Chapter One #2
“Agnes, you look splendid,” Maman said graciously.
Maman, in marrying a French viscount, felt she came out quite well in any competition for status, and moreover she knew her own smart jacket-style bodice over the petticoat with its velvet hem stood up rather well beside her friend’s finery.
Maman’s neckerchief had been arranged to display her bosom, which required no augmentation, and her white silk made her seem young and virginal rather than a matron of several decades.
“I am so very glad you could join us, in mourning as you are. But where is that dashing son we are all anxious to meet?”
Agnes rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “That boy will be the death of me! Not home a fortnight, and I vow he’s done no more than sleep a few hours beneath my roof.
He’ll be along in a moment, I hope, but I doubt he will stay for dinner.
Said he had some engagement elsewhere tonight, but between you and I—” She lowered her voice, casting a glance at Georgette, who did her best not to appear she was straining her ears to overhear— “he’ll be at the theater, or some such. ”
Theater, Madelina supposed, was code for in the arms of his mistress.
Or perhaps Garrick had not yet established a mistress, having been home for scarcely two weeks.
Perhaps he simply carried on as he had at university and his dissipated life on the Continent.
Welcoming any girl who made a pitch at him into his bed or, more commonly, visiting hers to conduct his business, then heading home in the wee hours.
Madelina had known of his reputation during that last terrible, painful interview, the one when she was eighteen. She had told him at the time it didn’t matter.
She was afraid, when she saw him again, it still would not matter. That her heart had not yet learned to be wise, for all the prodding and the long, sensible scolds she had given it.
“I do hope he will have a moment or two to spend with us.” Heavens, her voice sounded high and breathy, like some squeaky damsel. “I want to ask him,” Madelina added, lowering her tone, “if he has news of Constantin.”
The older women looked, as one, to the Vicomte, their expressions ranging from curious to, on Maman’s part, apprehensive.
“But why should he know of your brother, pet?” Agnes was the curious one.
“Lord Warin has been in France, has he not? So we have been told.”
“Indeed, but he has had nothing to do with those awful revolutionaries and the terrible violence. Garrick has been in the north, I think. Or perhaps south? Maybe it was Savoy—”
“We lost touch with Constantin after he went back to reclaim the family estate,” Aunt Victoire said abruptly.
“That council of grubby patriots they call the National Assembly said they would seize property of the émigrés, you know. But we did not abandon France,” said the woman who had done just that, fleeing with her gowns and her jewels and the silver service the moment the riots grew worse.
“étienne has lived abroad part of the year ever since his marriage. Constantin went to ensure the revolutionaries would not seize Chateau Vallon.”
Agnes clucked sympathetically. “Then I do hope that riotous boy of mine will set your family’s minds at ease, for you, my dear—” She patted Maman’s hand— “have always been like family to me. Poor, dear Constantin! I am very certain nothing terrible could have happened,” she said with all the relish of one who was certain something already had.
Madelina found her hands trembling so badly she couldn’t affix the holly to the kissing bough. “I-I have forgotten something.” She rose swiftly, clutching the bough before her like a holy relic. “I-I must see to the boxes for tomorrow. For the servants,” she said when Maman frowned.
“You could not have sorted this earlier? I thought you were belowstairs most of the day, putting things in order.”
“Just one or two few last things. Forgive me. Do not wait dinner on me, I will return soon,” she lied.
The unexpected sting of tears in her eyes nearly blinded her as she rushed out of the room. This continued down to the basement, which is why she collided with the tall form that wheeled unexpectedly out from the hallway at the bottom of the kitchen stairs.
“Mrs. Bird, I meant to ask you if—oof.”
The tall form reached out to steady her so she didn’t tumble down the last two steps of the flight.
“Mrs. Bird is currently unavailable, as she is running away to be married to me,” said a deep, masculine voice. “She’s got a plum pudding hanging and she made mince pie.”
Madelina’s arms burned where he touched her, and her heart thumped, no doubt from the sudden shock. She blinked several times, not sure she hadn’t conjured the apparition before her by wishing.
“Oh, is that what it takes to make you want to marry a girl,” she said, the words slipping out before she had time to think better of them.
Immediately the past roared to life between them, quick and hot as a live coal waiting to be fanned. She was wrapped in a veil of fire, and as she looked into his eyes that old whoosh soared through her, like an inferno bellowing with air.
He was older, yet exactly the same. Still in possession of those large eyes, deep and liquid, with lashes too long to belong on a man and framed by wide, expressive brows.
His nose had matured with the rest of him, a long, arrogant slash, but his mouth was even more finely shaped in contrast, the upper lip bowed, the lower a plump cushion.
His hair was as unruly as ever, dark brown curls spilling over his brow and ears.
He smelled of tobacco and leather and the Green on a summer day when a breeze stirred up the scent of warm earth and clover.
Madelina just managed to restrain herself from leaning forward to press her nose against the fashionably wide lapel of his coat.
“Mrs. Bird is already married,” she added, like the ninny she instantly became in his presence. Mrs. Bird had a husband, children, and a swarm of grandchildren back in Kents Hill, and she had been their plain cook for as long as Madelina could recall.
“Mother’s French chef ruined the plum pudding with bechamel sauce,” he said. “So I snuck over to pinch yours.”
“Just one more item for which to hold the French to account,” Madelina said.
She registered with her sensible mind, fast and fleeting, that this conversation was absurd. She had not seen him in over three years. She was a young lady of breeding. He was a man fully grown out of his puppyish ways—he had been when she’d proposed to him, that momentary madness.
And his hands were still clasped around her arms, his warm palms a heavy weight against the skin not covered by her elbow-length gloves.
“Are you not coming up for dinner?” Now she sounded hurt. She was turning more nanny goat by the moment. Not the way to prove, beyond a doubt, that she had recovered from him completely.
Wariness entered his dark eyes. “Of course I am coming up. I do not intend to insult your family. We’re too close of neighbors for that.”
“And shall be in one another’s pockets all the more so now,” Madelina said. “Shall I salute you as the new Lord Warin?”
His face hardened. “Hardly a prospect I wished for.”
She knew that, because she had grown up with this boy, even if she didn’t understand the man he’d become.
Bartholomew had been older than both of them, an adult already when they were children, and bred from birth to the title his father had wrested for himself when he served the King’s Cause at Dettingen.
Garrick and Madelina had expressed their affection by poking fun at Barty’s pompous ways and self-conscious airs.
Though Garrick was his heir presumptive, the family and their friends assumed that Bartholomew would eventually come round to his duty and marry a proper girl.
Maman had quite frequently voiced the hope he would choose Madelina.
“It was quite sudden. Barty’s passing,” she said. “We were all terribly shocked.”
None more than Madelina, who found herself at Bartholomew’s bedside, his own mother being absent in Italy for the air, Agnes terrible in the sickroom, and Maman too nervous to make a reliable nurse.
It had fallen to Madelina to hold his hand at the last, this man who had always seemed grand and forbidding to her and in the end was no more than frail human flesh, like the rest of them.
Bleakness came and went in Garrick’s eyes. “I suppose everyone fell apart save for you, Mad.”
Now how should he know that? How could he know that? And how could he invoke the old name now, the pet name only he had called her, when she was a grown woman and he was entirely unsuitable and all her dreams were gone and broken. And at Yuletide, to boot.
Unthinking she placed a hand on his arm, as if they were still children sailing their corsair ship down the Ouzel, herding sheep across the Green pretending they were Hannibal invading Rome. As if she still had some claim on him, after all this time.
“You must tell me,” she said. “What do you know of Constantin?”
The wary expression flashed back into place. “Your brother?” He retreated a step. It was either cling to his arm or let go. “I know nothing.”
She let her arm drop.
“Nothing,” she repeated dully. “He did not contact you, then?”
“Did you expect him to?”
“He was abroad. He would need allies. He was—is—attempting to keep the Assembly from seizing our property as traitors.” Her arms hung at her sides, as useless as the rest of her. “We have heard nothing of him in months.”
She didn’t care about the property. She was desperate for news her brother had not got caught up with Girondins or revolutionaries. That he was still alive.
“I have not heard of him,” Garrick said, but his eyelids flickered shut on the words, and Madelina knew he was lying. He never had been able to speak an untruth directly into someone’s face; he briefly shut his eyes while he did.
He knew something about Constantin—perhaps what Barty knew, perhaps more—and he did not intend to tell her.
She fell back a step of her own. “I’ve the boxes to see to. Go on up,” she said, lifting her hand to point the way up the stairs.
“You’re not—er. You don’t mean…”
His brows rose, forehead furrowing as he glanced upward, and Madelina became suddenly and horrifying conscious of the item in her hand. And that, in her current pose, it appeared she was holding the kissing bough above her head.
“Ooh, is that a kiss for Miss Lina, is it?” Mrs. Bird appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, a smile creasing her lean face. On an instant, a crowd of kitchen maids, a footman, and the hall boy appeared behind her, jostling and joking.
“No,” Madelina said, face burning as she shoved the kissing bough behind her back. “Of course not. Besides, it isn’t finished.”
“You can’t break tradition, Miss Lina!” scolded Tofty, the butler, emerging from his pantry with a polishing cloth and a silver plate. “You’ll bring bad luck on all of us.”
“It’s to be hung proper from the chandelier in the parlor,” Madelina argued. “I’ll make you another for the servants’ hall, Tofty. Don’t go expecting one can claim a kiss by waving a half-made bough about.”
“I see,” Garrick said, his eyes resting on her face as if he were studying her. Noting all that had changed in his time away, and all that had not. “I must exert myself to win a kiss from your Miss Lina. They aren’t simply given out to all.”
“I shan’t be asking for one.” She flushed. “I don’t want one.” Liar, liar. “Besides, I expect rakes give their kisses out quite freely, so claiming one from you is hardly a prize.”
Oh, well done, Lina, she congratulated herself. Transformation from a goat to a prudish spinster. Commendable choice.
His face shuttered into formal lines, all the warmth of confusion and the brief flash of—not, not interest—was gone, tucked away. “Escort you upstairs, shall I? Exerting myself to the utmost to behave.”
Oh, so he didn’t like her bringing up his reputation. Touchy about it, was he? Well, if he’d earned his stripes, he ought to wear them before all. She raised her chin.
“I’ve one or two things to see to. Please do go up. Maman will be delighted to see you, and you mustn’t hold dinner for me. I might be a moment.”
He watched her face again, his gaze touching her every feature, as if she were a puzzle he still had not solved. Damn and drat him for having that power over her still.
“Happy Christmas, Mad,” he said softly, starting up the stair toward her.
She moved aside swiftly so he didn’t brush her when he passed. He must not, must not touch her.
“Happy Christmas, Lord Warin,” she said and went in the other direction, head held stiff and high, her heart breaking all over again.