Chapter Thirteen
After much fussing over and patting of the donkey, who quickly ate the rest of Dot’s flowers and seemed inclined to eat the
little garden in front of the Grand Palace on the Thames as well, arrangements were made to board her for a few weeks in the
adjacent livery stables by virtue of an intricate bargain with the stable owners involving a dozen of Helga’s scones, a week’s
stay free of charge at the Grand Palace on the Thames, tickets to a program at a bawdy theater (which Mr. Delacorte had in
his coat pocket), the current contents of the Epithet Jar, plus two pounds and two shillings and four pence, donated from
the pockets of Mr. Marchand and Mr. Delacorte and the reticule of Miss Woodville.
If the donkey had a name, the man who delivered her was unaware of it. Hogarth had won her from the Earl of Kildere’s third
son.
Mrs. Pariseau went off to her planned visit to a museum; Delilah, Angelique, Dot, and Mr. Pike returned to their chores; and
Mr. Delacorte went off to get the donkey settled at the livery stables.
That left Mr. Marchand and Ginny in the courtyard.
Ginny suddenly felt a little shy.
In the bright daylight, he looked tired. Her heart twinged. She recalled how pale he’d gone before he’d abruptly departed
the sitting room the previous evening. She studied him for other signs of languishing, but apart from faint shadows beneath
his eyes, he was his usual intimidatingly splendid self.
“You might as well add one pound and a shilling to my brother’s debt total,” she finally said.
He smiled. “Already done.”
She gave a short, pained laugh. “I wonder if this is the last of the so-called whimsical gifts Hogarth won.”
He cleared his throat. “About that . . . Miss Woodville, I have something important I feel I should share with you. You may
want to sit down for it.”
Alarm surged through Ginny. Perhaps he was desperately ill.
He gestured to the bench in the little garden, and she stumbled over to it and sat down warily.
He sat across from her on the other bench, at a chaste but still pleasantly disturbing distance. She was aware of but perilously
unconcerned about the fact that they were both growing comfortable with this sort of proximity to each other. Her mother would
have keeled in a swoon.
She breathed in, and the scent of the nearby blossoms plus eau de Marchand—bay rum and soap, a dash of tobacco—made her head
briefly light.
“Miss Woodville . . .” He leaned toward her like a doctor about to deliver difficult news. Her heart slammed. “I’m wondering
if it’s time to consider the possibility that your brother might just be a little, well . . .” He paused suspensefully. “. . . stupid.”
She froze.
His eyes were glinting. The devil.
“Oh, my God,” she breathed in mock wonderment. “You’ve hit upon it! That’s precisely it! He’s stupid.”
He nodded slowly.
She laughed, but her laugh evolved into a despairing groan. “What I can’t be certain of is whether it’s a permanent, fatal
sort of stupid, or just a young man sort of stupid, because aren’t all boys a little stupid until a certain age?” She turned
to him beseechingly.
“The aristocratic ones are, of a certainty,” he agreed equably.
“You weren’t, naturally.”
“Oh, I was stupid. But there’s a sort of grandeur to the way Hogarth is going about being stupid. A purity. An innocence.
A divinity.”
“Have a care, Marchand.”
“Sorry,” he replied insincerely, stretching out his legs.
“How on earth will he survive, let alone raise a family? How can I stop him from doing stupid things now that he’s started?
What if he does it again, even if I actually ever find the vase, which doesn’t seem at all likely anymore?”
“Here’s the paradox: You stop him from doing stupid things by not stopping him from doing stupid things.”
“I assure you, that’s not an option.”
“Miss Woodville, you—emphasis on you—cannot keep the young earl in cotton batting the whole of his life. And that is part of the problem, I’m afraid. He seems
to have saved up all the stupid things he’s never done before and done them in one night.”
She bristled. “But I promised I’d look after him. And besides, I want to look after him. I’m good at it. It’s what I’m best at, in fact.” Was this true, or was she just reflexively arguing a point?
“But I suspect Hogarth has probably been very, very careful not to put a foot wrong in order not to let you down in any way
for all these years, too, and this, believe it or not, could be in part the result.”
That brought her up short.
Damn Marchand and his bluntness and pointing out things she didn’t want to face. It was a relief as much as it was a trial.
She pondered this assertion.
“I should tell you, Mr. Marchand, that Hogarth did not precisely shame himself at university. He’s not that kind of stupid. In fact, he greatly impressed all of his tutors.”
“What were his best subjects?”
“Fencing. Mathematics.”
“You’re having me on.”
“I’m quite serious. Even the fancy kind of mathematics. Formulas like hieroglyphics.” She waggled her fingers in the air,
pantomiming the scrawling of equations. “That sort. The reason he went mad at the betting table had nothing to do with his
ability to calculate things.”
“Hmm.” Marchand was pensive.
“Do you know, Mr. Marchand, my brother would tell me only two things about that whole night at Lucifer’s Fall. He said that
I would have understood why he did it if I’d known with whom he was wagering. And I think I do understand, now that I know it was Sydenham. And—this
is the odd one—he told me that Sydenham’s satyr waistcoat buttons were jeering at him.”
“Jeering?” Mr. Marchand said it so sharply she gave a start.
“It might have been ‘leering.’ I expect it was just because Hogarth was drunk.”
“Well, he was that,” Mr. Marchand mused.
He fell silent for a time.
“Marchand . . . what is the point of me if I can’t keep him from being stupid for the rest of his life?”
“Guinevere.”
Her head swiveled toward him abruptly, her eyes wide at the sound of her first name. The word was gentle, but etched in amazed
exasperation.
“What is the point of this shrubbery?” He reached up and drew a leaf between his fingers.
“It’s decorative? It . . . looks fetching against this bench?”
“And?”
“It’s . . . a home for birds and insects and little rodents. A prop for lectures from supercilious men of dubious character.”
His eyebrows flicked. “So birds and insects no doubt think of it as one thing, and you think of it as another, and what do
you suppose the shrubbery believes its purpose is?”
“But do shrubberies think, Marchand?” She tipped her head and wrinkled her nose.
“The shrubbery just is. It basks in the sun and soaks up rain and puts out flowers in the spring.”
“But I’m not a shrubbery?” she reminded him.
He sighed. “It’s a matter of perspective, isn’t it? What the point of anything is? You are a grown woman. You don’t need a point. But should you be so inclined, you can decide the point of you.”
He was again making the kind of philosophical sense that unnerved her because it called into question the way she’d lived
her life to date.
“You don’t understand. I’m good at it,” she said stubbornly. “I like looking after him.”
Did she? Or was it all she knew?
Was it all she knew because her promise kept her connected to people who were forever gone?
She didn’t like the way these thoughts felt, because they threatened to reorder an existence that was already in a state of
upheaval.
Her head suddenly ached.
He read something in her expression.
“Close your eyes,” he ordered. But gently. “And turn your hand palm up.”
“Speaking of ordering people about,” she muttered. But she obeyed.
Her breath hitched when his fingertip touched her palm.
He delicately, slowly, traced a simple shape across her palm with his fingertip.
Her breathing went shallow.
Ohhhh, this devastating bastard. It was so subtle, so clever.
So revelatory.
Shivery tributaries of sensation fanned out from where he touched her; in their path, cells stirred awake to participate in
this little pleasure. The hairs on the back of her neck lifted. The ones on her arms prickled to attention. Her nipples were
practically stinging. Here, here, and here, her body seemed to say. This is where you want to be touched by him, in case you didn’t yet know.
And just as all rivers reach the sea, apparently this sensation, which was in truth hardly a touch at all, was destined to
convene right between her legs in a hot, heavy pulse of longing.
He’d touched her for all of five seconds.
And in those five seconds, like those seconds during which she’d been airborne when he’d lifted her into the carriage, she’d
felt an extraordinary, elemental freedom from . . . herself. Or rather, she’d felt more purely herself than she had in years.
Imagine what he could do with his fingers over the span of a night, a wicked little voice that sounded remarkably like Marchand’s
whispered inside her head.
One night of pleasure, and at least a few of your problems would be solved.
Finally, reluctantly, she opened her eyes.
“I didn’t feel a thing.” Her voice was a traitor: It creaked.
He smiled at her, thoroughly, almost sympathetically, amused.
“You know, I honestly expected seduction to be a little fancier. Perhaps with . . . nets?” she hazarded.
“Nets?”
“I’m only guessing. I didn’t mean to shock you, Marchand. My goodness, look at you, clutching your pearls in alarm.”
“If I wanted to actually seduce you, I wouldn’t have to try. You’d just fall into my hand like a ripe plum before you even knew what’s happening to you.” He sounded bored. He cupped
his hand, illustrating, presumably, the plum.
She made a soft little scoffing noise. “I’m certain you kiss the way a little boy kisses his grandmother.”
A speculative, knowing, almost pitying little smile curved his lips. As if he knew a thousand things about her that she had yet to discover.
She felt that smile in her nether regions as surely as if he’d traced a shape there, too.