murder Tourists, had long since fled back to the bright lights of the capital.
After her life had gone back to normal, in other words.
Which was, she insisted to herself, just the way she liked it.
A few hours later, Georgie was on her hands and knees in a pair of dungarees, digging happily in the dirt.
She and Egg had taken a long, muddy ramble through the surrounding hills, an endeavor that had involved clambering over fences, traipsing through sheep-dotted fields, and then walking back home along the narrow dirt path that ran along the shady banks of the Woolly River.
She had brought her rucksack and a few jars with her, and had happily collected some plant specimens to take home and study; she would have thought, after a lifetime in this village, that there would be no more delights to uncover in terms of the flora that grew around them, and yet the thing that she loved so much about the natural world was the fact that it seemed to have limitless variation.
Something new was always cropping up underfoot.
It was, in other words, the exact opposite of what it was like to live in a small village like Buncombe-upon-Woolly—at least, until people had started getting murdered.
And, added a sly voice inside her head, until Sebastian Fletcher-Ford turned up.
Georgie had ignored this, and upon returning home had donned her worn, stained dungarees that she wore exclusively when gardening, tied her hair back from her face with the silk scarf that her mother had once used for exactly this purpose, and then taken herself off to the kitchen garden, which she had been somewhat neglecting of late, given the other issues occupying her mind.
She didn’t know how much time had passed—Mrs. Fawcett had tried to summon her indoors for lunch at some point, but she’d waved her off; Georgie tended to slip into something of a trancelike state when she was in the garden, the earth beneath her hands.
Now, however, a sudden shadow was cast over the ground before her, and she glanced up, her neck aching and, she suspected, slightly burned from the sun, to see Sebastian standing over her.
“Hello,” she said, straightening enough to sit back on her heels and peeling off her gardening gloves.
“Hello,” he said, crouching down next to her, wearing a pair of carefully pressed gray wool trousers, a collared shirt, and a jumper of the palest blue, like the early morning sky.
She was suddenly acutely conscious of the frizzy mess of her hair, the muddied state of her dungarees, and the smudges of dirt that no doubt were on her cheeks.
Something about the way he looked at her made her feel like crawling out of her own skin.
It was dreadful, and somehow also not dreadful, all at once.
“You were gone an awfully long time,” she said a bit cautiously.
“I’ve been back awhile—Mrs. Fawcett makes an excellent roast beef sandwich, did you know?”
Georgie did know; they were her particular favorite. As if on cue, her stomach growled, and Sebastian extended his hand, which contained something wrapped in a carefully knotted napkin. She unwrapped it.