Earls Trip

5 - Unsteady as She Goes

5

Unsteady as She Goes

The next morning, Archie was enjoying a cup of tea in the so-called breakfast room—which did not contain any breakfast despite Mrs. MacPuddle’s assurances that she would manage to feed them for a fortnight—thinking about how Earls Trip was finally underway when Clementine marched in.

Gone was the whispering girl of last night. She had been replaced by a tall, assured, wild-haired woman who walked and spoke with confidence.

And, judging by the mud on her boots and the hem of her dress, she had already been outside, though it was not yet half seven. That part was familiar, too, and, more than anything else, an indication that she had not been elementally harmed by the events of yesterday.

“There are a few things we need to discuss,” she said, sinking into a chair next to Archie before he could organize his limbs to stand in acknowledgment of her arrival. “First, I do not swoon.”

“And a good morning to you, too,” he remarked, trying not to be too obvious about letting his gaze roam her person, searching for any signs of lingering damage.

She was wearing a slate-blue day dress, which aside from the mud, was unremarkable. Her mahogany hair had been braided and the braids pinned up, but the whole thing was sloppily done. Hanks of hair hung loose, and the still-pinned-up part was listing off to one side. Her cheeks were pink and her brown-copper eyes bright. She had a smattering of freckles across her cheeks and slightly-beaky nose. This was all familiar. The Clementine of his memory had often looked like this. Yet somehow, today, all these usual characteristics added up to something different.

He tried to think how long, exactly, it had been since he’d seen the Morgans. He’d attended Mrs. Morgan’s funeral, of course, but the sisters had been veiled and surrounded by well-wishers. Beyond that, it had very likely been four, perhaps five years. He did some arithmetic: he was twenty-seven, which would make Clementine twenty-four. Suppose she had been nineteen the last time he saw her. How could the difference between nineteen and twenty-four be so great?

Yet it was. She was different.

Or perhaps, he thought with unease, she was the same, and he was different.

“I am not the sort of woman who swoons when confronted with unpleasantness,” she declared. “I don’t faint my way out of trying situations.”

“I should think not. You’re the sort of woman who shoots your way out of them.”

Her posture softened. “I am sorry about that. How is your shoulder?” She leaned closer. “And your face?” She must have bathed, for whereas yesterday she had smelled . . . not bad exactly, but the way a person smelled after spending days on the Mail coach, today she smelled like . . . sugar and herbs. She smelled like Clementine.

And she had twigs in her hair, little ones that could only be seen from this close vantage point. He turned his head away to smile so she wouldn’t see. A man shouldn’t be seen to be too fond when discussing his own near murder. He composed himself before turning back and saying, gruffly, “I’m fine.”

“Did you require a surgeon?”

“No. The injury looked worse than it was, bled more than was called for.” Mrs. MacPuddle had interrupted the boys’ ineffectual fussing over his wound last night and given him two stitches. It bothered him still, the sharp pain of yesterday having settled into a deep ache, but Clementine didn’t need to know that.

“And this?”

She reached out as if to touch the scrape on his face, and he instinctively leaned back to dodge her hand, though he wasn’t sure why. “Fine. Healing over already.”

Now that he was calm and some time had passed, he could scarcely believe that he and Simon had . . . well, they’d ganged up on Theodore Bull. Archie was an avid boxer, sparring with a teacher in Sevenoaks, the town nearest Mollybrook of any size, as often as he could. And Heaven knew, he’d gotten into enough scuffles at school. But he’d never gotten into a proper, adult fight before. It was disconcerting. But it had worked: they’d gotten in several jabs before Mr. Bull surrendered. They’d frightened him enough, Archie dared say, that they could trust his promise to disappear. Simon had left him with a warning: “We know everything, and we shall make it public if we ever see or hear of your presence in England again.” When Archie had questioned Simon about the threat, Simon had merely said, “Men like that always have secrets. I don’t know what they are, but he doesn’t know that.”

So Archie supposed their fit of violence had worked. He eyed Clementine. He’d do it again if he had to, as uneasy as it made him.

“Well, good,” Clementine said, “but I’m still sorry for shooting you, and for dragging you into this mess to begin with.” She sighed. “Oh, Arch.”

“Don’t call me ‘Arch.’”

“Why not?” she asked. “As diminutives go, ‘Arch’ is much more dignified than ‘Archie.’”

“I don’t like it,” he said, though that wasn’t precisely true. When Clementine called him “Arch,” tossing the single syllable off as if it were her right, it made his insides feel wobbly, the same way his knees had yesternight at her bedside. Like a blancmange being transported too aggressively. Archie did not fancy being compared—even when he was the one doing the comparing—to a blancmange. “It doesn’t suit me,” he added peevishly.

“Well, you do it to me, too. You call me ‘Clem.’”

“I do not,” he said reflexively, though he wasn’t sure why, as she was correct. He did call her “Clem.” Or he used to. Yesterday aside, he hadn’t had occasion to call her anything for several years.

“You do, though.”

“Well, it isn’t only my habit. Olive calls you ‘Clem.’”

“She does not. She calls me ‘Clemmie.’ You’re the only one who calls me ‘Clem.’”

Was that true?

“I call you ‘Arch’ and you call me ‘Clem,’ but usually only when other people aren’t around.”

Was that true? He would certainly never have used her Christian name in company, nor she his, but when they’d been alone, or among immediate family, they’d never stood on ceremony. Archie called Olive by her Christian name, too, in private. But again, that was years ago now, and both sisters had since had their debuts. And he had been trying to remember to call Simon and Effie by their titles here. Although this remote pile of rocks could hardly be considered society.

He shook his head. They were getting lost in the weeds here; none of this mattered. “Are we going to talk about yesterday?”

“What about it?”

The part where your sister eloped with a knave to whom you’d previously been betrothed? The part where you disguised yourself—poorly—as a boy and took flight after them? Or perhaps the part where youshot me?

He didn’t articulate any of that, though. Instead, he said, “You weren’t surprised to see me at the inn.” The fact of which had just occurred to him because he remembered that she’d called him “Arch” when he’d burst into her room.

“I suppose I wasn’t. That’s a bit odd, isn’t it? But on the other hand, perhaps not. You always seemed to be there when I needed you.” She huffed a resigned sigh. “I suppose I shall have to tell you everything from the beginning, but I’d rather wait for Olive to awaken, because I don’t know the whole story. Perhaps between the three of us, we can put the pieces together.”

Fair enough. “And I’d prefer to wait for Marsden and Featherfinch if it’s all the same to you. They’re my closest companions, they were there yesterday, and they can be trusted absolutely. Ifthere’s anything more to be done to secure a good outcome from this near disaster, they can be of use. Still, if you’d prefer not to involve them any further, I will of course keep your confidence.”

“I am quite willing, if not pleased, to recount the entire unfortunate saga for the lot of you. So let’s wait for them, and for Olive.” He was about to agree when she added, “However, there are a few things we can and should discuss now, the first being that, as I said, what you witnessed from me yesterday was not a swoon despite how it may have looked. I had barely eaten for days, and I hadn’t slept at all. It wasn’t a swoon.”

“Noted.” He wasn’t sure the distinction mattered—what was a swoon but a loss of consciousness?—but it seemed important to her to make one. He refrained from upbraiding her on the substance of her assertion—the fact that she hadn’t eaten or slept for days—reasoning that he would save that for the larger conclave. But honestly, if one was going to make an impulsive, hazardous journey of the sort she’d undertaken, the least one could do was provision oneself sufficiently.

She looked surprised by his lack of ire, and it took her a moment to begin speaking again. “Secondly, I would like it stated for the record that I have no plans to marry. I am opposed, in the strongest possible terms, to the very concept. This whole mess with Mr. Bull resulted from an appalling lack of judgment, but I am returned to my senses. While I appreciate your loyalty to my family, I’m sure you are relieved by the fact that it hasn’t resulted in an imperative to wed either Olive or me. Regardless of whatever my father has said on the matter, after three Seasons to acquaint myself with the . . . selection, I shan’t be marrying anyone—not even to avoid ruination. I thought I ought to make that clear.”

The selection. Archie stifled a chuckle. He was tempted to commiserate, to say that he understood what it was like to have an overbearing father who thought he knew best, but he was still peeved at her, so he settled once again for saying, “Noted.” Again, she looked surprised that he wasn’t going to fight her. “Is that all?”

“No. There’s one more thing. I should like to stay here for the rest of your planned sojourn. With Olive, of course. I should prefer that we not go back to London at this time.”

“Yes, fine.”

“Fine?” Surprise transmuted into astonishment. Her eyes went so wide her eyebrows nearly disappeared into the unkempt hair slanted across her forehead.

“We are already late arriving because we detoured to go after you,” he explained. “We’ve only ten days left of our holiday. If I took you back to London at a more humane pace than either of us took to get here, several more days would pass. There would then be no point in making my way back here.”

And now that he was here, after the pair of false starts, he couldn’t bear the idea of giving up his holiday. The boys had been right, as had Miss Brown. Archie needed this break.

“I shall write to your father straight away.” Well, he would dictate a letter and Effie would write it. “I will tell him all is well and that I will deliver you and your sister home at the end of my holiday. Surely there can be no objection? He did trust me enough to send me after you.” And more to the point, Sir Albert was many hundreds of miles away, so even if he did object, there wasn’t much the old man could do about it.

“Mind you,” Archie added, “I would have taken you back to Town if I’d had to, but it seems clear that no one in this odd house is in any position to harm your reputations or standings in society.” Effie had had a chat with Mrs. MacPuddle, and besides her and the elderly man who’d seen to their horses last night, the only other people in residence were a kitchen maid, a housemaid, and the housemaid’s four-year-old daughter. The housemaid was Mrs. MacPuddle’s granddaughter, a girl of about twenty who’d been round to light the fires that morning. There’d been no mention of a husband to Mrs. MacPuddle’s granddaughter. Archie didn’t give a fig about any of it, except to the extent that perhaps people in glass houses, et cetera, et cetera. As a result, he felt quite confident that there was no harm—of either the literal or reputational variety—waiting to befall anyone at Quintrell Castle. Assuming, that was, that they could shield themselves from falling roof tiles and protect against invading armies disguised as trees. “So,” he said in conclusion, “I’d just as soon not have my holiday ruined if it’s all the same to you.”

Clementine opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again. Along with her still-wide eyes, it brought to mind a haddock. He tried not to laugh. Clementine Morgan loved all the creatures of field and stream, but he suspected even she would not take kindly to being compared to a fish so ill-featured as a haddock. He told himself to enjoy this moment of having struck Clementine dumb. It was the first time he could remember it happening, and it was entirely possible it would be the last.

“That would be quite satisfactory,” she said once she’d regained the power of speech. “Father will not object. He knows you are like a brother to Olive and me.”

“However, there is one condition: You and your sister will make yourselves scarce. Not scarce enough to get into any trouble, mind you, but scarce.” As glad as he was that Clementine was safe, and as much as he vowed to renew his friendship with the Morgan family, that was not what this trip was about. “Do I make myself clear?”

“Quite.”

“This trip is a sacred masculine tradition.”

“I understand.”

“I had a walk about the house this morning, mostly to make sure it is, in fact, structurally sound, but I observed that it is sizable enough that we can easily stay out of each other’s way.”

“Yes.”

“I cannot stress this point firmly enough. I don’t want you—”

“Arch!”

“What?”

“I am agreeing with you. I have done nothing but agree with you since you started talking! You won’t even know Olive and I are here. I promise.”

Right. Well, then. He picked up his teacup. “Don’t call me Arch.”

* * *

After her petition to Archie had been so unexpectedly successful, Clementine’s next order of business was to pay a visit to Olive’s bedchamber. She found her sister, who had never been an early riser, still abed, snoring lightly as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Clementine marched in, slammed the door behind her, and threw open the curtains to the misty morning.

“Get up,” Clementine said curtly. She tried to summon some of yesterday’s faith that her sister had not knowingly and callously betrayed her. But with a clear head and in the bright light of morning, it was harder to cling to that certitude. The fact remained that Olive had run off with Theo. Olive had run off with Theo. With the fear and panic of recent days having faded, what remained was anger, and while Clementine had a healthy supply of it for Theo, at the moment there was plenty left over for Olive: for stealing Clementine’s erstwhile, good-for-nothing fiancé, for almost throwing away her youth and good name on such a man, for sending them on a wild-goose chase that could have ended very badly for both of them—and that had resulted in Archie’s being injured.

“Clemmie?” Olive said sleepily as Clementine stood looking out the window. In novels, anger was often described as hot. Invigorating. A force that animated a person, making her impulsive and rash. This anger was like snow, white and cold and deadening.

Perhaps she ought to stop expecting life to be like novels.

“Clemmie, are you all right?” Olive asked. “I was so worried about you last night.”

Slowly, Clementine turned and saw that her sister believed what she said—that she had been worried. Olive was, generally speaking, careless and selfish and impulsive. She thought nothing of manipulating people and situations to satisfy the most passing of whims. Olive never intended to hurt people with her behavior, but the fact remained that she did, because she didn’t think about the implications of such behavior, beyond whether it would get her what she wanted.

But to be fair, Olive was also loyal to a fault. It was as if Olive had drawn a circle around herself, nay, branded a circle around herself, scorching a line in the earth with fire. The result was an unmovable enclosure, and if you were inside it, there was nothing Olive wouldn’t do for you. Clementine had seen this pattern unfold dozens of times, had witnessed her sister give the cut to people whose only crime had been a slight, sometimes even an unintentional one, against one of Olive’s friends.

Clementine and Olive had little in common and had never been close. There were five years between them, and though they’d shared a governess for a while, at some point a tutor had been brought in for Clementine, and later, when Olive’s interests had bent more toward drawing and singing and painting, music and art masters had been brought in for her. The sisters were like stars that appeared close together in the sky, but in truth existed on different planes. Still, Clementine would have thought she’d be inside Olive’s circle by virtue of blood if nothing else.

But why? Why would she think that? What was blood, really? Look at the brotherhood Archie had forged with his bosom friends.

“I am fine—physically,” Clementine said slowly, turning her mind to her sister’s question. “But for all you know, my heart is broken.”

Olive tilted her head and said, “It isn’t, though, is it?” She threw off the bedclothes and extended her arms, inviting Clementine to embrace her.

Clementine kept her arms by her side. The anger was still cold; it was making her brittle, disinclined to allow such a gesture of comfort.

Except it wasn’t only anger. It was pride, the only defense she had here, outside of the circle. “Olive, everyone knows you’re the prettier of us.” Clementine’s voice sounded as cold as her body felt. Her tone was dispassionate, as if she were commenting on, say, a piece of embroidery—and it was difficult to overstate how little she cared about embroidery.

Olive started to bluster over Clementine’s remark. Clementine held up a hand. “You’re clever, too, so don’t pretend not to understand me. You’re pretty, you sing like a lark, and you speak three languages. You embroider and play the pianoforte with great skill. And your father is a baronet.” Olive’s brow furrowed. Clementine would have to spell it out, which somehow made it all the more mortifying. “I have the same baronet father, of course, but I don’t have those other qualities. I don’t have your classic English beauty, your charm, or your mastery of the feminine pursuits. I know what people say about me, that I’m odd and wild and unbiddable and in possession of an ugly nose and that I ought to do a better job concealing my freckles if I want to catch a husband. You, on the other hand, could have any man alive. Why did you have to take the only one I’d ever wanted?”

She had tried to keep the hurt out of her voice, but was very much afraid she had not succeeded.

She saw understanding dawn as Olive climbed out of bed and came to stand in front of her. “But you didn’t want him anymore, did you, Clemmie? That was exactly the point—and the problem.” Pity flooded Olive’s expression as she took Clementine’s hand.

That could not be allowed to stand. Clementine snatched her hand away. “What do you mean? How do you know that?” How could she know? Clementine had spoken to Father about her change of heart regarding the engagement, but he had been attempting to convince her to stay the course. Whether he’d have been successful or not, he would never have breathed a word to Olive. Father believed his younger daughter to be more innocent than she was. He was forever trying to shield Olive from the machinations of men when really what he ought to be doing was shielding men from the machinations of Olive.

“Theo told me,” Olive said calmly. “He told me you’d cried off, that he’d taken your maidenhood, and that he was going to tell everyone as much unless you changed your mind and agreed to marry him after all. He was preparing to blackmail you.”

Clementine did not like to think of herself as a gasper. She was not the sort of lady who swooned or gasped. She had once stared down a wild boar, for Heaven’s sake. But the gasp that ripped from her throat at Olive’s matter-of-fact recitation of Theo’s misdeeds was so theatrical as to be worthy of inclusion in a pantomime.

The last few days had proven very lowering indeed.

She had not thought Theo capable of such cruelty. But she had also not thought him capable of many other things she had gone on to witness him doing, including ordering not one but two plates of roast beef.

“So I suggested that I marry him instead, in exchange for his keeping quiet about you,” Olive went on, summoning another gasp from Clementine. “I am not as witless as you think, Sister. One of us was as good as the other from his perspective, I reasoned. What Theo wanted was a generous dowry and to marry into a respectable family. He didn’t actually care about you.”

So Clementine had learned. She wanted it not to sting, but it did.

“Or me,” Olive added, and that stung, too, but it was more akin to a bee sting, a galvanizing pinch that made Clementine angry. How dare Theo not care about Olive? Even though Clementine was angry at Olive.

This was all very confusing.

“But I knew he didn’t care about me,” Olive went on, “so I wasn’t bothered by it.”

“Then why would you offer to take my place?” Clementine asked. “Why would you sacrifice yourself for . . .” Oh. Oh no. “Olive, did you also . . . ?”

Why couldn’t she finish a sentence? In addition to not gasping or swooning, Clementine did not dissemble.

“No,” Olive said firmly, and in a way that suggested she’d heard the unarticulated part of Clementine’s question. “No, I did not.” She looked at Clementine with an expression that seemed to say, Unlike you.

Clementine’s cheeks burned. Not with shame over what she had done exactly. Perhaps to her discredit, she had not seen any great moral problem with anticipating her marriage vows. Nay, her hot cheeks heralded shame over her spectacular lapse in judgment in choosing Theo to begin with. She shoved it down. Her humiliation was not the point here; getting to the bottom of Olive’s extraordinary actions was.

The only explanation left was that Olive carried a genuine tendre for Theo. Olive did tend to do that. And Theo was a very good actor. Clementine sighed. “Had you fallen in love with him, Olive?”

“Good Heavens, no!” Olive made a face as if she’d drunk spoilt milk.

“If you didn’t have warm feelings for him, and if you hadn’t given him your maidenhood, why would you offer to take my place?” It couldn’t have been purely to spare Clementine the humiliation of ruination. Clementine wasn’t inside Olive’s circle.

Was she?

“I had my reasons,” Olive said briskly, moving to look at herself in a small mirror mounted above the bureau. Like everything in the castle, it was timeworn. Olive had to contort herself to find an untarnished spot.

“That’s all you’re going to say?” That could not be the end of this conversation. Clementine hadn’t learned anything—well, beyond the ultimately unsurprising fact that Theo had been intending to blackmail her into un-breaking their engagement.

“You needn’t know everything about me, Clemmie, just like I needn’t know everything about you.”

While true, that declaration, and the blithe manner in which Olive tossed it off, caused a pang in Clementine’s chest. A day ago, she would have agreed, would’ve had no wish to know the details of Olive’s social scheming, and no desire to show Olive the contents of her own heart. Today, though, she wondered if she’d been too quick to declare their sisterly differences disqualifying.

“For example,” Olive went on, “I don’t need to know why you gave Theo your maidenhood.” Clementine’s face heated anew. “That’s between the two people involved—and God, I suppose, if a person is inclined that way.”

If a person is inclined that way?Goodness, was her sister secretly a heathen? What else didn’t Clementine know about Olive?

Olive began pinching her cheeks to bring color into them, and all Clementine could do was stand there, agog. “But although I had my reasons,” Olive continued, pressing her lips together in a fashion that called to mind a duck, “and although I’d made my peace with the trade-off I was planning to make, I will admit that I did not understand Theo’s intentions for our life together until our journey was underway. So I do think the best possible outcome was achieved. Thanks to Archie, neither of us is ruined, and neither of us has to marry Theodore Bull.” She finally stepped away from the mirror and turned and smiled cheerily at Clementine. “And now we can put this bit of unpleasantness behind us.”

“But . . .” Clementine wasn’t even sure what she was objecting to. She desperately wanted to know about this trade-off Olive had referenced. She wanted to know what I had my reasons meant. She wanted to know how Olive could be so calm. So cheerful. So not consumed by dread, or even any sense of mild unease, over what might have been. But she knew pressing would do no good; Olive could be endlessly stubborn when she had a mind to be. Regardless, Clementine was certainly in agreement that the absence of both ruination and husbands was a good outcome.

“But what?” Olive prompted.

“But you can’t call him ‘Archie’ here,” Clementine finished weakly, needing something to append to her aborted thought. “In company, he is Lord Harcourt.”

“I know that, silly. You just said yourself that I was clever.” A small smile suddenly appeared and was just as quickly extinguished.

“He said we may remain here, with him and his friends,” Clementine explained. “Well, we may remain as long as we’re not with them. If we agree to stay out of their way, he’ll send word to Father that all is well, and we will return to Town with them at the conclusion of their holiday.”

“Really?” Olive did a little twirl that made her look younger than her nineteen years, and Clementine’s heart performed another confusing pang she did not know how to interpret. “Oh, goody!”

Clementine was a little surprised by Olive’s enthusiasm. As much as Clementine preferred the country, Olive favored the city. “But he is entirely in earnest about us staying away from him. We mustn’t be underfoot.”

“Well, that is a pity. I would like very much to find out who Lord Featherfinch’s tailor is. He certainly is a swell of the first stare, isn’t he? He looks like the hero of a Gothic novel, like he’s meant to be wandering around the heath suffering terrible pangs of unrequited longing.”

Clementine had thought the same, but she was not about to admit to it. She tended to read such novels only when perched high in trees; she always took care that her drawing-room reading was more respectable. Though now that she thought of it, she wasn’t sure why. She was profoundly uninterested in catching a man, and she was beginning to think that life was too short not to simply read what one wanted to read.

“But yes,” Olive said solemnly, “I understand, and I shan’t do anything to compromise our sojourn here, for in my estimation, we truly need it, the both of us.”

“All right, then.” What more was there to say? Apparently nothing, though Clementine could not shake the sense that they were slithering out of this near-disaster too easily.

“I say, are you sure you’re all right, Clemmie?” Olive called after her as she turned to go.

Clementine considered the question. She did not know if she was all right. But if she wasn’t, what was she? Not heartbroken over Theo. Not heartbroken over Olive either, as it turned out, since Olive had apparently been acting at least partially in Clementine’s interest, if for reasons that remained mysterious and were probably at least somewhat self-serving.

She was no longer hungry anymore, either, as she’d visited the kitchen for some more milk and bread this morning and had drunk several cups of tea.

She should be feeling buoyed. She should be all right.

“You look a bit unsteady,” Olive added.

Yes. That was a good word for it. She was unsteady. How could something so potentially life-changing, so frightening, end with such a whimper? She’d been primed for so many days to fight. And now, not only was there no need to, it appeared she was on holiday.

“I’m fine,” Clementine lied.

And then she did what she always did when she was in any sort of discomposed state—she went outside.