Chapter 29
“Do they have frogs in Scotland?” Ivy planted herself squarely in front of Magnus with the grave urgency of an ambassador.
“Big ones? Bigger than English frogs? Beatrice says everything Scottish is bigger and crosser, which is why you are the way you are, so I need to know about the frogs specifically.”
Magnus set down the chicken leg he had been eating and gave the question the solemn consideration it deserved.
“Aye. We’ve frogs the size of yer two fists together up in the lochs, and they’ve a temper on them ye wouldnae believe.
There’s one that lives near me aunt’s house that has been croakin’ the same insult at me since I was a boy.
I’ve never once made out the words, but I ken it’s nothin’ kind. ”
Ivy’s whole face opened like a window. “Can I see him? When we come to Scotland? Rosaline promised I could come to Scotland and see a stag and look for fairies in the lochs. She promised on every frog in England, and now you have Scottish frogs, which are better, so…”
“Then ye’ll come, and ye’ll meet the whole ill-tempered lot of them, and I’ll teach ye to catch the wee ones in yer hands so ye can carry them to Beatrice’s bed.” He leaned in, conspiratorial. “That last part we’ll nae mention to yer sister.”
“Which sister,” Beatrice asked darkly from behind her book, “am I to understand is receiving frogs in her bed?”
“Neither of ye. It’s a hypothetical frog.” Magnus said it with such grave innocence that Ivy dissolved into giggles and even Beatrice’s mouth betrayed her.
Magnus sat in the dappled shade of a Hyde Park elm with a duchess at his side and her sisters at his feet and felt, with a quiet astonishment that had not yet worn off, the shape of a thing he had not had since he was a boy of fifteen.
A family.
A loud, sharp-tongued, frog-obsessed family, and it was impossibly his.
He looked up and found Rosaline watching him over the rim of her glass, and the look in her eyes was warm enough to scald.
“You are very good with her,” she murmured as Ivy scrambled off to interrogate Leo about whether marquesses were allowed to eat the last of the strawberry tarts.
“I like her. She says exactly the thing she means and hang the consequences.” Magnus shifted closer under cover of reaching for the wine until his shoulder pressed against the warm length of hers, and his voice dropped.
“Reminds me of a woman I ken. Though that one waited twenty-one years to start sayin’ what she meant, and now I cannae get her to stop, and I find I like her loud even better than I liked her quiet.
” His mouth grazed the shell of her ear, scandalous in the open park.
“Especially in the evenings, when I have her alone.”
“Magnus.” The color flooded her throat, and she did not move away. “There are young girls present.”
“The girls are besieging a marquess. We’ve a whole minute.”
But he leaned back all the same, letting her recover, savoring the flush he had put there, the private knowledge of it a heat that ran under the whole bright afternoon.
Rosaline let him have his victory for exactly as long as it took her to refill his glass. Then she leaned in and set her mouth close to his ear, as he had done to her.
“When we are home,” she murmured, sweet and unhurried, “and the door is locked, I am going to take my time with you. All of it. Slowly enough that you remember only my name in your mouth… and yours in mine.” A pause, warm against his ear.
“I have been thinking about it since the strawberries. I thought you should suffer for it too.”
Magnus forgot entirely what he had meant to say, and knocked clean over the wine he was holding.
“There are children present, Your Grace,” she said serenely, then returned to her strawberries.
It was the proudest he had been of anyone in his whole life.
“Where is Lord Darton today?” Abigail asked, settling down on the blanket with a plate. “I confess I braced myself for him. I had a great many withering remarks prepared, and now I have no one to aim them at.”
“Urgent business.” Rosaline’s voice was carefully neutral. “Or so his note said. He regrets he cannot join us.”
“He is not busy.” Ivy had returned and delivered this with the flat certainty of a child reporting the weather.
“I heard him tell his valet that he would not sit on a blanket in a public park to be stared at and whispered about by people wondering how a sister of his married a savage Scot. And then he said.” She screwed up her face in recollection.
“He said he would rather not be in the same green acre as that Scot because he is frightened of you.” She beamed at Magnus, entirely pleased to be the bearer of such excellent news.
“Everyone is a little frightened of you. But Samuel most of all.”
Silence fell over the blanket, delicate as spun sugar.
“Ivy,” Beatrice said without heat, “we have discussed the difference between things that are true and things that are said aloud at picnics.”
“But it is both.” Ivy was unrepentant.
Magnus laughed, because there was nothing else to do with it, and because a small savage part of him was not the least bit sorry that Samuel lay awake at night frightened of a Highland brute in a kilt.
“Ye’re a dangerous creature, Lady Ivy. I’d nae cross ye for the world.” He handed her the last strawberry tart off his plate, a bribe and a benediction. “Say nothin’ true and aloud about me, and it’s yers.”
Rosaline chose that moment to reach into the hamper and draw out something wrapped in a linen napkin. She set it in Abigail’s lap.
“For you,” she said. “Open it.”
Abigail unwound the linen and went still. The little golden fox gleamed up at her in the sunlight.
“Rosaline, this is Reynard Chase’s prize. You won this. The whole of London is talking about how you won this.”
“We won it. But you and lost it a year ago in every dead end of that dreadful maze, and you never once stopped laughing at me for leading us wrong.” Rosaline’s voice had gone soft. “It was always going to be yours. I only had to marry a man with fast enough legs to go back and fetch it.”
Abigail’s eyes were suspiciously bright. She opened her mouth, no doubt to deflect with a joke, but then she closed it again and simply held the fox.
Magnus looked at his wife giving away a trophy that half of society coveted as though it cost her nothing, and thought that he had married the most generous creature he had ever encountered.
He caught her hand where it lay on the blanket between them, hidden by her skirts from the others, and drew his thumb slowly across her knuckles. Her breath hitched, though her face never gave her away.
“Ye keep bein’ this kind, this clever, this bonnie,” he murmured, “and I’ll be forced to invent some urgent reason to take ye home early, and every soul at this picnic will ken precisely why.”
“Then behave,” she breathed, but did not pull her hand from his.
“Nae a chance, wife.”
It was Leo who drew him out of it and away.
“Walk with me. I want to steal the good cigars I know you’re hiding, and I refuse to do it in front of witnesses.” He said it lightly, but the look in his eyes was grave.
Magnus rose and went with him a little distance down the path, out of earshot, into the bright bustle of the park.
“Ye’ve found something,” he noted quietly.
“I have found a man named Deane.” Leo kept his voice easy, his face pleasant, a gentleman remarking on the weather.
“He was a clerk once to a certain circle of very great men, and he handled a great many papers he was paid handsomely to forget. He is no longer handled handsomely. He was turned out two years ago, ruined, bitter, drinking his grievance, and he has been telling anyone who will stand him a bottle that he knows where a good many bodies are buried.” He paused.
“One of them is a laird charged with treason on documents that a sober Deane once swore, to a man I trust, he watched forged with his own eyes. Your reputation is worth something now. A duke can send for a ruined clerk, and no one will blink an eye.”
The bright afternoon went very cold and very sharp around Magnus, the laughter behind him and the name in front of him suddenly existing in two separate worlds.
“Where is he?”
“Southwark. I have the direction.” Leo held his gaze. “Softly, though. If Deane starts naming the great men he forged for, and word reaches the greatest of them before you have what you need, he will be a corpse within a week. These are not gentle people, whatever their tailoring.”
Magnus glanced back down the path. Rosaline had her head tipped back, laughing at something Ivy had said, the sun beating down on her face and turning her cheeks rosy.
He had come to England for the cold thing. He had not expected to find the warm one waiting alongside it, nor how fiercely he meant to keep them both.
“Softly,” he agreed. “Set up the meetin’. And Leo.” He clasped his friend’s shoulder briefly. “Thank ye. For all of it. Ye’re a better man than ye’ll ever let anyone say.”
“Slander,” Leo drawled. “And this time, not the least bit true.” He covered Magnus’s hand with his own for a moment before stepping away, and then he raised his voice for the blanket. “Now, come and defend me. The little one is accusing me of hoarding tarts, and I fear the Duchess believes her.”
Magnus went back to his family in the sun, folding the dark thing carefully away for later. He let his wife pull him down onto the blanket beside her, and stole the last of her wine, and paid for it with a kiss to the corner of her mouth that made her blush all over again in front of everyone.
He did not, for one whole golden hour, think of Southwark at all.