“I think so. Lately, I’ve been seized with . . .” Effie looked around as if to make sure they weren’t being overheard, but since they were utterly alone, the effect was comical. “I’ve been seized with moments of joy.” Archie had to hold back laughter, and Effie must have realized how silly he sounded, for he pulled a face and said, “But don’t worry, I retain my appreciation for the beauty in the darker side of life.”
“What’s brought on these moments of joy?” Simon asked.
“I’ve had some correspondence lately that has made me rethink a few things.”
Archie could see Simon getting ready to launch an interrogation. Archie himself was desperately curious. But Effie rose and shoved Archie to the side. “Move over. I want to try that slide again.”
A tussle broke out over who would gain ownership of the settee, the three of them braying like donkeys as each attempted to sit and to dislodge the others. It was a bit like a game Mother used to set up outside on long summer days. It had involved a grouping of chairs containing one fewer in number than the assembled players. Everyone processed around the chairs until a neutral observer shouted, “Sit!” at which point a mad scramble ensued. The chair-less player was ejected, a chair removed, and the process repeated until the final two players went head-to-head for the last chair. Archie had forgotten about that. He had the notion that the game was meant for children, but Mother loved it and cajoled him and Father to play whenever they had familiar guests over—the Morgans had played this game many a time. Mother had had such a sense of fun in those days. And Father had always grumbled at being pressed into such a silly game, but by the end, he would be laughing along with everyone else. How extraordinary. In all regards: that it had happened to begin with, that Father had been regularly coaxed to participate, and that Archie had so entirely forgotten it.
Tonight wasn’t exactly like that game, though. Here, the settee was big enough to accommodate the three lords, if just. No one wanted to give up, so as the tussle wound down, they ended up pressed together, each man sitting on just enough space for his silk-covered arse to slip and slide in place. And as they sat there wiggling, laughter started bubbling up again.
And when Simon said drily, “No wonder our fathers disdained us. We are an utter embarrassment,” they exploded in mirth.
Then Clementine and Olive walked in the door, and everyone went silent.
Being caught out like this should have been mortifying. Itwasmortifying.
But somehow it wasalsothe most amusing thing that had ever happened to Archie. After so much longing for Clementine to appear, that she would choose this exact, absurd, perfectly imperfect moment to do so, felt both providential and hilarious. He managed to get to his feet. “Well, hello. I thought you weren’t coming.”
* * *
Clementine would freely admit that she was never going to be a paragon of manners and decorum. She never noticed when she had grass stains on her dress. Her hair never stayed where her maid put it—and it was even more of a lost cause here at Quintrell Castle, where she had no maid but Olive, whose hairdressing skills were nowhere near as good as her embroidery skills. But those were errors of execution, not of theory. Clementine’s training had been sufficient to educate her on how to conduct herself. The fact that she was constitutionally ill-suited for spending a great deal of time in company didn’t mean she didn’t know how to do it. Theoretically.
None of her lessons had ever covered what to do when one walked in on two earls and a viscount wearing silk dressing gowns and doing what could only be described as writhing on a settee whilst laughing like Bedlamites.
“Oh, my Heavens,” Olive breathed, and somehow it was enough to draw the gentlemen’s attention.
The room went dead silent as three pairs of wide eyes swung toward the sisters. The men ceased their moving as if they’d been at a dance and had been struck by paralysis mid-cotillion.
That comportment training Clementine had been thinking back on, while not having covered this specific scenario, would nevertheless have suggested that it was in poor taste to laugh at peers of the realm. Especially this lot: they had been so kind to her and were being so welcoming to her and her sister. Well, two of them were. Archie was running hot and cold on that front. He wanted her not underfoot. He wanted her to come to dinner.Which is it?she sometimes wanted to cry.
But, oh, how she wanted to laugh at this absurd tableau.Neededto laugh. She bit the insides of her cheeks. Clenched her fists. Anything to stave off the massing storm clouds of amusement, growing heavier with unshed mirth by the moment.
They were frozen, all of them, suspended in amber like poor ancient insects.
Finally, Archie stood. “Well, hello. I thought you weren’t coming.”
There was a beat of silence before Clementine said, “I can see that.”
The storm clouds let loose then. Olive started it, letting loose a great, girlish peal of laughter. Oddly, it sounded like nothing Clementine had ever heard, and she’d heard Olive laugh any number of times. This laugh was unfamiliar: high and musical and infused with delight.
A baritone thrumming rose up from the bottom of the scale, Marsden and Featherfinch joining Olive. The former had a deep, booming laugh; the viscount’s was punctuated with the occasional snort, providing a percussive element to the symphony.
That left Clementine and Archie, alone now in their amber prisons, staring at each other while the other insects buzzed with laughter and liberation.
Archie was the first to succumb. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was the other way around. Clementine initially thought the first upturn of one corner of Archie’s mouth was the tinder that caused an echoing flare inside her. But it might have been the reverse, because Archie looked surprised by the fact that he was laughing. Either way, Clementine felt a cracking, as if something inside her she hadn’t even realized was frozen, incarcerated, was coming alive, the amber around it fracturing to let in air and light. And laughter. Gales of it.
Archie never took his eyes off her as the chorus rose, a roomful of happy locusts. The others stopped before she and Archie did, perhaps because they’d had a head start, or perhaps because she and Archie needed it more, to allow themselves the balm of laughter, to let the light shine into the fissures created by the splintering of their amber confinement.
The other two gentlemen rose and exhorted Olive to sit. Eventually, Clementine and Archie’s mirth tapered off, but still he looked at her, still he smiled at her. She looked back at him,smiledback at him, her dear friend, and marveled that she’d been nervous to join him and his friends this evening. She wasn’t sure why, only that her reacquaintance with Archie had heretofore taken place in the dark. On the roof. Under the stars where it was easy to say what she meant—what she felt.
She had told him somuch, recklessly exposed her foibles and her fears. She had snuffed out her lantern, there on the roof under the Seven Sisters, and she had shown him herself.
She was forced to break from the steadfastness of Archie’s gaze by Lord Featherfinch, who was suddenly at her side. “Won’t you please sit, Miss Morgan?”
She felt as if she were coming out of a trance, and she felt the rousing as a loss. Her nervousness was gone, but in its place, a kind of resigned sadness moved in. Now she would have to act properly, remember to address Archie as “my lord,” be decorous in front of his friends. She took Lord Featherfinch’s proffered arm and revised that thought. If anyone here ought to be worried about the contravention of social norms, surely it was the gentlemen wearing dressing gowns and, judging by the bare legs sticking out of the bottom of them, not much else?
Clementine had never seen bare male feet before. Though he had undone the fall of his breeches, Theo hadn’t removed his stockings when they’d lain together. Clementine examined Archie’s lower limbs. His ankles were . . . well, they were lovely. The lines of his long feet were graceful, and his ankle bone protruded in a way that kicked up her heartbeat. She allowed her gaze to migrate up his leg. Oh! She hadn’t expected so much hair. And she would never have expected so much hair to be so . . . pleasing to the eye. Pleasing yet simultaneously unsettling—probably only because such a sight was so out of place in a drawing room.
