Chapter Nine
“Oh, what is that?” Rebecca asked, shrinking back against her father.
Edmund, of course, being afraid of nothing but the sound of owls at night, stepped forward. “It’s heads. It says, ‘Louis the Sixteenth and Marie Antoinette, beheaded during the Reign of Terror, masks cast from the actual death masks.’”
“I’m going to faint.” Rebecca, Becks, put a forearm across her eyes.
“If you do, you won’t be able to see Queen Elizabeth. I heard someone say she’s just ahead.” Edmund giggled. “I mean, she’s in front of us. It’s her whole figure. She’s more than just a head.”
“Edmund.” Iris grinned even as she chastised her son. He wasn’t particularly bloodthirsty, generally, but he was clearly enjoying himself today. And being quite clever, as well.
“Well done, Edmund,” Beckett complimented with a laugh, patting him on the shoulder. “I’m proud to know you.”
“That was good, wasn’t it?” He bounced up on his toes, then hurried to the other side of the wide room where Henry VIII and all of his queens stood ranged on a low dais.
All of them seemed to have their heads, at least. The costumes were delightful, and probably cost more than her entire wardrobe, winter and summer combined.
“I don’t want to see just heads,” Becks said, facing her father before she lowered her arm.
“I shall do my utmost to guide you away from any. Edmund’s over there, if you wish to follow him.”
“Eddie, you said you’d stay with me. Not go ahead.” She charged after him.
“She doesn’t seem overly distressed,” Iris noted, stepping forward to stay even with Beckett.
“No, she doesn’t. I may be, however. No one said there would be heads stacked about, together with red-edged necks and sagging, surprised expressions.”
“Your description frightens me more. It’s very vivid.”
He shrugged. “If I’m ever beheaded, I intend to wear a smile. Let everyone wonder what I knew that they don’t.”
“Look, Papa! It’s Shakespeare. You talk about him all the time. Did you know him?”
“Yes, because I’m two hundred years old, Cricket.”
His daughter giggled as she and Edmund moved on to the next set of figures.
Several of the wax models were eerily lifelike, and once or twice Iris caught herself glancing back at them, half expecting them to have moved the moment she looked away.
The French royal heads had been exaggerated to the point of absurdity, thankfully, and she thought perhaps the modelers had done that intentionally, because the actual replicas would have been too horrible to view.
“How do they do the eyes?” she muttered. “They have a shine to them, just like real ones.”
“Glass and oil, I think. They’re unsettling, aren’t they?”
“Yes. I may have nightmares tonight.”
Beckett paused, facing her. “I didn’t invite you to join us in order to distress you, Iris. If you want to leave, I’ll happily take us to Hyde Park for some ices.”
Mm, ices. “Oh, no. This is fascinating. There’s a lingering … dread about it all. People aren’t meant to stand so very still and not blink. I’m quite entertained.”
“Good. I, for one, intend to imagine all my dinner guests this evening as unmoving wax figures. I may turn it into a game. Who can remain still and unblinking the longest? There will be prizes.”
She laughed. “You’re having another dinner party? You’re doing very badly at avoiding them.”
“I’m aware. It’s a matter of my friends meeting Pauline’s friends, or so she says.
No doubt she’s going to evaluate the quality of my acquaintances to determine if I can keep them after we’re married.
She has no idea that most of them have fled over my tendency to chat about Rebecca instead of gossiping about drunken brawls and wagering. ”
“Well, heaven forfend if, widowed or not, you attempt to remain friends with women when your husband owed theirs money.”
“Did you know your husband wagered? Before you married him, I mean.”
If anyone else had asked her that question, she would have …
not answered it. Except perhaps with her fist. “I knew Thomas wagered. I didn’t know that his father had cut him off because of his debts, that his entire income came from wagering, or that he would put our belongings at risk on a regular basis.
” She sighed. “He was handsome and charming, and I was young and stupid enough to believe that my loving, supportive presence would overcome his inclination to look for a better future beneath every unturned card.”
Beckett leaned his head toward hers. “Lydia didn’t wager,” he said quietly, moving them around a group of visitors who seemed to be daring each other to alter William the Conqueror’s dour expression.
“But I did think that being married to me would give her the opportunity to be herself. My mistake was in not realizing that the overly agreeable, timid young lady with an overdramatic imagination was who she was. And then she died an hour after giving birth to Rebecca, which, if she’d been a character in a story as she liked to imagine she was, would very likely have greatly pleased her. ”
Iris tightened her grip on his forearm. “I think Thomas meant to drink himself blind, then wake up the next day with a solution to our latest difficulties. Instead he tried to walk home, fell into a ditch, and drowned.”
“It’s been you and Edmund for four years, yes? And you managed to hold off the rest of the Silbern family for that long. That’s impressive.”
“Thank you. The use of that house was the only gift we received from his family. Actually, Thomas’s father, the old viscount, was of a mind to let Edmund and me stay in the cottage until Edmund came of age.
He died six months ago, though, and Thomas’s brother, Reginald, the new Lord Bellamy, wanted a new hunting lodge. ”
“Did you punch him?”
She covered her laugh with her free hand.
“I promise you that I do not go about punching everyone. You’ve simply seen me at my least patient.
On several occasions.” Clearing her throat, she lifted up on her toes to see a blond boy and a black-haired girl several displays in front of them.
“If I’d hit him, he might have tried to take Edmund from me.
So I was quite polite, and only left a pile of nuts and grain in the attic beside the open window as a gesture of kindness to the red squirrels that like to live in the neighboring trees. ”
“Remind me never to cross you,” he said, grinning. “Anyone looking at you and your big hazel eyes, your attractive smile, your slender figure and petite stature, would think you … perfectly pleasant, inside and out. Not bland, but…” He frowned.
“Ordinary?” she offered.
“No. Unsurprising, I suppose. But you’re not. You’re extraordinary. Sharp-witted, quick-tongued, and deadly in an argument.”
Hearing him say that pleased her to an absurd degree. “A wolf in sheep’s clothing?”
“No. A panther in lady’s clothing.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Did you get strawberry cream on my coat on purpose? Everyone knew I was determined to find a wife that Season.”
Her cheeks warmed. “You were too pretty, Beckett. And you … didn’t need me. And honestly, you wouldn’t have let me guide you. Thomas needed my help, or so I thought.” She sighed. “I decided I wanted to marry someone who needed mending, and whom I could mend, I suppose.”
“Wait a moment.” He held up a hand. “You took yourself out of the running to be my bride. Intentionally.”
Was he angry? He didn’t look angry. Surprised, certainly. “I … Yes. For being too handsome and strong-willed.”
His mouth twitched. “I’ve never been thrown aside in such a flattering manner before. Evidently, I was also after someone I could improve. What does that make us?”
“Foolish.”
“I would agree with that. At least we seem to have learned our lessons.”
Yes, they’d both become wiser. Now he wanted a poised female who would help him raise Rebecca and get him a son.
And she was considering a man too old to be her father who offered her a roof and a future for Edmund.
No romance, no thoughts of love, nothing but being as practical as possible.
Whatever the lesson had been, they’d both learned it. Quite well.
“Come and look,” Becks said, appearing beside them and grabbing her father’s hand. “We found Romeo and Juliet. She’s lovely. And they’re so romantic.”
“I thought you were looking for Queen Elizabeth.”
“Oh, we found her,” Edmund said, popping up at Iris’s elbow. “She has a very white face and red hair that looks like rats nest in it.”
“That was the fashion at the time, dear,” she commented, falling in with them as the children led the way through the crowd. “Being as pale as possible is still considered fashionable.”
“It looks silly. But she does have some nice jewels.”
“I say they’re paste,” Becks put in, hopping around them. “Because how could they put them in the middle of where everyone is walking if they were real?”
“You make a good argument,” Beckett commented. “But why are you so interested in Shakespearean characters?”
“Well, you like Shakespeare.”
“I do.”
“Mama, you like Shakespeare,” Edmund commented. “You always say Much Ado About Nothing is your favorite.”
Iris nodded. “It is.”
“Then come along! We found something you both like.”
Sending Iris a sideways glance, Beckett grinned. “I don’t know about that. I rather enjoyed the heads.”
Rebecca rolled her eyes. “Oh, Papa.”
The Romeo and Juliet display, featuring as it did Juliet holding a dagger to her breast and Romeo already dead and draped over a stone bench, didn’t seem very romantic to Iris, but then she wasn’t nine or ten years old. “What do you like about the display?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“It’s so romantic,” Becks gushed. “She’s going to kill herself to be with her Romeo.”
“That is not romantic,” Beckett cut in, his voice sharp. “Men are smelly nodcocks and buffoons. No woman should ever do so much as cut her hair to please one, much less stab herself. Is that clear, Rebecca?”