“On the contrary,” Archie said soothingly to Effie, who had begun imposing a sort of order on the chaos. He glanced at the ormolu clock on Effie’s mantel—and smiled to see the ornate gilded timepiece bedecked with dried roses. “Take your time. You wouldn’t want to forget anything, and I, for one, could do with a nip of brandy.”
* * *
Despite his efforts to stall, Archie lost the wager. Effie packed with uncharacteristic expeditiousness, and the three friends climbed into the coach thirty minutes later. Archie took the rear-facing seat, accepting Simon’s triumphant jeer with good humor.
Archie didn’t mind losing. He enjoyed gambling. And riding and boxing and all manner of gentlemanly pursuits. He loved to be active, and he loved to compete. But he had never been overly concerned withwinning. This indifference used to drive his father to distraction. But for Archie, the appeal of any pursuit was the experience of it rather than the outcome. Hunting, arguably the greatest of his passions, was about the actual hunt, not the kill. The clean air scouring his nostrils, the focus that always came with physical exertion, the strategy developed among friends with whom he was sharing the day.
Well, no, in the case of hunting, itwasalso about the outcome: dinner never tasted so good as when one shot it oneself.
But the larger point stood: Archie enjoyed games and contests, but he was not elementally competitive. So he was quite happy for Simon to win their wager, though he played his role and scowled and grumbled over the loss. Truth be told, he was pleased Simon had won, because it meant they’d gotten underway sooner rather than later. There was nothing like an Earls Trip. These two weeks in September were his favorite of the year.
“We wagered on how long it would take to extract you, you know,” Simon said to Effie.
“Did you? Who won?”
“I did,” Simon said with an air of what looked from the outside like haughtiness but Effie and Archie knew was merely Simon’s innate seriousness. He had an earnest nature that was often tinged with worry. Most people didn’t realize that.
“Well, good,” Effie declared. “Archie wins entirely too much. Always has. Remember that archery competition in fifth form?”
Simon snorted. “As if I could forget it. I thought I’d starve to death waiting for it to be over.”
“And then the rain began,” Effie remarked wryly.
The boys were referring to the annual archery contest at school. Perhaps Archie needed to revise his previous thought that he wasn’t naturally competitive. He wasn’t naturally competitive with hisfriends. But put him in an archery contest where everyone had been eliminated but him and his fifteen-year-old arch-nemesis, the bully Nigel Nettlefell, and he would shoot arrow after arrow into the night, in the middle of a rainstorm, until his arms shook. He would do it again today, had he the chance, purely for the satisfaction of beating that miserable little toad.
“I think,” Archie said, “that I win exactly the right amount. Which is to say frequently.” His friends jeered good-naturedly, and he doubled down. “I do attempt to lose every now and again, mind you, to keep from smothering your spirits.” The pair of them made various noises of disgust. “It must be very trying to always be coming up short around me, so I try to keep myself humble,” he added with an air of exaggerated martyrdom.
Simon sniffed and opened one of his newspapers, which caused Effie to pull out a leatherbound journal. Effie looked like a raven, dark and regal, and Simon like a dunnock, unassuming and brown. Archie tamped down a smile. His air of martyrdom had been just that—an air. In truth, Archie loved his friends in spite of their quirks—becauseof their quirks—with a depth of feeling that was perhaps unseemly for a grown man. But he didn’t care overmuch about seemliness. A man needed friends in this world, and he had the best of them.
Mind you, he didn’t go aroundsayingany of that. Some sentiments did not lend themselves to earnest declarations.
He allowed Effie and Simon to get lost in their individual pursuits as the cobblestones of Mayfair gave way to the dirt road out of Town. The toast would happen later. He reached for his valise, intending to extract his beads to pass the time, but was greeted by the unwelcome sight of a ragged counterpane. “Bollocks.”
Curious how something could be so familiar yet so unwelcome. Familiar because the bed covering used to be his. He knew the soft silk of the front and the scratchy linen of the back. His fingers used to trace the elaborate pattern of stitching that was meant to keep the wool batting the thing was stuffed with in place while Mother read to him at night. The batting was long since gone, and the silk had faded from its original blue to a drab gray.
Unwelcome because they would have to double back now. At least Mother was in London.
Still, what a stroke of bad luck. “Damn it all to hell.”
“Whatever’s the matter, Archie?” Effie asked, peering over the edge of his journal.
He held up the coverlet.
“What in the devil is that?”
“It’s my mother’s . . .” How to explain? The boys knew about his mother, but the day-to-day details, the grind that was the care-taking endeavor, was not something with which he burdened them. It was not something he knew how to explain. He would try, though. “This is what remains of the counterpane from my bed when I was a boy. When I was seven, we got a dog named Baron. He was my father’s dog—he was a birder—but much to Father’s annoyance, Baron attached himself to me.”
“Your father, the earl, named his dog Baron?” Simon asked.
“He did indeed.”
Simon snorted, and Effie said, “Of course he did.”
“Well, at least weknewBaron would never live up to Father’s standards,” Archie said. He’d been aiming for a breezy delivery but to his dismay, the declaration had come out sounding more bothered than he would have liked. “When I was away at school, Baron would drag this counterpane around. He missed me, and I suppose it smelled like me. Mother was always taking it from him and putting it back in my bedchamber. It became somewhat of a jest between us.” And, he supposed, a jest between Mother and Baron when Archie was at school. He smiled, thinking about how each time he’d come home, there would be another tear or stain on the coverlet. Mother would pretend to be irritated and threaten to replace the counterpane, which she always said wasn’t suited for the man Archie was becoming. But she never did.
“Somehow, as her mind has . . . become clouded, Mother has become fixated on the bloody thing.” Archie paused. “I am understating the matter. I am not sure Mother and Miss Brown can weather the fortnight ahead without this rag. Mother has grown inordinately attached to it. It brings her comfort. Calms her when she has episodes.” It was to her as his string of beads was to him. Miss Brown, Mother’s companion, had given them to him—she had initially given them to Mother, having fashioned them after some ancient Greek contraption she’d read about. They were akin to the rosaries of the Catholics, though they carried no religious meaning: they were intended merely to occupy the hands and soothe the mind. They hadn’t worked with Mother, but they had worked on him. They gave him something to do with his hands, focused his mind. The difference was he could do without the beads if he had to.
“How did it get in your bag?” Simon asked.
