“He was a refreshingly forthright sort,” Clem went on. “Told me outright that he was hunting for a wife. I suggested that hiding from dances mightn’t be the wisest strategy if matrimony was his aim. He replied that if any young ladies saw him attempting the quadrille he might as well go home right then. We had a lovely chat. At the end of it, he shocked me by proposing marriage.”
Archie tried to interject, to ask what kind of man would propose marriage after mere minutes of acquaintanceship, but he wasn’t fast enough. There was a lag between the astonishing things she was saying and his ability to absorb them.
“I did consider it,” she continued blithely. “He was a pleasant enough sort, and his passionate interest in ice was really rather compelling. But his wife would have to go to America with him, where he lived in an apartment in New York. A large apartment, to hear it told, but . . .” She shrugged. “He was to inherit his father’s empire and was in want of a wife to be a hostess and . . . Well, that wasn’t me.”
Of course that wasn’t her. For God’s sake! Archie opened his mouth to agree with her, but once again, she was too fast for him.
“I told him I’d be as suited to that life as he was to the quadrille, and we parted ways amicably. My mistake was in telling Olive about it. Olive told Father, and he was quite angry with me. Which, in truth, I found hurtful. One likes to think one’s father might have at least a minor pang of wistfulness at the idea of sending a daughter across the ocean to marry a stranger.”
She brushed her palms together briskly and her tone became equally brisk as she said, “So that’s that. One offer from an American industrialist who lived in the most urban of conditions, and one from a boring-but-benign man old enough to be my grandfather. But again, one wonders, in retrospect—especially when one’s current vantage point is post–Theodore Bull—if one made the right choice.”
“Clem, I—” He had no idea what to say. Words were beyond his grasp. She turned her head toward him, her wild hair backlit by the lantern so that, together with her flowing dress, she looked like a feral blue angel. He became so befuddled that even if he had known what hewantedto say, he wasn’t sure he knew how to make his mouth form the corresponding words. Usually, Archie’s problems with words were in reading or writing them, not speaking them, but he had so many thoughts jumbled up in his head.
That Clem had almostgone to bloody America! Left England for good.
That she’d come close to settling for Frank Chapman, or God forbid, for Theodore Bull—or foranyone.
She was too good to settle. Even if she married a kind, unexceptional gentleman, and even if that kind, unexceptional gentleman loved her, he wouldn’tunderstandher. He wouldn’t understand that sometimes she had to leave a party because she would die if she stayed a moment longer. Or that the antidote to a concert that went on too long and made her feel trapped was to take her outside. Or that it was a goddamn tragedy that she hadn’t climbed a tree in years.
Clementine Morgan didn’t just need love; she needed understanding.
Still, even if he could have made his mouth report these thoughts, he could not give that speech. It was fine for him to have this point of view, but he didn’t have to live her life. He was, as she had pointed out, free to livehisas he chose. He couldn’t tell Clem not to settle for anything less than love and understanding, because she might have to. It made him . . . well, it made him positively seethe with indignation over the unfairness of it all. He wondered what he could do about it. Nothing, he concluded, short of changing the very basis around which society was organized, and that was well beyond his capabilities.
Archie had heard Clementine say she didn’t want to get married. He had sympathized. But perhaps he hadn’t brought the proper depth of understanding to her aversion. He did now. If only there were a way to support Clem in her quest to remain unmarried. That would solve the problem for her, if not for the rest of society, and he cared a great deal more about her than he did about society. Perhaps there was a way he could influence her father. He would think on it.
“Yes?” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I believe you were about to say something, but I fear I’ve quite lost you to your thoughts,” she teased good-naturedly.
“Ah. My apologies. I was going to ask, will you please come to dinner tomorrow?”
9
Lady Pirate
She did not come to dinner. Yet another day passed with no sign of Clementine. It was maddening. Archie did not share Effie’s fancy that Quintrell Castle was haunted, but Clem might as well be a ghost for how much she was around. After an early morning walk during which he saw no evidence of her, and a late, leisurely breakfast at which he saw no evidence of either Morgan sister, Archie, Simon, and Effie rode past Doveborough and on to the next settlement, which was a market town of some size. Simon disappeared into a bookshop, and Archie and Effie walked an enormous hedge maze and got well and truly lost in it, so much so that Archie had to boost Effie up so he could attain a prospect of the thing and identify a route for their escape.
He couldn’t help but think how much Clem would have enjoyed it—the maze, but the long ride, too, lover of horses that she was.
Once again, though, he saw her at night. Which, come to think of it, rather bolstered the theory that she was a ghost. Had Clementine died without his noticing and now she was haunting him? He wouldn’t put it past her.
But no, there she was, the real, corporeal Clem, once again perched on the slanted roof beneath her gabled window. Every time he popped his head out of the window in the neighboring bedchamber and spied her there, he’d been torn between the urge to exhort her to go inside before she fell to her death and the opposite urge to join her.
The opposite impulse always won.
He consoled himself that even though she had not climbed a tree for years, that kind of nimbleness didn’t desert a person. It remained baked into one’s being, the same way the boxing moves he had practiced his whole life could be summoned by his muscles without his mind needing to be involved at all. Those had come in handy with Mr. Bull.
“Where have you been?” he asked as he squeezed himself through the window.
“What do you mean where have I been? WherewouldI be?”
“I haven’t seen you for days.”
“That’s not true. I saw you here last night, and the night before that.”
“That doesn’t count. I haven’t seen you in company.”
