“You can’t enjoy the spoils at the same time you criticize the method,” Archie insisted with feigned affront, but in truth he could feel his rough edges being smoothed by the company of his friends just as his hunger had been sated by the feast.
And then the pears came.
“Dear Heavens!” Effie exclaimed after his first bite. “What sorcery is this? Honey, but what else?”
“Walnuts,” Archie said, eyeing the steaming bowl in front of him. “But I’m not sure what the dark liquid is.”
“Apparently Miss Morgan’s disapproval of consuming animals does not extend to consuming the fruits of their labor, given that bees make honey,” Simon said, his first bite on a fork poised to enter his mouth. Once it did, he moaned. “Sorcery indeed. This is the greatest thing I have eaten in weeks. Months.”
“It’s a pear!” Archie protested.
“It’ssorcery,” Effie declared again, but it came out sounding more like “It’s torture me,” since he’d jammed half the fruit into his mouth before speaking. That seemed an apt sentiment. Though Archie couldn’t quite articulate why, he did rather feel as if he were being tortured, and he couldn’t blame the sensation on hunger any longer.
“Well, it certainly isn’t better than the pheasant was,” Archie grumbled, peevishly stabbing a pear with his fork as the other two mused about what the mystery ingredient might be.
He took a bite, and flavor exploded on his tongue, an amalgam of familiar—honey and pear—and darkly mysterious.
It was better than the pheasant, blast it.
7
Guess Who’s (Still Not) Coming to Dinner
After their strange-but-satisfying dinner, the gentlemen retired to a dusty drawing room that made Simon sneeze repeatedly. The space was studded with buckets collecting rain that was fallingthroughthe roof, so it took some doing to arrange themselves in such a way that facilitated conversation but discouraged dampness. Once they were settled, Effie read his sonnet about Sally. One would think a sonnet commemorating a dead parrot would be ridiculous. One would be wrong.
That was the thing about Effie. Hewasin some ways ridiculous, with his severe attire and his dreamy demeanor. Though Archie would never countenance anyone besides himself or SimoncallingEffie ridiculous. More than one boy at school—chief among them Nigel Nettlefell—had made that mistake and had subsequently come to regret it.
What Simon and Archie and perhaps few others understood was that beneath Effie’s embroidered silk waistcoat beat the heart of a true artist. He had a way, with his best poems, of using a handful of exquisitely economical phrases to pluck at heartstrings one didn’t even know one had.
And this poem, “Lamenter, Be Not Proud,” was one of his best. It was about a bird, but not. Effie had a way of writing around a specific, seemingly small subject in such a way that one ended up astonished at the realization that the small subjectwasn’tactually the point as one was blindsided by analogy to one’s own experience of the world. It was rather like believing oneself to be on a pleasant punting outing, only for the boat to suddenly overturn and plunge one into a river of astonishing truths and terrible beauties. It seemed like alchemy, this ability of Effie’s, and it made Archie proud to call him a friend.
Archie and Simon applauded when Effie finished his recitation. Archie had to swallow a lump in his throat before he could speak, because somehow, this poem about a parrot Effie had loved had put Archie to mind of the death of his own father, whom he had . . . Well, whom he had learned not to love, to be frank. And of his mother, who, while not dead, was sufficiently lost to him he sometimes thought she might as well be. He sometimes wondered, as he sat by her side and attempted to engage her in conversation, if hewouldmourn her. Perhaps a man only had so much mourning in him to attach to any given person, in which case he feared he had spent his allotment for Mother. What he wouldn’t give to come home one more time to her wide-open arms that always greeted his arrival home from school. What he wouldn’t give for one more of her garden games, or one more hand of whist. She always used to beat him at whist, but she always made him laugh while doing so. He had lost all those things so slowly, in such a piecemeal fashion, that he hadn’t known to consider whether any specific experience of them might be the last.
His thoughts were growing mawkish. He cast them away. “You’re going to send this sonnet toLe Monde Joli, yes?” he asked, naming the magazine that occasionally published Effie’s poems.
“ForgetLe Monde Joli,” Simon said. “You ought to aim higher than a mere ladies’ magazine with this one. Or never mind that, you’ve enough good ones now that you could publish a chapbook.”
“I’ve already sent it to my editor atLe Monde Joli,” Effie said, “and while I am loath to appear overly self-impressed, I am confident it will be accepted.” Effie was doggedly loyal to the publication that had accepted his first poem, after years of rejection everywhere else. Amusingly, when he’d first submitted, he hadn’t realized the publication was targeted at ladies, but the knowledge hadn’t dampened his enthusiasm one jot. To hear it told, his editor was a harsh taskmaster but one who brought out the best in Effie. “And frankly, if I were a lady I would take offense at your use of the word ‘mere.’”
“As long as you’re happy,” Archie said. It all had to be anonymous anyway. It wouldn’t do for a viscount, the son of an earl—especially the son of the high stickler Earl of Stonely—to be publishing poems, in a ladies’ magazine or any other. Perhaps if Lord Byron were more respectable and therefore provided better precedent, things might be different for Effie, but as it stood, he felt the need for secrecy.
After the poetry, they poured a round of port and a companionable silence settled, the crackling of the fire the only sound. Archie sighed happily, anticipating the slow spread of satisfaction through his bones. This evening, they would drink, they would talk, and they would be together. It would be like old times, at school, in the sense that the responsibilities and pressures of adulthood, and of the earldom, felt very distant. But also not like old times, because they could do whatever the hell they wanted to. There were no teachers or parents or social conventions to stop them. No bloody essays to write—or to beseech Effie to write for him. Nothing but them and the pure pleasure of long-standing friendship.
Archie was aware that to voice such a sentiment would make him seem ridiculous, but this moment was one that he looked forward to all year. If the toast on the way out of Town signaled that an Earls Trip was underway, the first evening they settled in together, after unpacking—or after detouring to a posting inn, getting shot, rescuing some childhood friends, and threatening a criminal sufficiently that he would never return to England—signaled the true start of the retreat. Simon had said earlier that he was sorely in need of respite. Simon was not alone in that sentiment. Earls Trips were about the restoration of Archie to himself. He had always enjoyed these trips, but as the years passed and the situation with Mother deteriorated, heneededthem.
He sometimes felt as though he was one of those ghosts he didn’t believe in, that through the course of a year, some essential essence of his being—his spirit, he supposed—slowly became unmoored from his body. As if there were two versions of him that were meant to nestle together as one, but by the time autumn rolled around, the edges didn’t match up at all.
Simon and Effie got his edges matching again.
He rolled his eyes at himself. Was this sentimentality the result of too much drink or not enough? He picked up his glass. Only one way to find out. As he was taking a deep drink, something popped to mind. Another example of this feeling of freedom and camaraderie, one from long ago. “Remember the couple of years we all spent the Christmas holidays at school?”
“Those were grand times,” Effie said.
“I was so happy that first year you stayed back, too, Archie, and then when you joined us the next, Effie,” Simon said, gracing them with a rare unrestrained smile.
“Yes, whydidyou start staying back?” Effie asked Archie. “Aside from the fact that our school Christmases were so much more enjoyable than those at home, at least in my case.”
Simon had always stayed at school over the holidays because he wasn’t wanted at home. Effie had usually gone home for Christmas, but that year, and one or two others, his parents had been traveling.
