Not knowing how to steer them out of this conversational morass, he returned to the original topic—he did want to get his question answered. “Speaking of Chiddington, you wrote me once, when I was at school, about a dance there. You made mention of having danced with two different partners that evening. I was wondering . . .” He was belatedly hearing how odd it was going to sound for him to be focused on, to have remembered at all, such an inconsequential detail. But now that he’d started, he couldn’t see a way to reverse course. “I was wondering who it was you danced with that night?” He rushed to add, “It just popped to mind, what with all the talk of the old days, and the assembly rooms.”
Her lantern, the one that was blunting the effect of the heavens above them, was sufficient to illuminate her furrowing brow. “Hmm, no doubt one of them would have been Ralph Scully. Do you remember him? He always danced with Olive straight away. They were great friends. When he returned Olive to us, he generally invited me to dance. It was out of pity, mind you, but I always liked him.”
“He was the son of Mr. Smith, the surgeon.” Mr. Smith had always been kind to Mother, even when he hadn’t been able to offer much by way of assistance.
“Yes. Ralph and Olive struck up a particular friendship. I think it went back to the time I broke my arm falling out of that willow by the pond—do you remember that?”
He did. “I believe I was the one who ran to the village to fetch Mr. Smith.”
“That’s right! I remember lying on the grass beneath that tree, sure I was going to die!This is it, I thought, and I consoled myself that at least I would die shrouded by the branches of the willow, which if you recall were quite magnificent in the way they hung down, almost like a waterfall of foliage.” She laughed at herself. “Ralph came with his father to tend to my arm, and he and Olive discovered a shared love for—nay, obsession with—dogs, of all things.”
“Terrible news when we learned of his death.”
“He died?” Clementine’s voice sounded genuinely distressed.
“Yes, in Upper Canada—he’d joined the army and was part of a garrison there. And Mr. Smith died, too, a year or so before Ralph, so poor Mrs. Scully is left all alone.”
“How awful. And I hate how out of touch I am with news of home. I wonder that Olive never told me.”
A morose silence settled for a few moments before Clementine broke it by saying, “Certainly one of my dance partners that night would have been Ralph, may he rest in peace, if only because he was always one of my dance partners. You may remember that the rules there were relaxed. I’d never be allowed to dance with a surgeon’s son in London.”
“Mmm. And the other partner?” Archie tried not to sound too interested.
“I can’t remember the other, but it may have been Mr. Chapman. He came to be rather fond of me. Perhaps I ought to have considered his suit. That is another experience that seems not so bad with the benefit of hindsight. One comes to understand, as time passes, that one must lower one’s expectations.”
The small, resigned sigh that accompanied Clementine’s statement about lowered expectations should have dismayed Archie, but whatever he might have felt about Clem’s settling for less than, well, for less thaneverything, was eclipsed by his inability to get past her previous sentence.
“Hissuit? Are we talking aboutFrankChapman?” Archie did attempt to keep the shock—and dismay—out of his tone, but he feared he had not succeeded. He checked himself. Was it a shock that men had offered for Clementine? No. She had previously mentioned having rebuffed two suits. Despite her claims to the contrary, Clementine Morgan was a prime catch. Yes, she could be odd, and her obsession with the natural world perhaps went too far in some people’s estimations—she did tend to walk around with twigs and leaves in her hair and mud on the hems of her dresses—but she was pretty and lively and just generally so . . . incomparable. But Frank Chapman was a widowed gentleman who had to be older than Clementine’s father. And he must be the man to whom she was referring. There were no other Mr. Chapmans, Frank Chapman having fathered only daughters.
He wondered who the other suitor was.
“Yes. You might not remember Mr. Chapman. He rarely came to the dances, but he was a particular friend of my father’s—and yours—and when his wife died, he was round to our house for dinner a lot.”
Archie cleared his throat and endeavoured to make his next observation with significantly more equanimity, as if he were merely commenting on the weather. “I do remember him. You and Frank Chapman would be very ill-suited.”
“I’d thought as much. But had I said yes, I’d be in the country, wouldn’t I? And he wasn’t cruel or dogmatic or overbearing or simple.”
“Not dogmatic, cruel, overbearing, or simple?Thatis the standard?”
“Mr. Chapman’s only crime was that he was dull as dirt.” She tilted her head. “Duller. Because dirt is, in fact, quite interesting if you look at it closely enough.” Her head righted itself as if to signal the end of her digression. “And possibly also that he was still in love with his late wife, though she’d been gone for years by that point. The more I think about Mr. Chapman relative to my experiences with gentlemen in Town, the more I wonder if I made a mistake in rebuffing him. So I would have been subject to some mind-numbingly dull treatises on taxation—he was unaccountably interested in taxation. And can it really be counted as a fault that a man loved his wife?Shewas his wife. I would have been a placeholder. He would have left me alone a great deal of the time. And, as I mentioned, I’d still be in the country. Father would be placated, and I would have gotten at least some of what I wanted.”
“Who was the other gentleman?” he blurted.
“I beg your pardon? What do you mean ‘the other gentleman’? Although I can’t remember the evening we’re speaking of, I’m almost certain my two dance partners that night would have been Ralph Scully and Frank Chapman.”
“Not that. You, ah, mentioned the other day, when we were on the terrace, that you’d been in receipt of two offers of marriage. Mr. Chapman was one.”
He did realize that this was none of his affair. He just . . . needed to know.
“Oh, quite.” She snorted, which made him smile. “My other offer was from a man called Alfred Potter.”
Archie searched his memory for the man and came up with nothing. Clementine must have known that’s what he was doing, for she said, “You wouldn’t know him. He’s an American, if you can believe it. An industrialist.”
The idea that Clem had had an offer of marriage from an American industrialist put Archie back on his heels. Highlighted anew how far he had drifted from the Morgans. Good God, what if she’d said yes? Was Archie the sort of person who could have lost such a dear friendto Americawithout even realizing it?
Apparently he was.
“He was the son of a shipbuilding magnate based in New York,” Clem went on, oblivious to the dramatic reckoning of the soul underway in her conversation partner. “We met at a ball, hiding from the quadrille, and that provided a certain amount of fellowship of feeling.” She smiled fondly, and something rumbled unpleasantly in Archie’s chest. “He had recently started a company that ships ice to the American south, if you can imagine that!
