13 - Clem Shoots Her Shot （Not Literally, This Time）
13
Clem Shoots Her Shot (Not Literally, This Time)
Clementine did not expect Archie to agree to her admittedly outlandish proposition. He would almost certainly decline, and she’d only asked because she was at least confident that her having asked wouldn’t change his opinion of her. He would almost certainly say no, but he wouldn’t mock her or express outrage or incredulity—at least not any more than he did over anything else. Her having shot him, for instance. She was never going to live that down. Oddly, though, she found she didn’t want to. Now that the urgency of the circumstances surrounding the business with Mr. Bull had faded, she rather enjoyed being teased. Well, she enjoyed being teased by Archie. That was the difference between teasing and mocking, she supposed. To tease someone, you had to truly know her: to know what she would find amusing, to know where the line was between far enough and too far.
Archie might be the only person in her life qualified to tease her.
As upsetting as the hunting had been, Clementine felt as if they’d come through a storm together and achieved an even greater understanding of one another. Their friendship had emerged from turmoil stronger than ever, akin to the way that, under certain conditions, time can turn wood into fossilized stone.
So when Archie responded to her question by hopping down from the tree—she’d thought at first he’d lost his balance and fallen, but he landed more or less on his feet—and merely said, “Yes, all right,” with the same mildness of tone as if she’d asked him to post a letter for her, she was astonished. Perhaps the shock she’d expected him to exhibit had bounced off him and refracted back to her.
“Are you coming?” He held out a hand as if making to help her down from a carriage instead of a tree—though since she was two boughs above him, the gesture was purely symbolic. “We ought to be getting back. Effie and Simon are expecting me for dinner, before which I’ve got to venture back out and find that bird, and who knows what the cook is preparing to suspend in aspic for your evening meal?”
Attempting to disguise her discombobulation, Clementine swung herself down to the large limb below and paused. Archie’s hand was still extended, and now she could reach it. The prospect of taking it made her feel odd, as if the musculature of her legs had been replaced by the aforementioned aspic.
She was being ridiculous. They had just made an agreement to lie with each other intimately, and she could not even see her way through to putting her hand in his? She brushed her palm against her skirts to dry it off—for it was suddenly damp—and took his hand. She didn’t need his help: he had been correct in his earlier assessment that she did not require assistance in matters of tree climbing. And in fact, accepting Archie’s help was incapacitating as it effectively lost her the use of the one arm. But he made up for it by catching her as she leapt.
“Oof.” She exhaled involuntarily as she landed forcefully in his arms. He brought her to his side and held her there, her feet dangling a few inches above the forest floor. She thought he would lower her the rest of the way, but he didn’t. She was a hummingbird, hovering in place. Archie’s face was inches from hers, and she was unaccustomed to looking at him at such close range, not to mention in the full light of day. He was studying her with an expression she could not parse, something harder than kindness and softer than ire.
There was something about the intensity of his regard that made the aspic feeling intensify. It wasn’t just her legs that felt wobbly now, but her stomach, too. And her chest. She thought initially that Archie was holding her too tight: her breaths were short and shallow, and it was difficult to fully fill her lungs. But no. He was holding her fast against the firmness of his body, but his arm was around her waist; her chest, though very near his, was unconfined.
On he stared. Just as she began to fret that something was truly wrong, he said, “Your eyes are the color of a thruppence. Not a shiny new one, but one that has been worn by time.”
The comparison delighted her. Her eyes were the color of a thruppence, so it had the advantage of being true, but beyond that, hearing such an observation made her heart twist for reasons she could not articulate.
“Your eyes are . . .” She leaned in even closer, studying his irises. Archie’s eyes contained many different colors—green, brown, and a kind of yellow-gold. She had always known that. She’d never tried to describe those colors, though. She looked, and he let her take her time. Did not press her to speak. “Your eyes are the color of the moss that grows on that big beech tree we used to climb, the road to Hill House just after it’s rained, and the straw in the fields outside Mollybrook after it’s been bailed.” Yes, that was exactly right. “Your eyes are the color of home.”
Those eyes lit, as if he appreciated her inept attempts at poetry more than was warranted. But only for a moment, before, astonishingly, they grew . . . shy? That did not seem right. He ducked his head and lowered her to the ground, though the hummingbird found she did not particularly want to be set free.
“Let’s go.” He turned for the castle and she followed, reasoning that surely now he would begin raising objections to her proposal, or at least questions and/or points for discussion. After all, she had questions and points for discussion despite the fact that the whole thing had been her idea.
Question: When were they going to engage in the act?
Point for discussion: They would have to agree not to tell anyone. Even their closest confidants couldn’t know.
Question: Would he remove himself from her and spill his seed outside her body as Theo had?
Point for discussion: She would have to ask him to, or, alternatively, to enlighten her as to one of the other methods he’d alluded to that prevented the conception of a child.
But Archie said nothing. Everything was the same as ever as they walked.
When the castle came into view, she was almost out of time. “I must extract one promise from you,” she blurted.
He shot her a quizzical look.
“You must promise me one thing if we are to . . . enact the plan I proposed earlier.” Had he forgotten?
“All right. What is it?”
She drew a fortifying breath. If they weren’t going to talk about the rest of it, that was one thing, but this was an essential condition. “You mustn’t get any ideas about marrying me as a result of our lying together. You’ve got to leave your overdeveloped sense of honor at the bedroom door.”
“Overdeveloped!”
He had stopped in his tracks, but it had taken her a moment to realize it, so she halted a few feet ahead of him and turned. “Indeed.”
“Need I remind you,” he said, a note of pique entering his tone, “that it’s thanks to my ‘overdeveloped’ sense of honor that neither you nor your sister are currently Mrs. Theodore Bull?”
“Need I remind you about the time you broke a vase at Hill House and instead of hiding the pieces as any sensible child would have, you sought out my mother and confessed? Or the time you fed Mr. Smith’s Easter ham to Olive’s dog under the table?” His jaw dropped, and she smirked. He had thought he was being so subtle that day. “Or,” she cried, overcome by the momentum of her own argument, “that time you went way out of your way to rescue Olive and me from an unscrupulous knave, were prepared to marry one of us if need be, and didn’t even get angry when I shot you?”
She thought they were going to have an argument then, but he laughed. Threw his head back and cackled. When he was done, he righted his head, looked her in the eye, and said, “All right, Clem. I promise not to get any ideas about marrying you. You’ve made your aversion to the institution quite clear.”
She was tempted to point out that just because a woman had aversions—or preferences, for that matter—it didn’t mean that a man need heed them. In fact, most men found the aversions and preferences of women completely irrelevant. But better, of course, to retain the advantage here. “All right, then.”
“All right, then,” he echoed, and she was about to resign herself to the fact that none of her other questions or points of discussion were going to be dealt with, at least not right now. He was about to turn, and they would make the final approach to the castle. He would, as before, conduct himself as if everything were the same as ever. She wasn’t sure why that annoyed her so.
He did turn, but to her shock, everything wasn’t the same. He offered her his arm.
He had never done that before. Well, there may have been the odd time when the Morgans were dining at Mollybrook and one or both sets of parents had insisted on a show of formality. But he had never done anything so courtly as offering her his arm when they were alone. Being themselves.
But there it was, his wool-encased forearm, bent at forty-five degrees, the elbow making a point that pierced like a knife through her aspic heart.
She laid her fingers on his arm, and walked with him.
* * *
As they approached the castle, Archie had been intending to suggest they meet on the roof again after dark. On the roof, he would talk Clem out of her ridiculous proposition. He needed the time between then and now to rehearse his speech. He wasn’t good with words at the best of times. And even though in some ways Clem offering herself to him was the best of times, her doing so had him completely and utterly befuddled. That feeling he got when he tried to read something important? Where the words started to look wrong and the letters began to slide out of place and his head felt as if it would burst from the pressure?
He usually got that feeling from books, but for a moment back there, the entire world had done that to him. So much so that he’d fallen out of a tree. He couldn’t think straight, so he’d known he’d never be able to talk straight. So he’d landed as best he could from that fall, dusted himself off, and allowed himself to pretend, just for a while, that he was in agreement with Clementine. That he could have her.
They would sort it out later, in the dark, where it was easier to talk.
He wasn’t able to whisper an instruction to meet him on the roof, though, because they were met in the gardens by Effie, Simon, and Olive, who were running around like Bedlamites.
“Clemmie!” Olive shrieked when she caught sight of her sister. “I’ve lost Hermes!”
“Pardon?” Clem took her hand off his arm, and even though Archie had a sense that the laws of nature didn’t work this way at all, he felt the removal of her hand as the slamming of a door. She was releasing his arm, but he felt the opposite: a sort of imprisonment.
Olive launched into a story about how she had decided to sketch a picture for Clementine to memorialize their time at Quintrell Castle. “I asked the gentlemen to pose for me, and I thought we ought to include Hermes.” She sniffed loudly, seeming to Archie more distraught at losing her sister’s turtle than she had been at stealing her sister’s fiancé. “So I got him out of his enclosure, and I lost him!”
“Miss Olive,” Effie said, “I cannot allow you to take the blame for this unfortunate turn of events. Miss Morgan, it was I who suggested the introduction of Hermes to our tableau. I am truly sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Simon called from where he was on his hands and knees beneath a cracked stone bench surrounded by overgrown grasses. “Hermes can’t have gotten far, and if you lot would spend as much time helping me look as you have in hysterics, we might actually get somewhere.” He paused and twisted his head over his shoulder. “Hello, Harcourt. Hello, Miss Morgan.”
And so Archie found himself not whispering instructions to Clementine for a clandestine rendezvous but scrabbling around the overgrown estate looking for her turtle.
“It is all right, everyone,” Clementine kept saying. “It’s unfortunate we’ll have to skip the races, but it isn’t as if Hermes can’t survive in the wild. He’ll be fine. In fact, he’ll be better off. I’ve been feeling increasingly guilty about confining him. Captivity, no matter how comfortable, is still captivity, after all.”
She was roundly ignored. Well, she was ignored by everyone else. Archie heard her as if she’d been speaking into his ear, nay, into his very soul, as absurd as that was. Captivity, no matter how comfortable, is still captivity.
The phrase brought to mind her instance that he not take a marriage-minded approach to their liaison—not that there was going to be a liaison. It had never seemed out of character for Clementine to be opposed to marriage, but he hadn’t thought about it in the context of the word captivity. No wonder she hated the idea. Wild Clementine could never thrive in captivity.
“I found him!” Olive screeched a few minutes later, sounding for all the world like a banshee foretelling death rather than a girl proclaiming victory. She strode up from the banks of the pond, holding poor Hermes over her head like a trophy. Her hem was dirty and wet—she resembled her sister that way.
“Oh, Olive, you’ve ruined your dress,” said Clementine, whom Archie knew had never spared a care for her owned ruined dresses.
It was, perhaps, only in captivity that people minded ruined dresses.
“And so I have!” Olive exclaimed. “I don’t know how you bear it, Clemmie. Wet feet are the absolute worst. Come, let’s change before we dine. Happily, I overpacked for my botched elopement, so I’ve plenty of dresses where this came from.”
It occurred to Archie that he’d noted—several times—the blue day dress that Clem had been wearing. When the light was right, you could see the outline of her legs beneath it. She’d worn it nearly every day except for twice when a pink dress trimmed with ribbons had taken its place—almost certainly a loaner from Olive. Yet he could not recall one thing about Olive’s appearance since they arrived, until now when he’d noticed her Clemlike muddy hem.
Olive took her sister’s arm, and chattered at her as they departed. Clem looked over her shoulder at Archie, just briefly as they mounted the stairs to the terrace. He could not read her expression.
* * *
As Archie sat alone in the drawing room waiting for Simon and Effie, he thought about what a wonderful day it had been, in the end. The worst part had been the bacon. Which made no sense, because what about the Clem-abjectly-weeping part? While he never wanted to cause Clementine pain, her distress had led to a forthright conversation he was very glad they’d had. And then she’d made her ridiculous proposition. He would, of course, be nipping that in the bud, but nothing had ever—ever—flattered him more. So, on balance: a wonderful day.
But the bacon. Having to swallow it guiltily while he made eye contact with her. Something about it was still bothering him. He reminded himself of Clementine’s own words on the matter. She had no jurisdiction over what Archie did or did not eat today.
Still, that bacon weighed heavily, almost as if it remained undigested in his gullet.
All at once and fully formed, a memory surfaced. Mother used to have a bedtime ritual she would perform with Archie when he was small. She had called it “Rose, Thorn, Bud.” She would lie next to him in his bed, and they would look back over the day and name their roses and their thorns, the rose being the best part of the day and the thorn being the worst. Then, the bud: a hope for the next day.
So, thorn: the bacon. Rose . . . He could hardly choose. The moment after he’d swallowed the bacon and caught sight of Clem and suddenly understood her in a way he hadn’t been able to articulate previously? No, not quite. Perhaps watching her stare so intently at the family of snakes? No, not that either.
It was, in fact, the moment he’d fallen out of the tree, as nonsensical as that seemed. Clem’s offering herself to him. It wasn’t a matter of lust, though. No, that moment wasn’t his rose because of what she’d offered; it was the fact of the offer. To be trusted with such a delicate thing. To be recognized as a person Clem could confide in, as a person who tried to help where he could.
To be known.
By God, she had known all along that he hadn’t eaten that ham all those years ago? And more to the point, she’d known why. Then she’d looked into his eyes and described them so perfectly he’d felt almost as if she were describing more than his eyes. He rather thought he had never been so thoroughly seen before.
Except perhaps by Mother. A great while ago.
Yet that had felt different from this, somehow. With Mother, it had been a . . . calmer sort of seeing. Clementine saw him in a way that both comforted him and agitated him.
He let his mind wander forward to tomorrow, searching for the bud that might bloom. Of course, Archie was not a saint. He was honored by Clem’s trust in him, and he was inordinately flattered by her proposition. And he had to admit—to himself—that he was attracted to her. A man’s prick did not lie, and on several occasions recently while in proximity to Clem, Archie’s had . . . not lied.
Such attraction was logical, he told himself. Clementine Morgan was a very pretty woman. She was kind and clever, too.
It was also irrelevant.
Time to put Clementine and her extraordinary proposal out of his mind, an endeavor that was made easier when the boys clattered in, professing hunger and pouring drinks and asking him what he’d shot today.
“A pheasant,” he said with a mildness he hoped wasn’t too studied. “I gave it to Mrs. MacPuddle for her own dinner.” After he’d gone to retrieve it, he couldn’t bear the thought of eating it, probably because he associated it with Clementine’s anguish. He could see the boys gearing up to ask him more about the day. “Shall we go into dinner? Mrs. MacPuddle came while you two were changing and said we may eat anytime. I, for one, am famished and would happily forgo an aperitif.”
Archie’s hunger pangs turned to another kind of pang entirely when they entered the dining room. Cook had outdone herself. At the center of the table sat a suckling pig roasted to perfection, its skin crispy and deep brown, and . . . its mouth opened unnaturally wide to hold an apple and its empty eye sockets appearing almost demonic.
He thought yet again of that encounter with Mr. Smith, the farmer, all those years ago. Too bad Olive didn’t have any of her dogs with her here.
Seating himself at the rear of the unfortunate creature where at least he did not have a prospect on that uncanny, eyeless face, Archie surveyed the rest of the table. Having enjoyed the informality of their inaugural dinner at the castle, the men had asked for their subsequent meals to be served all at once, rather than in a series of removes. They’d been enjoying helping themselves willy-nilly to whatever they liked, their conversation undisturbed by the presence of servants, who were too thin on the ground at Quintrell Castle anyway to serve a proper meal.
That their dining tradition had been established thusly was a boon to Archie this evening. It meant Effie and Simon did not notice he didn’t take any of the pig. He filled up instead on potatoes, stewed apples, and some kind of wilted green he didn’t care for but shoveled into his mouth all the same. He followed it all with an enormous helping of sticky toffee pudding. Tomorrow was his meatless day with Clementine, but after that, he would find himself some meat that didn’t bring to mind Mr. Smith berating his wife or Clementine screaming as he shot a bird. Perhaps some mutton.
“I’ve been thinking.” Archie angled his chair to face Simon as they pushed their plates away and Effie went to the sideboard to fetch the brandy decanter. He had done so to better see Simon, who was seated next to him, but the adjustment had the happy consequence of putting the ravaged pig outside his field of vision. “Perhaps I ought to take my responsibilities in Lords more seriously. Turn up for more than just the most essential votes.”
“I beg your pardon?” Simon asked, even as Effie exclaimed, “Why in God’s name would you do that?”
He should not have said anything. It was merely a half-formed idea. Not even that. It was an absurd notion that had suddenly popped into his head and just as rapidly out of his mouth. “I’ve been thinking about how I don’t really . . . do anything.”
“You do plenty,” Effie said, inserting himself between Archie and Simon to fill their glasses. “You’re the most accomplished hunter I know, for all that we harangue you about it. You’re a master of so many pursuits: boxing, archery, riding. You, Archie, are a true Corinthian.”
“Yes, but those are idle pursuits. They don’t do anyone any good.”
“But do you really want to become a parliamentarian?” Simon asked, squinting at Archie as if he didn’t quite recognize him.
“I beg you, please don’t,” Effie said dramatically as he reseated himself. “I can’t have the both of you squawking at me about excise taxes, what Howick is or isn’t doing right, and God knows what else.”
“Shall we return to the drawing room rather than linger here?” Archie asked. Effie had retaken his seat across the table, and Archie preferred not to have to stare at the wreckage of their dinner.
Simon and Effie shared a look Archie could not parse but agreed. Once reinstalled in their drawing room, Simon, still studying Archie as if he were a specimen under a quizzing glass, said, “Archie, where is this all coming from?”
“Mr. Hughes runs the estate with minimal help from me. I almost never show up in Lords. I’m depressingly ordinary. I don’t do anything of worth.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Effie proclaimed. “I don’t do anything of worth.”
“That’s not true,” Archie said. “You are a poet.”
“One might say that poems are less than no use. Lord knows, my father does.”
“He is wrong. You bring people beauty, and understanding.” Archie turned to Simon. “And you strive to make the world a better place. I, by contrast, do nothing of use.”
“That is entirely false,” Simon said quietly, his muted but firm objection the tonal opposite of Effie’s earlier outburst.
“Oh, come now.” Archie was starting to grow impatient. He did not wish to be coddled. “Even if you do not share Miss Morgan’s moral objection, hunting, while enjoyable, isn’t important, not in any elemental way. At least not if one doesn’t need to hunt to live.”
“He’s not talking about that,” Effie said dismissively. “What you do is love people.”
Archie blinked, taken aback. “I beg your pardon?”
“You love people, openly and without reserve. That is entirely rare.”
Archie looked to Simon, who merely gestured at Effie as if ceding him the floor.
“Consider your mother,” Effie went on. “I don’t know another son in England who would take such devoted care of his mother. That’s why you’re never in Lords. You’re taking care of your mother.”
“Yes, but Miss Brown is there, and honestly, I could hire any number of nursemaids. It needn’t be me taking care of Mother.”
“But it is you. That you have taken up that burden so willingly and with such kindness . . . well, that’s exactly the kind of thing you do. And forget the countess. What about us?”
“What do you mean?” Archie was confused.
“You find people, and you love them,” Effie declared. He was on a roll now, gesticulating dramatically into space. “I, for one, wouldn’t have anyone else who did if you hadn’t adopted me. Can you imagine the lonely state I’d be in if I didn’t have you around? If you didn’t drag me around England for a fortnight every autumn?”
“If you didn’t make these trips a priority, they wouldn’t happen,” Simon said. “If I’d stayed home, you know I’d’ve spent the past fortnight reading newspapers, but what would that have accomplished? Parliament isn’t in session. I’d merely be reading, sending my mind on a fruitless whirl. It is only here that I gain a sense of remove from the troubles of the day.”
“Indeed,” Effie declared. “This is my favorite fortnight of the year.”
“Mine too,” Simon said.
Well. Archie hardly knew what to say. Between this, and Clementine’s trust in him, he feared he was about to get a big head. He didn’t hate it, though.