He chuckled. “Well, if anyone could, it’d be you. But I take your point.”
“Besides, am I not too old to climb trees?”
He didn’t like the notion that Clementine would regard herself as too old, or too anything, to engage in an activity she used to enjoy as much as climbing trees. “I don’t think of tree climbing as an activity with an age limit.”
“Hmm,” she said, though she sounded cheered.
Silence settled, and he reflected that as much as he liked Olive, he wasgladshe wasn’t here. This was his second rooftop tête-à-tête with Clementine, and he had the most absurd feeling that he would like to do this every night for the foreseeable future without Olive or anyone else joining them.
In fact, he was fairly certain he’d begged off drinking with Effie not to go to bed, as he’d said and perhaps even half believed, but to find Clem. He ought to feel chagrined. This was supposed to be an Earls Trip, after all. Not a Clem-and-Archie trip.
But since hehaddone it, and since hedidhave Clementine all to himself, he was going to ask her another question, an old one, but one that had recently risen to the surface of his mind. “Do you remember the dances in the assembly hall in Chiddington when we were young?”
That, of course, wasn’t the real question. It was the prelude to the question. Even though this was Clem, to whom he could say anything, he felt some priming of the pump was called for.
“I do. I hated those dances, but in retrospect, they seem so benign.”
“How do you mean?”
“If you were of a mind to flee, you could be outside in under a minute. And Chiddington is not large—the buildings themselves are not tall, and there’s only the one high street. So from the assembly rooms you could be on the street in less than a minute, and clear of the village proper in another five. Whereas at some society parties in London, you walk for what feels like milesinsidesomeone’s house before you evengetto the ballroom.” Clem was talking faster as her theory unspooled. “And if you want to depart, there is usually a complicated leave-taking process involving calling a servant to fetch your outerwear, and another to summon your conveyance. And of course you can’t do any of that without a chaperone. And if that chaperone happens to be yourfather, who is bound and determined to see you married off, good luck with your attempted escape.”
“Ah, yes, I see.” He had never thought of it that way, but he shared her outlook on London parties, except of course he did not require a chaperone to attend or to leave them. And as to the Marriage Mart that had Clem so agitated, he had to admit that one not unwelcome outcome of having a dead father and a mother who had taken leave of her wits was that no one was haranguing him about marrying, preserving the lineage, and so on. The title and its accompanying estates and wealth—the whole damn thing—could pass to Archie’s cousin Herbert, who was next in line and quite competent, and not a single person in the world would mind.
The thought, which should have been liberating, was in truth a trifle unsettling. Because the notion of not a single person caring about the fate of the title was, of course, equivalent to not a single person caring abouthim.
Though, of course, he reminded himself, Effie and Simon cared about him.
They just couldn’t help him with the whole “fate of the lineage” problem.
Not that it was a problem. As previously established.
“Andthen,even if youdomanage to get out,” Clementine finished with a great flourish, waving her arms as if she were conducting a symphony, “you’re still inLondon.” She made a melodramatic choking sound.
“Indeed.” He laughed at her theatrics, but he could not disagree with any of what she’d said.
“Andthenthere’s thecompany.”
Oh, she wasn’t done. He smiled and settled in to listen to the rest of her monologue on the merits of the assembly rooms in Chiddington relative to the ballrooms of London.
“There was a rather lot of talking about horseflesh and crop rotation, which are both topics in which I have some interest—and of which I have some knowledge. And though I wasn’t meant to show the latter, in reality no one much minded when a mere girl had something to say about the merits of Cleveland Bays versus Yorkshire Trotters as carriage horses.”
“Probably because you knew what you were talking about. I recall a time when you advised Aaron Hastings on the purchase of a pair of matched Cleveland Bays he was quite happy with.”
“Yes, he had been planning to buy a pair of Suffolk Punches, and that seemed too much horse for the job. It wasn’t as if he needed them to do double duty as workhorses. He merely wanted to swan around in his curricle and impress everyone.” She scoffed laughingly. “Honestly, thebaysmay have been too much horse for the job.”
“So you aren’t able to converse on these topics in company in London?”
“Goodness, no. In London it’s all dresses and shopping and the on-dits of the day. What is Lord Byron’s latest scandal, for example? Mind you, I would be quite happy to discuss Lord Byron’s latestpoem. He does write so piercingly. But so many people who talk about him seem not to have actually read anything he’s written.”
“You should read Effie’s—” Ah, bollocks. Archie was so comfortable with Clem, he’d been about to let Effie’s secret spill as easily as tipping over a teacup in a too-close drawing room. He tried again. “Featherfinch is a devoted student of literature, and I believe he’s read every word Byron has ever written. You should speak with him on the topic.” She could do just that if he could ever get her to dine with him. “If you’d care to join us for dinner tomorrow, I’m sure we could get him to expound upon Lord Byron for significantly more time than you may have thought you’d like to devote to the topic.”
Clementine looked momentarily delighted, then her face shuttered before his eyes. “Oh, no, I heard you before. You may have thought me still addled from my trying journey and all that dreadful business with Mr. Bull, but I heard you. My sister and I shan’t be intruding on your gentlemen’s holiday. Arch, you really must allow yourself to abandon your good manners. Your mother is not here.”
He saw her realize what she had said, watched dismay move across her features like a storm coming in at a good clip. She’d only been invoking his mother as a kind of stand-in for polite society, a proxy for whatever norms or practices dictated that a gentleman should always be accommodating and decorous and so forth. She meant to say that no one was watching him, but the thing was, he wanted to be watched—byher.
He wanted her to come to bloody dinner.
She looked increasingly stricken, and he did not know how to tell her that it was fine, that she had not erred or offended him or anything of that sort.
