Chapter 17
Seventeen
If you ever have the opportunity to make a snow angel (I can explain), be sure that your husband is on hand to pluck you from the snowbank so that your angelic skirts aren’t marred.
You’re a menace,” Ophelia remarked the next evening, watching as I spread cards into a fan, each perfectly spaced from its fellows.
“She must be cheating,” Colette said. She was seated on her husband’s lap, one arm slung around his neck.
“I’m not!” I protested. “Je ne triche pas aux cartes.” I don’t cheat at cards—uttered with the correct accent. Ophelia and Colette were tutoring me. Even Mima taught me a random phrase, when she could remember the words.
“But you could cheat,” Godric said, his eyes lingering on my face.
He was the only person who had grasped that I disliked my husband even before Burnsby’s villainy was apparent, that I regretted not meeting a ghost, and that—yes—I could cheat if I wished.
I shrugged.
“When you visit us in France,” Colette said, “you must play my friend Claudine. She boasts of being the finest card sharp in Paris.”
“Genevieve could beat her without cheating.” I didn’t need Godric’s lips to curl to signal his amusement. If he could read my eyes, I could also read his.
“That’s the point,” Colette said. “Claudine is so good at cheating that no one will play with her at all. She will adore Genevieve!” She leaned over and dropped a kiss on my cheek, as Frenchwomen do. “All my friends will.”
Everyone in polite society would claim my life had changed for the worse since arriving at the abbey. Au contraire: My life had changed for the better. I was even grateful for the snow that had kept us confined to the abbey.
I have been thinking hard about why I married Burnsby. Yes, Rosie’s dowry was a pivotal factor, but I had also thought he was a good choice because of his age. Because bedding a man was intrinsically distasteful.
I didn’t feel that way about Godric.
I may lie easily, but I’m not in the habit of lying to myself. It’s only since coming to know Godric that I can imagine joining a man in bed with curiosity as opposed to dread.
He and I are growing unnervingly, audaciously closer day by day, hour by hour. He’s intelligent, brusque . . . kind.
For example, before dinner I found him sitting beside Mima, who regarded me with watery eyes. “I’m telling my darling boy how ruddy his face was at birth.” My heart twisted as Godric brushed a kiss on her cheek, and she smiled through her tears. “I had him as a baby, but Hecuba sent him away.”
“My goodness,” I said inadequately.
Not only was Mima illegitimate, but she gave birth, presumably out of wedlock? A baby who was removed from her care—albeit for obvious reasons. Mima didn’t seem capable of raising a child.
I opened my mouth to point out that Hecuba didn’t enter the house (and marriage) until Godric was eight years old, but he shook his head. Logic would never convince Mima that he wasn’t her lost child.
“I’m sorry,” I said, seating myself.
“She took him,” Mima said.
“Hecuba?” I asked.
She nodded. “I’m sure it was Hecuba, not Alice. Burnsby only has one wife, you know. One at a time.”
“Generally speaking, people do adhere to that rule,” Godric said.
“There can only be one wife,” Mima said, nodding like a marionette.
“I wish your baby hadn’t been taken away,” I said, taking her hand.
We three sat in silence until Mima’s expression abruptly changed. “I’ll go for a walk,” she announced, jumping to her feet.
“Perhaps the child was raised by the sister she keeps trying to find,” Godric said, after the door closed. “Sophonisba may know what happened to the child, and who the father is, for that matter.”
“As must Burnsby,” I said. I couldn’t imagine asking either of them, and regardless, it wasn’t our business.
My heart sped up the following evening when I walked into the library and discovered Godric by himself. I pretended to be overheated and removed my cravat. My evening gown practically bared my breasts, which felt luscious and plump. Desirable.
Godric was not a man who disguised his emotions. When he was annoyed at me—we really don’t agree about the gold standard’s importance for British currency—he showed it with a fierce scowl.
When he was charmed, his eyes softened. When he desired me . . .
Desire isn’t a character trait, like charm. It’s a need. Godric taught me that without touching more than my hand and the middle of my back.
“Do you wish you had a fur cape?” he asked me, as we seated ourselves before the fireplace. “Ermine, perhaps?”
I frowned. “My mantua is warm Norwich wool, with rabbit at the wrists and hood. What’s more, unless I’m mistaken, ermine is reserved for royalty. Isn’t that a law?”
“The sartorial laws regulating garments were repealed in the early 1600s,” Godric replied. He took my hand, brought it to his lips, and said, “Am I being too forward?”
(That sucked the air from my lungs, let me tell you.)
I shook my head as he kissed my palm. The feeling flared down my arm as he folded my fingers around that kiss. Exhilaration swept my entire body.
I cleared my throat, and said, “You have kissed my hand before.”
He smiled. “Well, yes, that is true.” And: “Burnsby has bestowed an ermine cloak on Sophonisba, as a Christmas gift.”
I didn’t care.
“I have no wish to break the outdated sartorial laws of England,” I said, laughing with my eyes. “I don’t give a fig.”
(“A fig” is slang, by the way. Unladylike slang. Even worse, American slang.)
Godric uncurled my fingers and kissed my palm again. “Do you give a fig when I kiss your hand?”
I swallowed, unsure what to say. He kissed it one more time and folded my fingers again, as if to preserve the touch of his lips.
“Have you seen a footman scurry after the king, holding up his train so it never touches the ground?” he asked. “Ainsworth’s cloak sweeps the snow as she passes.”
“We might send her round and round the cloister,” I suggested. “The grooms seem to be endlessly shoveling.”
“The footmen are warmer and more cheerful since you allowed them cloaks. When I arrived, I didn’t understand the extent of idiocy presiding over the abbey.
Not knowing that Ophelia had been banished from the dining room, I endured such a cheerless meal with Sophonisba and Mima that I considered leaving. ”
“Thank goodness you didn’t!” I cried from the heart. Then I colored. “This is hard to endure, and you are a refuge, not being a Burnsby.” Embarrassment chased down my spine like ice. “I’m a Burnsby.”
“No,” he said. “You’re you, Evie.”
(I am still trying to figure out who “Evie” is, but I appreciated it.)
At dinner I sat between Mima and Ophelia and practiced my French by asking them about their days, even though Miss Wellington had already told me that Mima wandered for hours in and out of the chilly cells built for monks. She had repeatedly tried to open the door to the ramparts.
“I found something for you,” Mima said unexpectedly. Her footman wheeled forward a baby carriage with black wheels and a wooden body. “It was made after a design for the Duke of Devonshire.” She frowned. “I think there ought to be a green parasol.”
Did she think I was carrying a child? Burnsby’s child? Or had my preference for Godric become so obvious that she assumed I was committing adultery?
Humiliation twisted my gut. I detest the idea of people whispering about infidelity, the way they had about my reasons for marriage.
In my mind, the wolves howled back and forth.
“Peony is becoming too heavy to carry,” Ophelia said, getting up to investigate. “This is so adorable, Aunt Mima! She will love it.”
I let out a soundless breath before I leaned over and gave Mima a kiss on the cheek. “It was very kind of you to think of my pet. Thank you.”
“It was moldering in the attics,” she said. “Better off being used, if only by a piglet.”
After the meal, the six of us sat around one of the library tables and sorted delicate, pastel-colored Parisian sweets onto squares of green gauze, adding a shilling, and tying each gift with a sprig of holly.
“Just like my mother used to give to the household,” Mima said, blinking. “I don’t remember her.”
“I don’t remember my mother, either,” Ophelia said matter-of-factly.
“Few of us do,” Lance added. “Will you help me tie this bundle, Aunt Mima?”
The evening ended with Ophelia wheeling Peony back to the kitchen, the piggy gazing over the side of the carriage at the ground with evident surprise. Godric escorted me around the colonnade to my chamber, his hand stretching the width of my back.
Though I had decided to reject society’s idea that ladies are delicate, I loved it when his size made me feel delicate.
“Good night,” Godric said at the door, his hand lingering. “Knock on my door tomorrow morning?”
I bit my lip. I wanted to put my arms around his neck, the way Colette did to Lance. Kiss the corner of his mouth, because I’m not brave enough to take his hand and draw him through the door into my room.
(How can I be thinking such suggestive thoughts? I’m no adulteress!)
I shaped my lips into a smile and tried not to read anything into his gaze. Godric didn’t smile back, but a wild emotion lurked in his eyes. Covetous. Ungentlemanly.
I’m almost certain he had never given another gentlewoman this look, because if so, he would be married.
Remember that tournament between myself and Sophonisba? I had the sudden, blinding idea that perhaps he was engaged in a similar battle—and the prize was me. “Good night,” I yelped, and fled into my room.
Waking up on the twenty-second, I told myself (not for the first time) to stop being so foolish. All chatter about French peacocks aside, I would never commit adultery.
When Tess first entered my employ, she had decreed that drinking tea in the bath was a heathen practice. Now she understands that I am barely sentient in the morning and hands me a steaming cup as soon as I’m immersed in hot water, allowing me to think (and soak) in peace.