Maman smiled slyly. “I made it clear I would have nothing to do with a scoundrel. No wastrel was worth my time. I made my mother pack us up to return to Milton Keynes and the Rectory.” Her smile broadened as she gazed across the room to where her husband and youngest daughter were prodding at the remains of the Yule log, determined to make it burn completely that night and thus ensure luck and good fortune for the coming year. “He followed.”
“But if you didn’t want a scoundrel?” Madelina asked, confused.
“He proved himself to me. More than that, he proved himself to my father, and you know how formidable the Reverend was.”
Aunt Hermione nodded vigorously.
“But how did you know he would not break your heart?” Madelina whispered.
Her mother shrugged and considered her embroidery. “I loved him, and I knew I was strong enough to bear whatever happened. If he was the man I thought him, I was certain that what we had was worth fighting to keep. And I felt that whatever price I paid later, I would never regret our time together.”
That was what Madelina could not bear to think of: the price she might pay in a lifetime of aching for the pleasure she had known. She stared into the basket as if the coils of silks could tell her fortune.
“You may keep your heart high on a shelf to protect it,” Tanta Victorie said. “But that is a heartbreak of its own, to be lonely.”
But she’d been right in what she said to him, Madelina consoled herself as the days of Christmas passed and no word came from Garrick.
Want wasn’t enough to bind them. He’d had pleasure with many women.Shemight be forever marked by what he’ddone to her, but look, he larked off to new fields as freely as a partridge in a pear tree. A true union required more. Love. Companionship. Trust. In one sense, they’d spent a lifetime building those things, yet in another, the last three years had made them strangers. A few kisses weren’t enough to ground a marriage.
She would go on as she must. She had before, when he’d left for school, when he’d left for university, when he’d left for the Continent. One could breathe with a broken heart; the blood still pumped through. Madelina was one in a long line of women he’d conquered, and she would survive.
Georgette found Madelina entertaining this mournful resolution during the family’s Twelfth Night festivities and plopped down beside her sister in one of the chairs set along the wall of the formal parlor. She heaved a sigh as if she were a matron of many years and not a young miss already worn out with dancing.
“I believe he’ll return for you.” Georgette announced. “You’re like Julia and Hippolitus from Mrs. Radcliffe’s novel. You think he is lost, and you will have no one else, which is very romantic, and also necessary to the plot. Because he will return.”
“I am not living out some Gothic romance, Georgie. And besides, Papa is not currently forcing me to marry an awful duke.”
“No, because he likes Lord Warin, and I believe Maman is holding out for him also,” Georgette confided. “She knows you’d never want anyone else.”
“Have I beenthatobvious?” Madelina cried in dismay.
“Goodness, yes. None ever doubted he was just waiting for you to grow up. And you were waiting for him to grow up in return.”
It wasn’t so much a matter of maturity as of constitution, Madelina thought. Could she trust a man who had a roving eye?Could she believe their time together mattered when pleasure was as common to him as breath?
“Tofty is a grand Lord of Misrule, isn’t he?” Georgette grinned at the celebrations before them.
“Indeed he is.” Tofty, the butler, had been the one to find the bean in the Twelfth Night cake, making him the King of the evening. Mrs. Bird found the pea, becoming the Queen, and between them they made for a merry riot.
At home in Woughton on the Green, the Moisenays would be attending a large formal party or ball for Twelfth Night—Agnes usually assumed the role of hostess—but with being removed to London, they’d settled for a small party with their combined households. Madelina and Georgette spent the day decorating the formal parlor with paper lanterns, swags of holly, knots of rosemary and bay, and more kissing boughs, the greens sprouting candles, berries, and fruit.
Mrs. Chislett made the wassail, which reeked of nutmeg and ginger ale, and Mrs. Bird and Monsieur François vied to produce the most delicious sugared cakes. The Christmas pie could have fed every person who had come to St. George’s on the feast of St. Stephen’s: it contained a turkey, a goose, a partridge, a pigeon, woodcocks, and four pounds of butter, set within a crust carefully constructed to hold the mass.
In the spirit of misrule, the servants dined at the long formal table, with the family waiting upon them and eating from plates balanced on their knees. Everyone had drawn a card to give them the character they were to play that night, in lieu of a masque, and Tofty, his paper crown slightly tilted on his salt-and-pepper head, was judge of each performance.
“Oh, I’m next.” Georgette popped out of her chair as Tofty beckoned. “I think Maman has the right of it, Lina. You might marry where you love. This isn’t a matter when sense should rule. Marriage should be a matter of the heart.”
“I do not require advice from a maiden of twelve,” Madelina called after as Georgette shot to the cleared space in the center of the room, ready to claim her share of attention.
Madelina let her mind wander, as she knew all the characters; she’d made up the cards. Tante Victorie had drawn Miss Pinchpurse, Aunt Hermione was Dame Opera, and Georgette, judging from her capering, was Miss Intrepid.
Madelina knew, when she drew the card’s design, that she was the opposite of intrepid. A cowardly instinct for self-preservation had made her push Garrick away. They had seemed sufficient reasons at the time: guard her heart from the rake.
But what if Maman and Georgette were right, and sense was the wrong thing to cling to? What if Madelina had been brave enough to hold and keep him? What if she had persuaded him to stay—could she likewise have persuaded him to be faithful?
Her heart twisted round on itself like one of the kissing boughs as she watched the merry scene before her. All the servants of the paired Grafton Houses laughed with glee as, for one night, they played at being the ones whose whims must be obeyed. If only Constantin were here to complete the family. They weren’t the same without him; the revelry held a hollow edge, as if they knew they danced near the edge of the abyss.
Raucous merriment outside rose over the laughter indoors as Georgette leapt up on a chair and feigned being an explorer surveying the terrain from a high peak. Revelers were singing carols in the street, from the sounds of it.
