“It is a bit unfeeling, don’t you think?” Madelina concentrated on tucking mistletoe into the kissing bough without dislodging the apples tied to the wooden frame. “Barty has barely been gone two months and now Garrick is Warin in his stead, replacing him as if he never existed.”
Her mother frowned. “It is the way things are done, Madelina.”
“He is carrying on the line,louloutte, which is what your brother should be doing,” her father said.
“Yes,” Madelina said with the bleakness that accompanied any mention of her brother. “Constantin should be here.”
And he wasn’t.
The door knocker sounded, and all the ladies came to strict attention, heads swiveling toward the open portal as if their guest might materialize within it.
Madelina realized she was crushing the clutch of mistletoe and forced her hands to relax before she left red stains everywhere. She wondered he would recognize her, now fully a woman. Five years of age lay between them, years that were an epoch between a boy of twelve, enrolled at the Royal Latin School, and a curious girl of seven, who thought him the most interesting person in the parish and followed him about everywhere.
Garrick Lockram, back in Woughton on the Green, had been an untidy boy with the most unruly thick black hair, a dark slash of eyebrows, and a gangly form, his bones too big for his body and not always obedient to his will. Most of all Madelina remembered the odd sort ofwhooshin her head when his large dark eyes fixed on her. There was such quickness in his eyes, such intelligence. She’d always felt that, in an instant, he assessed her abilities and found her lacking.
But then he would say, “Oh, come along then,” and allow her to accompany him on whatever masculine business he was about, whether it was catching frogs or fishing along the River Ouzel, climbing stiles to torment the sheep on the Glebe Farm, or poking about the remains of their Anglo-Saxon forebears in the cemetery at Old Wolverton. There must have been others with them, his brothers or hers, other boys from the parish, perhaps the gamekeeper’s boy or a young groom. But only Garrick stood out in her mind.
One summer they made a pet of a great spotted woodpecker they found injured in Wavendon Wood. Another they spent unearthing broken pottery in the fields at Monkston, remnants of the former industry of the former tenants who owned the Warin lands before Henry VIII decided he wanted them.
Then there was the fall they found a crude bracelet of some dull metal Garrick insisted was gold. He’d claimed he would sell it, become fabulously wealthy, and travel the world to the tip of Africa and the Far Orient. Madelina had immediately and vigorously staked a claim to part of the bracelet, since she had assisted in its unearthing and she too wanted to see the tip of Africa and the Far Orient.
But Garrick had taken the bracelet and young Madelina’s heart, carelessly, effortlessly, and never thought to return either. It had taken her many years, and some hard lessons, to mature into the knowledge that reckless youths grew up to become reckless men. While sensible if curious girls grew up to be young women who, if still curious, were more practiced in the art of good sense and would not go about casting their tender hearts after unsuitable subjects.
She would be courteous, no more.
She would ask him outright for the information she sought. And if he were not forthcoming—which she expected hewould not be—well, she was sensible, after all. She would find what she needed for herself.
The door opened, and Mrs. Agnes Lockram, the widow of Philemon Lockram, Esq., entered. Alone.
Revolution in France had not impinged on Mrs. Lockram’s ability to procure the latest Parisian fashions. She wore a lavender robe with full-length sleeves over a rustling petticoat of buttery yellow, and the sheer white buffont tucked over her breasts was starched enough to hold its own shape, giving her the silhouette of a pouter pigeon. Next to her, Madelina felt girlish in her simple white round gown sprigged with red apples, the only accents the frill of lace at her neckline and a belt of wide red ribbon that cinched her waist.
“So good of you to have me to dine with youen famille, Modestine,” Agnes said grandly, kissing the air on either side of her hostess’s cheek. “I had so many invitations I was simply beside myself, and then I thought, what could be more pleasant than a small dinner practically in the bosom of family, to savor a moment of quiet in the round of festivities? I swear I have been wearing holes in my slippers with the endless number of entertainments I am urged to attend. Butyouknow how it is, my dear.”
Madelina tucked away a smile of amusement. Agnes never ceased boasting she was wearied of her constant round of amusements while determined not to miss a single event. And, because Agnes had born a baron’s daughter rather than to the St. Mary’s rectory next door to the Manor, Agnes always managed to remind Maman of her inferior social status even while granting her the status of favored confidante.
“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 velvethem 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 thetheater, or some such.”
Theater, Madelina supposed, was code forin 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 notabandonFrance,” 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.
