15 - Three Square Meals
15
Three Square Meals
“Why no kippers, though?” Archie asked Clementine the next morning at breakfast, the first meal of their meatless day.
“Why would there be kippers here if we are not eating animals today?” Clementine asked from the table where she was seated with Olive and Simon—Effie never ate breakfast on account of his habit of sleeping in.
Archie paused at the buffet where he was filling his plate with pastries and . . . pastries. So many pastries. “A fish is not an animal.”
“It isn’t? What is it, then?”
He made his way to the table. “It’s not an animal-animal. You don’t shoot it.”
“No, you merely yank it from its peaceful, watery home and slowly suffocate it.”
Simon snickered.
“All right, you two, that’s enough.” Olive lowered the magazine she was reading, and Archie was amused to see that it was Le Monde Joli, the one that sometimes published Effie’s poems. He wondered if that was a coincidence or if Effie had told Olive all his secrets.
To Clementine, Olive said, “I do believe his questions are in earnest, so perhaps a less barbed response is in order.” She turned to Archie. “And you.” She sniffed. “If you’re going to do things Clementine’s way for the day, may I suggest you use your eyes and ears more and your mouth less? You’re meant to observe and learn, are you not? Rather than opine?”
Simon snickered again, and Archie shot him a look, but he smiled to himself, thinking of their first full day here, when he and Clem had been coming to terms for the visit. She’d said everyone knew that Archie was like a brother to the Morgan girls. That felt decidedly true in the case of Olive. She was like a younger sister needling him.
Clementine, though . . .
His gaze found Clem’s lips.
Clem, of course, did not feel like a sister to him anymore. He wasn’t sure now that she ever had.
His face heated. Nay, his entire body heated as he thought of her flushed, writhing on his bed, his ministrations sending her over the edge, her—
“Ahem.” Olive was still looking at him with her eyebrows raised.
“Yes, quite,” he said. “I understand. More listening, less talking.” He made a show of shutting his mouth.
Simon snickered yet again.
It was going to be a very long day.
* * *
Clementine had taken Olive’s admonishment to heart, and she was afraid Archie had, too. “You know, you are allowed to speak despite what my sister says,” she said to him when they’d passed the first ten minutes of afternoon tea almost entirely in silence.
They were alone for the first time today, and there were important matters to discuss, so she needed him to snap out of his uncharacteristically pliable quietude.
“I notice you have eaten eleven sandwiches,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?” That was not what they needed to discuss.
“I have been following Olive’s directive to watch and listen, and I have noted that you eat rather a large volume of food.”
She was not sure if she ought to be offended by the observation. If it were anyone other than Archie making it she would have thought herself being accused of gluttony.
“It’s just that I always thought you had a small appetite,” he added, his brow knitting ever so slightly.
Dear Archie. He was watching and listening. He was trying to understand. “No, I always pretended not to be hungry so I didn’t have to eat what was being served. It turns out that now that I’m in charge of what I eat, and don’t have to come face-to-face with a dead animal on my plate, I have rather a large appetite.” She pinched a bit of flesh on her arm to show him. “I am not the skinny girl of yore.”
“Yes.” He looked as if he was trying to suppress a smile. “I have recently had occasion to notice that, too.” The smile escaped its confines, and they grinned at each other as if they had a shared secret. They did have a shared secret. “But that can’t have happened in the short time you have been resident here.” His smile turned upside down. “So may I assume you are getting enough to eat under your father’s roof?”
“Yes. I became mistress of the house after Mother died, so I get to oversee the menus. I’ve given the cook a book called A New System of Vegetable Cookery that Theo recommended—so perhaps he was good for one thing. I simply order up plenty of dishes I can eat and no one pays any attention to what I do or don’t consume at the table.”
“Good.”
“Father never pays attention to me anyway, not really. He never has.”
“That is . . . less good.”
Enough discussion about her diet. “Archie, I have wanted to get you alone all day, and it has proven more difficult than I’d anticipated.” Olive had spent most of the day with Clementine, and had only just accepted an invitation from Lord Featherfinch to take a ramble.
“Yes, I know the feeling.”
She was starting to get that sensation again, the one she’d come to think of as the aspic feeling. A significant proportion of her body felt wobbly, and she was overtaken with a kind of . . . not shyness exactly. Not trepidation. More akin to . . . Oh, she was frustrating herself. What did it matter how she felt? She needn’t struggle over naming the unfamiliar sentiment inside her. She knew what she wanted, and for once, she was in the presence of a man who listened to her. So she blundered onward. “Archie, may I come to you again this evening?” She hoped they would not have to relitigate the matter. They hadn’t, last night, discussed the specifics of a second assignation.
“You may,” Archie said carefully. “I shall tap lightly on your door on my way to my room. When you hear that tap, wait ten minutes and come to me—carefully. Check the corridor.” Clementine refrained from telling Archie about her meeting with Lord Featherfinch in that same corridor yesternight. “And for Heaven’s sake, do not come in your nightclothes. If someone should discover you, you’ll be better able to make a credible excuse if you are properly attired.”
She waited for more, but there was none. The aspic feeling intensified. “The evening is going to feel very long, I fear. It is going to be a struggle to act as if everything is the same as ever.”
“Well, you must,” he said. “We are among friends, but if word of our . . . activities should reach my friends or your sister, I am afraid I shan’t be able to suppress my ‘overdeveloped’ sense of honor any longer.” He paused. “And I know how fervently you wish to avoid marriage.”
Yes, she . . . did desire to avoid marriage. And, as previously established, Archie paid attention to what she said. “Indeed. So we must act as we always do.”
“Yes.”
“Well, let us practice right now.”
“How do you mean?”
“Stop being so agreeable about today’s meals. Stop inquiring so earnestly about whether I’m getting enough to eat. Start telling me again that fish aren’t animals!”
“What about eggs?”
She smiled. “What about them?”
“Do you eat them?”
“I do not.”
“You say you don’t want to come face-to-face with an animal on your plate. Eggs do not have faces.” He grinned. “Therefore, eggs are not animals.” He sat back and turned his palms to the sky, triumphant.
* * *
Dinner was perhaps the greatest experience of Archie’s life to date, and it didn’t have anything to do with the food. The meal had been delicious, he had to admit. The cook’s now famous six-hour mushroom pie had been the centerpiece. Its pastry had been divinely flaky, its filling rich, and he dared say, meaty. It had been accompanied by various vegetable dishes as well as a savory cheesecake that was both odd and delightful.
And now they were enjoying some of those pears everyone loved. The boys were interrogating Clementine about their preparation.
“It’s vinegar!” she exclaimed when pressed about the mystery ingredient.
“Vinegar!” Simon exclaimed right back. “Never in a million years would I have thought of putting vinegar on pears.”
“Nor would I. The cook suggested it. It’s a locally made fig vinegar, so perhaps that makes a difference.”
“One hears the adage about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, but perhaps that is not the case here,” Olive said laughingly, “for I do believe these pears would attract more than their share of flies were we to leave them unattended outside.”
“Oh, but there is honey in them, too,” Clementine said.
“I knew it!” Effie said.
“So to test the theory,” Simon said, putting on his serious face, “we would need to prepare two batches of pears: one with just vinegar and one with just honey. Put them both outside and observe their respective insect visitors.”
“You know, I think I might paint those pears,” Effie said suddenly. He turned to the Morgans. “I dabble in painting. I’m not very good at it, but I persist in trying.”
Archie was attending to the conversation but not participating in it. He sat back and let it wash over him. Here were all his people: Effie, Simon, Clementine, and Olive. Everyone together, yet each person so very much him- or herself.
He remembered that first dinner, when he’d sent poor Mrs. MacPuddle on a goose chase—a Morgan sister chase—trying to lure the ladies to the dinner table. He thought then that he wanted the Morgans to know his friends and his friends to know the Morgans.
Now they did. It felt right. It felt right in the way that few things in his life did, or ever had.
And oddly, it felt different from the other times they’d all been together, the evenings spent in the drawing room after dinner. Perhaps the act of sharing a meal created an even more convivial atmosphere than usual. Or perhaps time spent in close quarters far from home had knit them more closely together, created a kind of easy familiarity. He couldn’t imagine what else it would be. Nothing else had changed.
Well, that was not precisely true. He glanced at Clementine. She must have felt his regard, for she swung her gaze around to meet his and smiled—unreservedly. He had to duck his head to hide an answering grin and settled back into his happy repose, letting the voices of his beloved friends weave a cozy cocoon around him. The only barb in his satisfaction was that sense of an ever-ticking clock. Of the end of their holiday growing near. It was day twelve.
“What do you think, Archie?” Simon asked.
Archie looked up. He had no idea what the question had been. “I beg your pardon. I was woolgathering.”
“We were discussing the coronation,” Simon said.
“Particularly the queen’s exclusion from it,” Olive said archly. “Did you know they met her with armed guards?”
“That seems extreme,” said Archie, who hadn’t known that.
“She was never in any danger,” Simon said.
“Still,” Archie said.
“Archie’s a very pacifistic sort,” Effie said.
“Except when it comes to killing animals,” Clementine said tartly, and everyone laughed, including Archie, though to be honest, his mirth was somewhat spurious. He didn’t like Clementine thinking of him as a killer.
“Or defending people he loves,” Effie added. “I can’t tell you how many times he made a boy named Nigel Nettlefell pay for being cruel to me when we were in school.”
“Oh, yes,” Simon agreed. “He did that quite a few times. Archie can be quite combative in defense of his loved ones.”
“Come now,” Archie said, wanting to get back to listening to them talk idly about things other than their overinflated impressions of his character.
He got his wish, but not for long. It wasn’t twenty minutes before Clementine suddenly announced that she was going to bed early. “The turtle races are tomorrow, and I need to get a good night’s sleep.”
“Yes, but Clemmie, all you need do is place Hermes at the starting line and cross your fingers,” Olive said.
“Nevertheless, I find myself quite tired.” Clementine yawned in a way Archie recognized as false. He hoped the others were not paying such close attention.
Clementine bobbed a curtsy to the assembled, a formality that was patently out of character, and took her leave. He could only consider himself fortunate that she did not shoot him a look as she departed.