Chapter 4
London
“We must find you a house.”
Richard Campion raised his coffee cup and sipped, gaze fixed determinedly on the window. A cart full of chickens was rumbling past, squawking loudly, as if they knew they were on their way to imminent death at the market.
He sympathized.
“A good house,” Clemency went on. His sister had been on this theme for a fortnight, and he’d begun tensing up every time she opened her mouth. Her prodding was like the stick of a needle, a minor irritant at first but now it had raised a welt that burned and irritated. “Something near us.”
But not too near, Richard thought.
He ought to regret thinking that, but he could not.
He’d come back to England for Clemency, after the French invasion of Russia had scrambled all his travel plans and prolonged the journey from a planned year and a half into nearly four.
When Clemency’s letter had finally reached him in Urga, it was already a month old, and its tearstained message had made him head west at once.
Clemency’s husband, Daniel, had died of a sudden illness, and she begged Richard to return to England to help her untangle his affairs.
He had returned expecting to find his sister prostrate with grief; instead, he found her still grieving, but no longer prostrate, and bent on getting him to stay. He was beginning to wish he’d remained among the yaks.
“Such a lot of trouble to go to,” he said aloud, “taking a house when I am not certain I shall stay here more than a few weeks.”
“No!” Her brows drew together, and she turned to the other man at the table. “Gerhard, you must persuade him to stay.”
Richard shot his friend a look that warned him not to join the battle. Gerhard turned mournful eyes toward Clemency. “How can I, if he is idiot enough to wish to leave?”
“You can,” she cried, reaching to put her hand atop his. “You are so dear to both of us—even if Richard will not admit it—and I know you will think of something. You have never disappointed me, Gerhard, never.”
He fairly glowed under her regard. “I hope to never! I will try to talk sense into him.”
Richard shook his head and went back to watching the bustling street outside.
It was the touch on the hand that did it, he knew.
Gerhard had been pining over Clemency since she turned sixteen, but the great oaf had been too cowardly ever to say anything to her.
Instead he’d become a loyal puppy, grateful for any scrap of her attention.
Clem, oblivious creature, had never noticed he was madly in love with her. She’d married a dashing Englishman who’d come to visit their father in Zürich during one of the lulls in the wars, and Gerhard had never recovered.
“I don’t like this city,” Richard said. He could feel both of them plotting their attacks, Clemency because she never liked to be thwarted and Gerhard because she had touched his hand and thrown fuel on the smoldering embers of his dreams. Richard hoped he was never so pitiable over a woman.
“Something in Paddington,” suggested Clemency. “Lady Ardle was telling me about the most delightful picnic she went to in Paddington. It was quite rustic.”
Great God. Clem’s idea of rustic meant stone cottages and landscaped parks, within a convenient hour’s drive of a town with a proper number of fashionable shops. If he took a house there, his sister would bring parties to picnic on his grounds.
“I can send word to an estate agent to help locate such a place,” offered Gerhard, who was gazing at Clem raptly.
“Not Paddington,” said Richard shortly. “Somewhere out of town, or I won’t go.
” He realized he’d have to view a place or two.
Nothing else would satisfy Clemency, and despite her desire to dictate his life, Richard was fond of her.
She was eight years younger than he, and he had spoiled her as a child.
Before their father died, he had impressed upon Richard that it was now his duty to look after Clemency.
Since she’d been newly, and happily, married to Daniel Murray at the time, Richard had thought this would mean an occasional visit, gifts for her children, and regular letters from wherever he roamed.
Papa ought to have given that speech to Gerhard, who already thought Clemency a veritable goddess he would die to protect.
Now Richard might have to take a house in London, of all places, or bear not only his sister’s tearful disappointment but the lashes of guilt from his late father’s spirit as well.
“Greenwich, then, or Richmond,” Clemency forged onward. Richard lifted one shoulder noncommittally, and she gave a happy chirp of delight. “Gerhard, do find an estate agent.”
“I will do it today,” he promised her. Richard gave him a sour look and Gerhard only grinned back, like an idiot. If Gerhard had to choose between pleasing Clemency and anything else, he’d please Clemency no matter the cost.
“Verr?ter,” he said.
“Ja, natürlich,” agreed Gerhard. Richard could call him any bad name under the sun, not just a traitor, and Clemency’s smile would wash it all away for Gerhard.
“Don’t do that, Richard, you know I don’t remember my German,” Clemency reproached him. “What did you say to him?”
“I urged him not to delay.” He leaned forward and set down his coffee cup.
“Since we’ve clearly exhausted your hospitality here and you are eager for us to be gone from your home.
” Gerhard had come along to England as a matter of course—it was difficult to dissuade him from anything involving Clemency, let alone a widowed Clemency—and the two of them had been here ever since, in her house in Clarges Street.
“What?” She blinked at him. “Oh no! I’m so glad to have you here—do not think I long to be rid of you, Gerhard,” she added, reaching to not just touch, but clasp his hand this time. “Never. You will always be welcome in my home.”
Gerhard melted under her imploring gaze like butter on a stove. “I would never do anything that displeases you, Mrs. Murray.”
She gave him a wide, grateful smile. Richard idly thought that if he stabbed his table knife into Gerhard’s thigh under the table, his friend would neither notice nor care. He might even be pleased, for then Clemency would fuss over him and hold his hand and stroke his face.
The door opened and two boys burst in, chasing each other with wooden swords in hand and shouting at the top of their lungs. Clemency shot to her feet. “Gabriel! Rafael! Stop that at once!”
“He destroyed my fort!” cried Rafael, swiping at his brother.
“I did not! You kicked it over, because you’re a clumsy ox!” Gabriel ducked and twisted around his mother’s chair, evading her reach.
“Liar!”
“Idiot!”
Richard watched his sister’s face turn red, then pale, and her mouth began to quiver. He put out one arm and caught his nephew as Rafael ran by him. Gerhard snared Gabriel on his side of the table, and both boys went quiet, breathing hard and glaring at each other.
“Who built the fort?” Richard asked.
“I did, sir.” Rafael seemed to wilt in his hold. “Of blocks. It was this high.” He held out one hand at his waist.
“That is excellent building,” Richard told him.
He turned to his other nephew, now sitting on Gerhard’s lap.
Gabriel was two years younger than Rafael, but was just as tall and bigger, with his father’s fair hair and energetic nature.
Rafael was the cleverer of the two, dark like his mother and more sensitive than his boisterous brother. “Gabriel, what did you do?”
“Nothing, sir,” muttered the boy.
“Really?” asked Gerhard mildly, and Gabriel flushed.
“I only tried to add a turret. But Rafe got angry and charged at me, and the whole side of it collapsed. It was not my fault!”
“It wasn’t your building to change!” cried Rafael. “Build your own!”
“You used all the blocks!”
“Stop,” said Richard firmly, and the boys fell silent. “Gabriel, would you like Rafael to interfere with your activities?”
The boy’s lower lip came out. “No, sir.”
“Rafael, was it worth destroying your entire building merely to stop him from adding something?”
The boy in his arm blinked away tears. “No, sir.”
“Gabriel, you will put away all the blocks by yourself, and you may not use them for three days. Rafael, you will compose a letter to your mother apologizing for such disruptive behavior. Do you not see she is upset by this fighting, which has not solved anything?”
“Yes, sir,” they mumbled.
He released Rafael. “Go.”
Gabriel climbed off Gerhard’s lap and the two of them picked up their swords and left. Rafael paused by Clemency’s chair. “Sorry, Mama,” he whispered.
She bit her lip and put her arms around him, kissing his cheek and smoothing his hair. Gabriel got his hug in turn. When the door had closed behind the boys, she turned to Richard. “This is why I need you to stay in England, close to me. They need a man’s guidance.”
“They need to be outside, not penned up in a schoolroom in the city,” he replied. “Find a house for yourself in the country, where they can climb trees and swim in a pond and get dirty and tired as boys should.”
She flushed. “I would lose them in the country. They would never come home.”
“Besides, I will not be here if I take a house of my own.” Richard glanced slyly at Gerhard. “Perhaps they need a new father.”
Gerhard’s face went pink even as he glared murder at Richard. Clemency sat upright in astonishment. “What?”
“Someone to build towers with them and show them how to swing their wooden swords. Someone who will be kind to them and teach them how to behave like gentlemen.” Richard watched his sister blush.
Gerhard sat in stubborn silence, but he deserved to be tweaked.
Perhaps if he thought Clemency was looking to marry again, he would untie his tongue and finally say something to her.
It never failed to amaze Richard that his friend, so fearless on the side of a mountain, so unflappable on the deck of a ship in the middle of a storm, grew starry-eyed and stupid under Clemency’s sparkling smile.
“Let me know when your estate agent has found something acceptable,” he said, rising from the table.
With any luck, he would be able to locate and secure passage on a ship back to the Continent, or perhaps to South America, before that happened.
“Hercule, come,” he said, and his dog scrambled up from where he’d been lying by the hearth.
“What would be acceptable to you?” she protested as he went to the door.
“In the country. Out of view of other houses. On top of a hill. With plenty of trees.” That ought to occupy her for a good while, he thought, and made his escape, Hercule at his heels.