Chapter Eight
“You cannot serve burgundy with fish, Theodore. It is an offence against both the grape and the ocean.”
“It is my house, my fish, and my burgundy, and I shall commit whatever offences against gastronomy I please.”
Teddy’s lodgings occupied the upper two floors of a handsome building in Quiet Street, above his wine-importing offices, and reflected their owner with the same cheerful disregard for convention that characterised everything Theodore Swifton did.
The furniture was mismatched and comfortable.
The curtains were a shade of gold that quarrelled magnificently with the wallpaper.
Bottles of wine occupied every available surface: some opened, some merely decorative, all evidence of a man who had turned his passion into a profession and saw no reason to separate the two once the working day was over.
The introduction had taken place in Mrs Bramble’s parlour several days earlier, and Cillian had been present for the worst of it.
He had walked over from the White Hart to deliver a parcel of medicinal balm for Molly’s ankle, expecting nothing more eventful than a brief, awkward exchange, and had been intercepted on the doorstep by his brother, who had decided, without consultation, to accompany him.
“You cannot simply appear at a lady’s lodgings, Teddy.”
“I have a basket of pears. People admit a man with pears.”
“That is not how introductions are conducted.”
“It is how mine are conducted.”
Mrs Bramble had opened the door, surveyed the pears, surveyed the brother, and admitted them both, with the resignation of a woman who had decided early in life that, when confronted by a smiling man holding fruit, the path of least resistance was the only sensible one.
Molly had been in the parlour, seated on the rug with the cat in her lap and a half-finished cup of tea on the side table. In the seconds before Teddy stepped past him into the room, Cillian understood that this was almost certainly going to be a mistake.
“Miss Granger,” he said, with the air of a man performing a duty under duress. “My brother. Theodore Swifton. Wine.”
“That is the worst introduction I have ever received, brother,” Teddy said pleasantly. “Miss Granger, I am delighted to make your acquaintance.”
He came forward with the basket of pears in his hands and made his bow with all the ease Cillian lacked.
Molly rose, the cat slipping from her lap to the hearthrug with an offended flick of the tail. “Mr Swifton.”
“Theodore, when formality becomes tiresome. Teddy, when friendship permits it.” His gaze dropped briefly to the cat, who had retreated beneath a chair and was watching him with sovereign mistrust. “And I see I must be careful not to offend another member of the household.”
“That is Wellington,” Molly said. “He is not easily impressed.”
“Then I shall endeavour not to disgrace myself before him.” Teddy set the basket on the table and turned at once to Mrs Bramble.
“Madam, I hope pears are not too great a liberty. My brother assures me nothing about this visit has been properly arranged, and I have always found fruit useful in softening an irregular entrance.”
Mrs Bramble surveyed him, the pears, and Cillian in turn.
“Fruit is rarely the worst thing a gentleman can bring to a door,” she said.
“An excellent principle. I shall adopt it at once.”
Cillian did not sit. He remained by the mantel and watched, with increasing resignation, as Teddy accomplished in ten minutes what he himself could not have managed in an hour.
He admired Mrs Bramble’s parlour without sounding false, praised the pears as if he had grown them personally, and asked Molly about her work at the milliner’s with precisely the right degree of interest.
Molly, who only needed one sincere question to become animated, described the window display, the theory of gradients, and the mirror beside the gloves.
Teddy listened as if the arrangement of ribbons were a matter of commercial strategy rather than female ornament, which, Cillian saw at once, was exactly the right way to listen.
Before long, they had discovered that they had both read the same Turkish-prison novel, had objected to the same chapter, and were already arguing over whether the hero’s escape was clever or merely fortunate.
By the time the pears had been distributed and Wellington had condescended to sniff one without approving it, Teddy had contrived to invite Mrs Bramble, Miss Finch, and Molly to dine before the week was out, and had informed Cillian, with infuriating cheerfulness, that his attendance was assumed.
“He does not care for dinners either,” Teddy explained to Molly, in the tone of a man delivering regrettable news kindly.
“I am beginning to detect a pattern,” Molly said.
Cillian, by the mantel, registered with no particular pleasure that the two most talkative people of his acquaintance had discovered each other and were, by every visible indication, about to become friends.
He said nothing at the time. He returned to the White Hart in a mood he chose not to identify, and the mood had not entirely lifted by the evening Teddy finally succeeded in gathering them all beneath his roof.
The dining table was set for five, and the company assembled around it formed, in Cillian’s private estimation, the most improbable dinner party of his life.
Teddy presided at the head, an expansive host who solved most difficulties by adding another bottle and another chair.
To his right, Dorothea sat very upright in a gown of dark blue silk, and received the burgundy-with-fish arrangement with an expression of profound disagreement, though she appeared to have made the strategic decision to reserve her objections for graver offences.
Mrs Bramble, on Teddy’s left, seemed only mildly bewildered by the invitation now that she had taken the measure of the man who issued it, and compensated by examining the silver with professional interest. Molly had been talking since she arrived, had already complimented the curtains, won the housekeeper’s good opinion, and shifted the centrepiece three inches to the left because it was, in her professional judgment, “interfering with the conversation.”
And there was Cillian, seated at the far end of the table, watching it all from the side like a man who had spent two years avoiding any room with more than one other person in it, and now found himself expected, by some sequence of events he could not entirely reconstruct, to participate.
“Wine,” Teddy said, filling Cillian’s glass before he could refuse. “You will oblige me by trying this, brother. For I selected this bottle with your palate in mind, and a refusal would wound me in my profession.”
“You make refusal sound ungenerous.”
“That was my intention.”
“Subtle.”
“I am not paid for subtlety. Drink.”
Cillian drank. The wine was, in fact, excellent, and the admission must have shown on his face, because Teddy pointed at him in triumph.
“There. You see? He likes things. He remains capable of pleasure. I have witnesses.”
“I recognised the quality of the wine. I did not say I was enjoying myself.”
“You are here. You are seated at a table with other human beings. You are drinking wine you like. For you, Cillian, this is practically dissipation.”
The table laughed. Cillian did not, but something in him eased despite himself: not much, not enough to be called surrender, but enough to be inconvenient.
Molly and Teddy were talking, taking up exactly where the parlour conversation had left off: quick, warm, and overlapping, two lively minds striking sparks from one another.
Both were talkers, both were bright, and both already seemed to possess the shorthand of people who had decided, by the silent agreement such persons reach, that they were likely to be of use to each other.
Cillian had foreseen this as one foresees rain. The two most talkative people of his acquaintance had located each other and were predictably becoming allies.
What he had not foreseen was the small, ungentlemanly heat beneath his ribs when Teddy made her laugh—the real laugh, the one that was not armour.
He chose to identify it as indigestion. The wine, perhaps. Or the fish, which had plainly entered the room under questionable alliances.
“You sell wine,” Molly said. “That means you taste wine for a living. That is the most enviable occupation I have ever heard of.”
Teddy beamed, honest and unguarded, with the kind of grin that arrived before he could decide whether to restrain it.
“Tasting it is the pleasant part. The labour lies in persuading other people that the bottle before them is worth its price. That calls for honesty, theatre, and the ability to describe a flavour without making the customer feel a fool.”
“I do the same with hats. Mrs Holt’s hats are beautiful, but customers often need to be told why they are beautiful.” Molly gestured with her glass, narrowly avoiding the salt cellar. “The telling is the selling, and the selling is a kind of storytelling. One must make people feel what one feels.”
“Exactly.” Teddy set down his glass very carefully, having nearly spilt it from enthusiasm.
“This Bordeaux, for instance. I could tell you the vineyard, the vintage, the soil, the rain that fell that year. Or I could tell you that it tastes like the last warm evening of autumn, when the light is gold, and one is sitting outside with agreeable company, knowing the cold is coming and not yet ready to go in.”
“That is beautiful.”
“That is what sells wine.”
“I should like to sell wine.”
“You may yet do so, according to my brother, who has been arranging matters with his usual talent for saying nothing until the most inconvenient moment.”
A brief silence followed.
Molly turned to Cillian. Her expression was difficult to read, containing several reactions she seemed to be sorting through too quickly for him to catch.
“You spoke to Mr Swifton about employment for me?”