Earls Trip

8 - Beware the Common Stinkhorn

8

Beware the Common Stinkhorn

By the next evening after dinner, Clementine’s leaves had advanced quite a bit. Well, they had advanced in the sense that there was a great deal more stitching on the fabric, but they were also advancing into looking . . . significantly less leafy.

“What does this look like to you?” Clementine held her hoop at arm’s length. “It looks like a cottage with a wavy roof, does it not?”

Olive squinted at Clementine’s paltry efforts. “I think it looks more like green water with sticks beneath the surface.”

“Hmm. What should I do?”

“Well, I could tell you how to fix it, but that would be as good as me actually fixing it for you.”

“And that would be a bad thing?”

“Well, then it wouldn’t be yours, would it?”

“I suppose not, but that didn’t stop you with Theo, did it?”

She regretted it the moment it was out. She’d shocked herself, in fact, with the outburst—shocked Olive, too, judging by the little gasp that burst out of her.

Clementine couldn’t seem to let go of this whole business with Olive and Theo, even though her feelings didn’t make any sense. She had spurned Theo before Olive ran off with him. How could she be hurt about Olive’s stealing something she’d already cast aside? Something she actively didn’t want, had come to despise, even?

“I was trying to help you,” Olive snapped, her shock rapidly papered over with irritation. “At some personal cost, I might add. Perhaps I ought not have bothered.”

“I know, I know,” Clementine said, chastened. She needed to keep things in perspective. Olive had been attempting to save Clementine from ruination. What she didn’t understand, was: “Why, though? Why did you do it?”

“He said he was going to ruin you!”

“I know, but that doesn’t answer the question!”

Olive’s eyes bugged out as they always did when she was frustrated. “I already told you: he said you’d given yourself to him.” She’d switched to speaking slowly and with an exaggerated air of patience, as if talking to a child, which made Clementine want to scream. “You had changed your mind about the betrothal, and he said he was going to tell everyone he had taken your maidenhood so you would be forced to marry him.”

“But you were forced to marry him!” That was what underlay Clementine’s Why? She wasn’t disputing the facts as told by her sister; she was struggling to understand the motivation behind Olive’s actions. Olive was not known for her selflessness.

“I wasn’t forced to. I suggested the switch. As I already told you.” Olive sounded miffed, as if having her intelligence underestimated by her sister was a greater affront than being married to a blackmailer.

“Yes, but once again: Why?” Clementine was equally miffed. Would Olive just answer the dratted question? “Why would you do that? You are being purposefully obtuse! Please just tell me! And don’t give me any of this vague nonsense about us not needing to know everything about each other. That may be true in general, but I need to know this!”

Olive stared at Clementine for several beats, her azure eyes unblinking. When she eventually spoke, she dropped her gaze and shrugged in a manner that struck Clementine as performative. “I want to see the world. Theo was planning on a grand tour. And I want to marry. So he seemed as good a prospect as any.”

That didn’t make any sense. Olive was the sort of girl who loved love. Or the idea of it. She was always developing brief but intense tendres for gentlemen, had done so since long before her debut. It hardly even seemed to matter to whom she attached her fancy; the object of her affection was always secondary to the fact of it. The son of visiting friends. A gentleman they’d met in passing at a party. Once, she had even taken a liking to the blacksmith in Chiddington, and she’d gone around and checked every foot of every horse they owned in the hopes of finding one in need of being reshod.

That trend had only intensified this past year, her first out in society. Olive had adored everything about the Season in London. Parties and dresses and outings with friends. Promenades and teas and trips to Gunter’s. And though her tendres had come faster and more furious than ever, given the wider availability of gentlemen to inspire them, none ever seemed to stick. “It’s a question of timing,” she would say. “I don’t want to make a match too soon. And I should so adore another Season. But I also don’t want to wait until it’s too late.” She would look at Clementine as she said this last part, as if Clementine were the corporeal manifestation of the concept of too late.

Clementine could only wish Father would look at her like that, would allow her to be well and truly on the shelf. “So Theo offered you marriage, and you want to travel.” Clementine could see that, on paper, Theo might be a sensible match according to those two criteria. “But what about love? You want love, do you not?”

Olive shrugged again, and this one seemed real, and it seemed resigned. “Two out of three isn’t bad.”

“Oh, Olive, you’re still young! Don’t—” Clementine cut herself off. She was hardly in a position to deliver an encouraging talk about holding out for a love match.

Olive stared at Clementine for a long while. She looked as if she were trying to come to a decision of some sort. When she finally spoke, she said, briskly, “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

Clementine followed Olive to her bedchamber. Inside, things were, as per usual in Olive’s domain, in disarray. Clothing was strewn on every surface, an open book lay facedown in such a way that had surely damaged its spine, and a half-drunk cup of tea sat on the bedside table alongside another embroidery hoop. Clementine marveled that Olive had managed to create such chaos in mere days, and even more so that she had managed to fit all this into the portmanteau she’d had on her person when she escaped Theo. Clementine moved to take a look at the sewing. “You’re doing another project?” The stitching Olive had been working on at Clem’s side, the one of the sheep near Chiddington, was already an ambitious endeavor.

“No, no!” Olive vaulted over the bed, grabbed the hoop and turned it over. “Just experimenting with something that isn’t ready to be seen.”

Well, that might be the most interesting thing Olive had said in a great while. Clementine’s hands itched to grab the hoop, but she kept them by her side.

It was strange, come to think of it, that Olive was stitching such a bucolic scene when she professed to hate the country. It was also strange that Olive did so hate spending time at Hill House. The young Olive of Clementine’s memory, while perhaps not as enthusiastic about scrambling up trees and stomping through streams as Clementine, had been quite happy when the family retreated to Hill House. And Olive’s beloved dogs were much more content there than in Town.

“Sit.” Olive pointed at a chair by the window, and Clementine obeyed, watching as Olive extracted her book of days from her valise—Olive was as attached to the worn leather volume as some children were to a doll or special bauble. She had carried it around for years. She slid out from between its covers an equally worn piece of parchment, which she handed to Clementine.

It was a list written in Olive’s familiar loopy hand. It didn’t have a title, but it was easy to see, as Clementine scanned it, that it was a list of experiences Olive wished to have.

1.Travel: the Continent, Egypt, America, Upper Canada.

2.Ride in a gas balloon.

3.Participate in a high-stakes game of cards of the sort gentlemen play.

4.Be the mistress of my own house and decorate it entirely in florals.

5.Have as many dogs as I want in my house decorated entirely in florals, and allow those dogs to do whatever they want in that house (after #1–4 completed).

6.Have children (also after #1–4 completed).

Clementine’s entire view of her sister abruptly shifted. It was a similar feeling to having drunk that ale on an empty stomach at the inn, as if the ground beneath her feet was not as solid as she had always believed. Who knew Olive was such an adventurer at heart? “This is extraordinary.”

“I want to live, Clemmie. I want to live a big life. You know as well as I do that women don’t usually get to do that. I don’t pretend I’ll ever get to do most of the things on that list, but with Theo, the travel was guaranteed, and since he’s an unconventional sort, I thought perhaps he would not mind having a wife who wanted to do unconventional things.”

“There you were mistaken. Theo was very much in want of a conventional wife. A subservient one, even, as I discovered.”

“As did I. I hadn’t watched him sufficiently. That was my fatal mistake.”

“You are always saying you have to watch people closely.”

“Yes. If you watch people closely and carefully and for long enough, a certain kind of knowledge will result. A kind of truth. I admit that I made an error with Theo. It was because I wasn’t able to watch him for long enough before I had to decide what to do.” She leveled an implacable stare at Clementine. “And that, Sister, is your fault.”

Oh, dear. Clementine had blamed Olive for this mess, but she was afraid the heavy, uncomfortable feeling in her stomach meant that at least some of the culpability rested with her.

She was trying to think how to respond, but Olive pressed on, her countenance gentling. “Surely you can see my logic. I thought Theo and I would travel, and when we eventually settled down, I would become the mistress of my own house. Although I do so want to travel, my home must be in England, close to you and Father. I am not prepared to bend on that.”

Clementine grabbed Olive’s hand and squeezed. She was overcome by that last declaration.

“And, yes,” Olive continued, “I would’ve had to endure Theo’s attentions in order to have children, but only for a limited time, and after that, I thought we could strike an agreement by which he would ignore me and I him. I have observed that such an arrangement between husbands and wives, one of mutual benign neglect, generally leads to a content, peaceable union.”

“That is . . .” Clementine had no idea what to say. Such an arrangement sounded sad. But also practical. And like nothing her sister would even think of, much less settle for. It was certainly not the type of union their parents had.

“After all, our parents’ union was not a love match, yet they were quite happy together.”

“I beg your pardon!” Clementine cried, and had she not been so shocked she would have laughed at how her sister had all but plucked the very thought from her head—but inverted it entirely. “How can you say that?” Father had doted on Mother and she him. “You are wrong.”

“I am not wrong. I heard Mother talking to Aunt Susan once, saying that the best decision she ever made was to marry Father. It was back when Susan was trying to decide whether to accept Uncle Roderick’s proposal. ‘We are not in love,’ Mother said about Father, ‘but we like each other a great deal. He is my dear friend.’ She went on to say that she appreciated the fact that if Father undertook any dalliances, he hid them well.”

Clementine made a noise of dismay. Truly, she felt as if she might weep.

“Clemmie,” Olive said soothingly. “They had a good marriage. A good life. We had a lovely family.” She sighed. “Until Mother died, anyway.”

When all Clementine could do was nod because she was too overcome to speak, Olive said, “Do not be so distressed. I believe they came to love each other. I asked Mother outright, during the final months of her illness, how she knew she loved Father. It was a trick question, mind you. I wanted to know if she would say anything like she said to Aunt Susan.”

That sounded exactly like something Olive would do. “How did she respond?”

“She said, ‘One day, we were sitting together after dinner in Town, and your father was answering his correspondence.’” Clementine smiled at the way Olive was mimicking their mother’s voice. She would have made an excellent actress. “‘He was irritated because there was some problem with the well at Hill House, and he was muttering through his letter to Mr. Hughes about it,’” Olive went on in the role of Mother. “‘I said we should return to Kent in the morning, and he absently pointed out that we couldn’t because we were attending a ball the next night—I can’t even remember which one. I countered that surely a failed well was more important than a ball. He set his letter down, peered at me through his spectacles, and said, “Not to you, it’s not; therefore it isn’t to me, either. We’ll go the day after tomorrow.” He said it with such fondness but also such matter-of-factness, as if it were a given. I remember thinking how lucky I was to be so loved, and how much I loved your dear grumbling father.’”

“I wonder when that was,” Clementine said. “There were often problems with the well at Hill House.” What she was really asking was when Mother had decided she loved Father.

“I know,” Olive said. “It could have been anytime in the last decade or so before she died. But the important part is that it happened.”

“I suppose. Does anyone marry for love, though? From the outset, I mean. Love of the passionate, romantic sort.”

“Honestly, the older I get, the more I understand how rare it must be. I think that kind of love is only found in novels. But you would know about that better than I—you were the one always reading novels in trees.”

She hadn’t realized her sister knew about her reading-in-trees habit, but perhaps this was another example of Olive watching people closely enough to glean the truth. “Olive, I—” Clementine wanted to say that true love must exist somewhere in the world, but did that matter if neither Morgan sister was destined for it?

“I’m sorry, Clemmie. I’ve upset you. Perhaps I should not have said anything. My point is merely that I know how the world works. I was—am—trying to play the game in such a way that I land on a satisfactory ending. I made a mistake with Theo. A grave enough one that I am chastened and shall return to my corner, regroup, and try again next Season.” She smiled. “And who knows, perhaps eventually I’ll have enough money saved that if I can’t get a husband who meets my criteria, I shall follow you into spinsterhood and hire my own gas balloon and such. You would let me live with you once Father is gone, wouldn’t you? I daresay you’d even let me redecorate, since you don’t care about that sort of thing.”

Clementine was all astonishment. “But . . . where are you getting this money you speak of?”

“From Father. It’s very easy to wheedle pin money out of him; have you not noticed?” A self-satisfied smile blossomed on Olive’s face. “In fact, I’ve been able to bleed him very freely since my debut. And once he is gone—not that I am wishing to hasten that, not at all—we shall each have our portions.”

Clementine remained agog. While she had always understood her sister to be clear-eyed, in possession of a practical-bordering-on-mercenary streak, she had thought it in service of shallow, transitory experiences. A new dress, a party, an evening at the theatre. “Olive, I think you are . . .”

“Yes?”

A great deal smarter than Clementine had understood. But to say that, to admit to her past impressions of Olive, seemed unnecessarily unkind. “While I am sorry your goals remain as out of reach as they ever were, marriage to Theo would never have delivered them to you. He is . . . not a good man.”

“I know that now,” Olive said sadly. “He is quite different when he isn’t actively deploying his charms. And I’m sorry that you . . . Did he hurt you, Clemmie?”

“No. I hurt myself. I gave myself to him. What was I thinking?”

Clementine had thought she would never speak of this particular shame to anyone. But here she was doing exactly that, and it rather felt as though she were the younger sister and Olive the older, wiser one.

“I expect you were thinking you were going to marry him in a matter of weeks, so what did it matter?” Olive spoke calmly, plainly, without the slightest hint of judgment in her tone.

Clementine had most decidedly not given Olive enough credit. She had seen only the ways they were different. She had dwelled too much on her sister’s outward attitudes and not enough on her actions, even though sometimes her actions were more well-meaning than they were effective—witness the entire elopement fiasco. But take the business with the cook. Olive had taken it as given that the cook would need to accommodate Clementine’s dietary preferences, had made a point to explain it to her. Olive had a kind of radical acceptance about her that was really rather extraordinary.

It appeared Clementine was in the inner circle after all; she just hadn’t realized it.

“Clemmie, I want to say that if my running off with Theo hurt you, I’m sorry for it. I knew you’d broken off the engagement.”

Clementine wanted to ask how Olive knew this, but if she’d learned anything in the past few days, it was how shrewd her sister was.

“I figured you had your reasons for doing so.” Olive sniffed. “Now that I know him better, I’m certain you had your reasons. But when I hatched this scheme, I was doing it at least in part to prevent you from having to marry him. I thought any discomfort I caused you would be short-lived. But if that’s not the case, I sincerely apologize.”

It was amazing what a genuine apology could do: Clementine felt the last of her unfavorable feelings toward Olive melt away. “He did hurt me,” she whispered. It was all she could bring herself to say just now.

“I’m sure he did,” Olive said gently.

“If I’d known what you were contemplating,” Clementine said, “I’d have warned you off Theo. As dear to you as your goals were, they weren’t worth the sacrifice.”

“Well, even so, you were.” Olive smiled wryly. “On balance anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“I still would have done it, if I’d had to, even knowing what I now know about him, if it’d meant preserving your good name.” Clementine was about to interrupt with yet another Why?, but Olive kept talking. “My silly list is never going to come to fruition. I know that in my heart. And since I don’t care who I marry, I might as well do some good with my choice of groom. Even if I couldn’t have gotten any of what I wanted, marrying Theo to save your reputation would have done some good. It would have given you a fighting chance to be happy. Bought you some time to try to outlast Father, anyway.” She performed another of her insouciant shrugs, as if they were discussing settling for lukewarm tea instead of a wildly deficient husband.

“But—”

“It’s a moot point since in the end neither of us had to marry Theo. Thanks to Archie.”

Oh, Archie. It had been so wonderful to talk to him, to really talk to him, last night. Perhaps it had been their perch on the roof, in the dark, that had allowed such a rapid resumption of their old intimacy. It had reminded her of being in a tree with him, which was a category of place they used to spend a fair amount of time. Regardless, it had felt like having her old friend back, and once back, she realized how terribly she had missed him. She’d missed him all day, in fact, in an oddly visceral way. She wanted to talk to him some more. To know that he was in residence—indeed, that he was in residence in the bedchamber next to hers—triggered a strange yearning for his company.

She wanted to tell him about the extraordinary conversation she’d had with Olive. She wanted to tell him that if the origin of his parents’ marriage was not what he’d thought, neither was the origin of hers.

“What do you think of Lord Featherfinch?” Olive asked suddenly.

Clementine blinked, taking a moment to adjust to the question.

“He’s so terribly handsome.” Olive flounced back on her bed and sighed melodramatically. It appeared the old Olive was back, the theatrical girl who could develop sentimental feelings in the blink of an eye.

“He certainly is . . . darkly imposing.”

“Isn’t he, though? And his apparel is absolutely exquisite. Who knew there were so many ways to style black? And his hair.” She sighed. “I daresay his hair is prettier than yours, Clemmie.” She sat up as suddenly and urgently as she’d fallen back. “Perhaps this has all happened for a reason. Perhaps I ought to set my cap for him.”

* * *

Archie had yet another perfectly typical, perfectly enjoyable day with the boys. Somehow, though, it did not have the usual restorative effect. In fact, he found himself growing increasingly tired and irritable as the day unfolded. By dinner, he was actively yawning, shaking achy legs he couldn’t keep still under the table, and he had to bring his beads to the table with him.

His mind kept snagging on the fact that they were nearly halfway through their trip. Only eight days left to . . .

To what?

What exactly was he wanting that he wasn’t getting?

He was tired. His mind had reached that point it sometimes did where it was incapable of settling. Better to call it a day and start fresh tomorrow. So he begged off uncharacteristically early, not long after dinner.

Which was fine, but that didn’t explain why, if he was so exhausted, he didn’t go back to his room but rather slipped into the empty one next to Clementine’s and stuck his head out the window.

Ah. There she was. She had a lantern with her this time, and she was bathed in its warm glow.

“Hello!” she exclaimed, and the undisguised delight in her tone jolted him awake. As he stuffed himself through the window to join her, he wondered if he had ever been this awake. It was in such contrast to his previous mood that it was almost whiplash inducing.

“Hello,” he echoed, eyeing her. She was wearing the same plain blue day dress as yesterday. Its skirt was voluminous enough that she was able to sit with her legs crossed, and they were wrapped and tangled in the fabric in such a way, and backlit by the lantern in such a way, that he could see the vague outline of them. Her hair tumbled down her back, almost to her waist. He had never seen her hair like this. As a girl, when they’d been on the loose near Mollybrook, she’d always had it braided. Typically, a great deal of it would come loose from its moorings, but this, this waterfall of untamed hair, was another thing entirely. And of course when Clementine came of age, she’d begun wearing her hair up. Well, she wore it up in company, and sometimes she wore a bonnet over—

“I didn’t realize until last night that you were in the bedchamber next to mine,” she said, interrupting his mental treatise on her hair.

“Yes, well.” He cleared his throat. “Nor did I, until I happened to look out the window and see you last night.”

That was a lie. The gentlemen’s quarters were in an entirely different wing of the house, on a corridor that extended out at a right angle from the main one, where Clementine and her sister were housed. He himself had suggested the separation when Mrs. MacPuddle had been musing over where to put everyone, repeating his desire for the ladies and the gentlemen to holiday separately. Last night, when he’d opened his window to let in the fresh evening air, without which he could never sleep, a flash of movement on the roof of the perpendicular wing had caught his eye.

That movement had turned out to be Clementine, and without thinking it through, he’d set out to find her. He’d poked into quite a few rooms in order to find one that provided a means of egress that would allow him to join her on the roof. It was as if she’d been a magnet and he an iron bauble, mindlessly submitting to her pull.

“And here I thought that if I found you out here tonight, I might find Olive, too,” he said. “What became of your quest to show her the stars?”

“I did some research today, and I brought this.” She reached behind her and produced a map. “I thought I might find a better constellation than the Seven Sisters.”

“And have you?”

“Yes, but the problem is the stories behind them. I only have this chart. I went through the library in search of a book that recounts the stories of the constellations, but I didn’t turn anything up. In fact, the library here seems to be comprised entirely of Gothic fiction and Jacobite history. While I admit to being fond of the former, it isn’t any help when it comes to my current task.”

They did used to spend a lot of time reading novels in trees. Well, Clementine did. He spent a lot of time watching Clementine read novels in trees. He smiled at the memory. “A deficient library. Alas.”

“Oh, it matters not in the slightest. I’m having a perfectly lovely time.”

“It is rather wonderful here, isn’t it, despite the rocky start.”

“I’m . . . still so very sorry about that.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that. I was referring to the initial lack of food. The aforementioned deficient library. The ravens Effie tells me are roosting in the guardhouse turret, and the clan of squirrels that has moved into the old castle keep. The, ah, interesting topiary.”

“Do you know that Olive thinks those are mushrooms?”

He burst out laughing. “Mushrooms!”

“Yes.”

He snorted. “What kind of mushroom is so . . . elongated?”

“Well, actually, there is a variety of mushroom called Phallus impudicus, better known by its colloquial name: the common stinkhorn.”

“Nice try, Clem.” Clementine knew a great deal more about the natural world than Archie did, and they both knew he was by no means a scholar, but she was going to have to do better than that to fool him.

“I am entirely in earnest! During Mother’s illness, I developed an interest in traditional healing. It was misguided, of course, but in my grief, I thought perhaps I could find a way to restore her to health. Can you imagine the hubris required to believe I could achieve what her doctors could not?”

She scoffed, but he could imagine it. He knew the pain of grasping at anything that might cure one’s beloved mother, even if what one was grasping at was ultimately an illusion—or a delusion.

“As such, I developed a particular interest in fungi,” Clementine went on, “and I can tell you with certainty that the Phallus impudicus is long and white and has a menacing-looking black, bulbous head that produces a most unpleasant slimy excretion.”

He still was not entirely sure she wasn’t mocking him. “Hmm. The Phallus impudicus. Is it poisonous?”

“I am not certain, but it reportedly stinks to high Heaven—like rotting flesh, they say—so even if not, I imagine it would be unpleasant to, ah . . . put the Phallus impudicus in one’s mouth.”

Again he burst out laughing. Clementine did not share his amusement. Perhaps he was taking too much for granted. Clementine might still be the sly, witty friend of his youth, but that didn’t mean she necessarily knew what she was saying. He didn’t have the impression that gently bred young ladies were bequeathed a great deal of information on this particular subject—although in some ways, one could hardly call Clem, she of the wilds and the wind, gently bred.

And, if she did know what she was saying, if she was making a concerted attempt at humor by bringing up the Phallus impudicus, was the bit about putting it in one’s mouth purposeful or accidental?

Goodness, being friends with the grown Clementine Morgan was a great deal more complicated than being friends with the girl version of her had been.

He swallowed his mirth. She, however, chose that moment to join in. Her high, lilting laugh soothed his worries. Soothed some hidden, inner part of himself, too. Gave him that same feeling the inaugural Earls Trip toast always did, that sense of haven, of balm, the delicious relief of setting down one’s burdens and knowing they would stay surrendered for the next little while.

He tilted his head back to examine the heavens. Clementine’s lantern was casting a decent amount of light, so tonight’s celestial tableau was not as breathtaking as last night’s had been, but that wasn’t disappointing in the least, so suffused was he with that feeling of remedy. “How goes the embroidery?”

She huffed a little, frustrated sigh.

“The thrill of the new worn off?” he teased.

“I must admit embroidery is a more challenging pursuit than I always believed.”

“Ah. Is it the pain of the embroidery itself that drew forth that sigh, or is it the fact that you didn’t award your sister enough credit when it came to the difficulty of her favorite pursuit?”

She grumbled, and he struggled not to find it adorable. “You know me too well, Arch.”

He was glad, unaccountably glad, she thought that the case. That all those missing years, all his neglect, hadn’t created a chasm between them too deep to bridge.

“I’m sorry I stopped writing you back,” he blurted.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You used to write to me at school. I have recently had cause to remember that you continued to do so afterward, but I . . . had difficulty replying.” He hadn’t phrased that well. He didn’t want to make himself seem illiterate. “I found the environment at home less conducive than school for keeping up correspondence, but I regret that I didn’t—”

“Oh, Archie, do not give it a moment’s thought. Letter-writing is easier when one is young, don’t you find? And I think it’s entirely usual for people to fall out of touch as they grow up. It doesn’t even require distance. Olive and I grew apart, too, and we were right there under each other’s noses the whole time.”

Her absolution relieved him, but he still felt regret. “Hence the sisterly exchange.”

“Hence the sisterly exchange—which isn’t really an exchange, at least not yet. I’ve been embroidering for several days and I have yet to come up with anything for Olive to do.”

“Perhaps instead of showing Olive the stars, you ought to charge her with a more active task, something with a degree of difficulty. Just to even the scales, you understand. Stargazing doesn’t require any skill. What about climbing a tree? Do you still do that?”

“No,” she said wistfully. “It has been years since I’ve climbed a tree. One can hardly detour from the path in Hyde Park and shimmy up an oak.”

He chuckled. “Well, if anyone could, it’d be you. But I take your point.”

“Besides, am I not too old to climb trees?”

He didn’t like the notion that Clementine would regard herself as too old, or too anything, to engage in an activity she used to enjoy as much as climbing trees. “I don’t think of tree climbing as an activity with an age limit.”

“Hmm,” she said, though she sounded cheered.

Silence settled, and he reflected that as much as he liked Olive, he was glad she wasn’t here. This was his second rooftop tête-à-tête with Clementine, and he had the most absurd feeling that he would like to do this every night for the foreseeable future without Olive or anyone else joining them.

In fact, he was fairly certain he’d begged off drinking with Effie not to go to bed, as he’d said and perhaps even half believed, but to find Clem. He ought to feel chagrined. This was supposed to be an Earls Trip, after all. Not a Clem-and-Archie trip.

But since he had done it, and since he did have Clementine all to himself, he was going to ask her another question, an old one, but one that had recently risen to the surface of his mind. “Do you remember the dances in the assembly hall in Chiddington when we were young?”

That, of course, wasn’t the real question. It was the prelude to the question. Even though this was Clem, to whom he could say anything, he felt some priming of the pump was called for.

“I do. I hated those dances, but in retrospect, they seem so benign.”

“How do you mean?”

“If you were of a mind to flee, you could be outside in under a minute. And Chiddington is not large—the buildings themselves are not tall, and there’s only the one high street. So from the assembly rooms you could be on the street in less than a minute, and clear of the village proper in another five. Whereas at some society parties in London, you walk for what feels like miles inside someone’s house before you even get to the ballroom.” Clem was talking faster as her theory unspooled. “And if you want to depart, there is usually a complicated leave-taking process involving calling a servant to fetch your outerwear, and another to summon your conveyance. And of course you can’t do any of that without a chaperone. And if that chaperone happens to be your father, who is bound and determined to see you married off, good luck with your attempted escape.”

“Ah, yes, I see.” He had never thought of it that way, but he shared her outlook on London parties, except of course he did not require a chaperone to attend or to leave them. And as to the Marriage Mart that had Clem so agitated, he had to admit that one not unwelcome outcome of having a dead father and a mother who had taken leave of her wits was that no one was haranguing him about marrying, preserving the lineage, and so on. The title and its accompanying estates and wealth—the whole damn thing—could pass to Archie’s cousin Herbert, who was next in line and quite competent, and not a single person in the world would mind.

The thought, which should have been liberating, was in truth a trifle unsettling. Because the notion of not a single person caring about the fate of the title was, of course, equivalent to not a single person caring about him.

Though, of course, he reminded himself, Effie and Simon cared about him.

They just couldn’t help him with the whole “fate of the lineage” problem.

Not that it was a problem. As previously established.

“And then, even if you do manage to get out,” Clementine finished with a great flourish, waving her arms as if she were conducting a symphony, “you’re still in London.” She made a melodramatic choking sound.

“Indeed.” He laughed at her theatrics, but he could not disagree with any of what she’d said.

“And then there’s the company.”

Oh, she wasn’t done. He smiled and settled in to listen to the rest of her monologue on the merits of the assembly rooms in Chiddington relative to the ballrooms of London.

“There was a rather lot of talking about horseflesh and crop rotation, which are both topics in which I have some interest—and of which I have some knowledge. And though I wasn’t meant to show the latter, in reality no one much minded when a mere girl had something to say about the merits of Cleveland Bays versus Yorkshire Trotters as carriage horses.”

“Probably because you knew what you were talking about. I recall a time when you advised Aaron Hastings on the purchase of a pair of matched Cleveland Bays he was quite happy with.”

“Yes, he had been planning to buy a pair of Suffolk Punches, and that seemed too much horse for the job. It wasn’t as if he needed them to do double duty as workhorses. He merely wanted to swan around in his curricle and impress everyone.” She scoffed laughingly. “Honestly, the bays may have been too much horse for the job.”

“So you aren’t able to converse on these topics in company in London?”

“Goodness, no. In London it’s all dresses and shopping and the on-dits of the day. What is Lord Byron’s latest scandal, for example? Mind you, I would be quite happy to discuss Lord Byron’s latest poem. He does write so piercingly. But so many people who talk about him seem not to have actually read anything he’s written.”

“You should read Effie’s—” Ah, bollocks. Archie was so comfortable with Clem, he’d been about to let Effie’s secret spill as easily as tipping over a teacup in a too-close drawing room. He tried again. “Featherfinch is a devoted student of literature, and I believe he’s read every word Byron has ever written. You should speak with him on the topic.” She could do just that if he could ever get her to dine with him. “If you’d care to join us for dinner tomorrow, I’m sure we could get him to expound upon Lord Byron for significantly more time than you may have thought you’d like to devote to the topic.”

Clementine looked momentarily delighted, then her face shuttered before his eyes. “Oh, no, I heard you before. You may have thought me still addled from my trying journey and all that dreadful business with Mr. Bull, but I heard you. My sister and I shan’t be intruding on your gentlemen’s holiday. Arch, you really must allow yourself to abandon your good manners. Your mother is not here.”

He saw her realize what she had said, watched dismay move across her features like a storm coming in at a good clip. She’d only been invoking his mother as a kind of stand-in for polite society, a proxy for whatever norms or practices dictated that a gentleman should always be accommodating and decorous and so forth. She meant to say that no one was watching him, but the thing was, he wanted to be watched—by her.

He wanted her to come to bloody dinner.

She looked increasingly stricken, and he did not know how to tell her that it was fine, that she had not erred or offended him or anything of that sort.

Not knowing how to steer them out of this conversational morass, he returned to the original topic—he did want to get his question answered. “Speaking of Chiddington, you wrote me once, when I was at school, about a dance there. You made mention of having danced with two different partners that evening. I was wondering . . .” He was belatedly hearing how odd it was going to sound for him to be focused on, to have remembered at all, such an inconsequential detail. But now that he’d started, he couldn’t see a way to reverse course. “I was wondering who it was you danced with that night?” He rushed to add, “It just popped to mind, what with all the talk of the old days, and the assembly rooms.”

Her lantern, the one that was blunting the effect of the heavens above them, was sufficient to illuminate her furrowing brow. “Hmm, no doubt one of them would have been Ralph Scully. Do you remember him? He always danced with Olive straight away. They were great friends. When he returned Olive to us, he generally invited me to dance. It was out of pity, mind you, but I always liked him.”

“He was the son of Mr. Smith, the surgeon.” Mr. Smith had always been kind to Mother, even when he hadn’t been able to offer much by way of assistance.

“Yes. Ralph and Olive struck up a particular friendship. I think it went back to the time I broke my arm falling out of that willow by the pond—do you remember that?”

He did. “I believe I was the one who ran to the village to fetch Mr. Smith.”

“That’s right! I remember lying on the grass beneath that tree, sure I was going to die! This is it, I thought, and I consoled myself that at least I would die shrouded by the branches of the willow, which if you recall were quite magnificent in the way they hung down, almost like a waterfall of foliage.” She laughed at herself. “Ralph came with his father to tend to my arm, and he and Olive discovered a shared love for—nay, obsession with—dogs, of all things.”

“Terrible news when we learned of his death.”

“He died?” Clementine’s voice sounded genuinely distressed.

“Yes, in Upper Canada—he’d joined the army and was part of a garrison there. And Mr. Smith died, too, a year or so before Ralph, so poor Mrs. Scully is left all alone.”

“How awful. And I hate how out of touch I am with news of home. I wonder that Olive never told me.”

A morose silence settled for a few moments before Clementine broke it by saying, “Certainly one of my dance partners that night would have been Ralph, may he rest in peace, if only because he was always one of my dance partners. You may remember that the rules there were relaxed. I’d never be allowed to dance with a surgeon’s son in London.”

“Mmm. And the other partner?” Archie tried not to sound too interested.

“I can’t remember the other, but it may have been Mr. Chapman. He came to be rather fond of me. Perhaps I ought to have considered his suit. That is another experience that seems not so bad with the benefit of hindsight. One comes to understand, as time passes, that one must lower one’s expectations.”

The small, resigned sigh that accompanied Clementine’s statement about lowered expectations should have dismayed Archie, but whatever he might have felt about Clem’s settling for less than, well, for less than everything, was eclipsed by his inability to get past her previous sentence.

“His suit? Are we talking about Frank Chapman?” Archie did attempt to keep the shock—and dismay—out of his tone, but he feared he had not succeeded. He checked himself. Was it a shock that men had offered for Clementine? No. She had previously mentioned having rebuffed two suits. Despite her claims to the contrary, Clementine Morgan was a prime catch. Yes, she could be odd, and her obsession with the natural world perhaps went too far in some people’s estimations—she did tend to walk around with twigs and leaves in her hair and mud on the hems of her dresses—but she was pretty and lively and just generally so . . . incomparable. But Frank Chapman was a widowed gentleman who had to be older than Clementine’s father. And he must be the man to whom she was referring. There were no other Mr. Chapmans, Frank Chapman having fathered only daughters.

He wondered who the other suitor was.

“Yes. You might not remember Mr. Chapman. He rarely came to the dances, but he was a particular friend of my father’s—and yours—and when his wife died, he was round to our house for dinner a lot.”

Archie cleared his throat and endeavoured to make his next observation with significantly more equanimity, as if he were merely commenting on the weather. “I do remember him. You and Frank Chapman would be very ill-suited.”

“I’d thought as much. But had I said yes, I’d be in the country, wouldn’t I? And he wasn’t cruel or dogmatic or overbearing or simple.”

“Not dogmatic, cruel, overbearing, or simple? That is the standard?”

“Mr. Chapman’s only crime was that he was dull as dirt.” She tilted her head. “Duller. Because dirt is, in fact, quite interesting if you look at it closely enough.” Her head righted itself as if to signal the end of her digression. “And possibly also that he was still in love with his late wife, though she’d been gone for years by that point. The more I think about Mr. Chapman relative to my experiences with gentlemen in Town, the more I wonder if I made a mistake in rebuffing him. So I would have been subject to some mind-numbingly dull treatises on taxation—he was unaccountably interested in taxation. And can it really be counted as a fault that a man loved his wife? She was his wife. I would have been a placeholder. He would have left me alone a great deal of the time. And, as I mentioned, I’d still be in the country. Father would be placated, and I would have gotten at least some of what I wanted.”

“Who was the other gentleman?” he blurted.

“I beg your pardon? What do you mean ‘the other gentleman’? Although I can’t remember the evening we’re speaking of, I’m almost certain my two dance partners that night would have been Ralph Scully and Frank Chapman.”

“Not that. You, ah, mentioned the other day, when we were on the terrace, that you’d been in receipt of two offers of marriage. Mr. Chapman was one.”

He did realize that this was none of his affair. He just . . . needed to know.

“Oh, quite.” She snorted, which made him smile. “My other offer was from a man called Alfred Potter.”

Archie searched his memory for the man and came up with nothing. Clementine must have known that’s what he was doing, for she said, “You wouldn’t know him. He’s an American, if you can believe it. An industrialist.”

The idea that Clem had had an offer of marriage from an American industrialist put Archie back on his heels. Highlighted anew how far he had drifted from the Morgans. Good God, what if she’d said yes? Was Archie the sort of person who could have lost such a dear friend to America without even realizing it?

Apparently he was.

“He was the son of a shipbuilding magnate based in New York,” Clem went on, oblivious to the dramatic reckoning of the soul underway in her conversation partner. “We met at a ball, hiding from the quadrille, and that provided a certain amount of fellowship of feeling.” She smiled fondly, and something rumbled unpleasantly in Archie’s chest. “He had recently started a company that ships ice to the American south, if you can imagine that!

“He was a refreshingly forthright sort,” Clem went on. “Told me outright that he was hunting for a wife. I suggested that hiding from dances mightn’t be the wisest strategy if matrimony was his aim. He replied that if any young ladies saw him attempting the quadrille he might as well go home right then. We had a lovely chat. At the end of it, he shocked me by proposing marriage.”

Archie tried to interject, to ask what kind of man would propose marriage after mere minutes of acquaintanceship, but he wasn’t fast enough. There was a lag between the astonishing things she was saying and his ability to absorb them.

“I did consider it,” she continued blithely. “He was a pleasant enough sort, and his passionate interest in ice was really rather compelling. But his wife would have to go to America with him, where he lived in an apartment in New York. A large apartment, to hear it told, but . . .” She shrugged. “He was to inherit his father’s empire and was in want of a wife to be a hostess and . . . Well, that wasn’t me.”

Of course that wasn’t her. For God’s sake! Archie opened his mouth to agree with her, but once again, she was too fast for him.

“I told him I’d be as suited to that life as he was to the quadrille, and we parted ways amicably. My mistake was in telling Olive about it. Olive told Father, and he was quite angry with me. Which, in truth, I found hurtful. One likes to think one’s father might have at least a minor pang of wistfulness at the idea of sending a daughter across the ocean to marry a stranger.”

She brushed her palms together briskly and her tone became equally brisk as she said, “So that’s that. One offer from an American industrialist who lived in the most urban of conditions, and one from a boring-but-benign man old enough to be my grandfather. But again, one wonders, in retrospect—especially when one’s current vantage point is post–Theodore Bull—if one made the right choice.”

“Clem, I—” He had no idea what to say. Words were beyond his grasp. She turned her head toward him, her wild hair backlit by the lantern so that, together with her flowing dress, she looked like a feral blue angel. He became so befuddled that even if he had known what he wanted to say, he wasn’t sure he knew how to make his mouth form the corresponding words. Usually, Archie’s problems with words were in reading or writing them, not speaking them, but he had so many thoughts jumbled up in his head.

That Clem had almost gone to bloody America! Left England for good.

That she’d come close to settling for Frank Chapman, or God forbid, for Theodore Bull—or for anyone.

She was too good to settle. Even if she married a kind, unexceptional gentleman, and even if that kind, unexceptional gentleman loved her, he wouldn’t understand her. He wouldn’t understand that sometimes she had to leave a party because she would die if she stayed a moment longer. Or that the antidote to a concert that went on too long and made her feel trapped was to take her outside. Or that it was a goddamn tragedy that she hadn’t climbed a tree in years.

Clementine Morgan didn’t just need love; she needed understanding.

Still, even if he could have made his mouth report these thoughts, he could not give that speech. It was fine for him to have this point of view, but he didn’t have to live her life. He was, as she had pointed out, free to live his as he chose. He couldn’t tell Clem not to settle for anything less than love and understanding, because she might have to. It made him . . . well, it made him positively seethe with indignation over the unfairness of it all. He wondered what he could do about it. Nothing, he concluded, short of changing the very basis around which society was organized, and that was well beyond his capabilities.

Archie had heard Clementine say she didn’t want to get married. He had sympathized. But perhaps he hadn’t brought the proper depth of understanding to her aversion. He did now. If only there were a way to support Clem in her quest to remain unmarried. That would solve the problem for her, if not for the rest of society, and he cared a great deal more about her than he did about society. Perhaps there was a way he could influence her father. He would think on it.

“Yes?” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I believe you were about to say something, but I fear I’ve quite lost you to your thoughts,” she teased good-naturedly.

“Ah. My apologies. I was going to ask, will you please come to dinner tomorrow?”