“You must promise me one thing if we are to . . . enact the plan I proposed earlier.” Had heforgotten?
“All right. What is it?”
She drew a fortifying breath. If they weren’t going to talk about the rest of it, that was one thing, but this was an essential condition. “You mustn’t get any ideas about marrying me as a result of our lying together. You’ve got to leave your overdeveloped sense of honor at the bedroom door.”
“Overdeveloped!”
He had stopped in his tracks, but it had taken her a moment to realize it, so she halted a few feet ahead of him and turned. “Indeed.”
“Need I remind you,” he said, a note of pique entering his tone, “that it’s thanks to my ‘overdeveloped’ sense of honor that neither you nor your sister are currently Mrs. Theodore Bull?”
“NeedIremindyouabout the time you broke a vase at Hill House and instead of hiding the pieces as any sensible child would have, you sought out my mother and confessed? Or the time you fed Mr. Smith’s Easter ham to Olive’s dog under the table?” His jaw dropped, and she smirked. He had thought he was being so subtle that day. “Or,” she cried, overcome by the momentum of her own argument, “that time you went way out of your way to rescue Olive and me from an unscrupulous knave,wereprepared to marry one of us if need be, and didn’t even get angry when Ishotyou?”
She thought they were going to have an argument then, but he laughed. Threw his head back and cackled. When he was done, he righted his head, looked her in the eye, and said, “All right, Clem. I promise not to get any ideas about marrying you. You’ve made your aversion to the institution quite clear.”
She was tempted to point out that just because a woman had aversions—or preferences, for that matter—it didn’t mean that a man need heed them. In fact, most men found the aversions and preferences of women completely irrelevant. But better, of course, to retain the advantage here. “All right, then.”
“All right, then,” he echoed, and she was about to resign herself to the fact that none of her other questions or points of discussion were going to be dealt with, at least not right now. He was about to turn, and they would make the final approach to the castle. He would, as before, conduct himself as if everything were the same as ever. She wasn’t sure why that annoyed her so.
He did turn, but to her shock, everything wasn’t the same. He offered her his arm.
He had never done that before. Well, there may have been the odd time when the Morgans were dining at Mollybrook and one or both sets of parents had insisted on a show of formality. But he had never done anything so courtly as offering her his arm when they were alone. Being themselves.
But there it was, his wool-encased forearm, bent at forty-five degrees, the elbow making a point that pierced like a knife through her aspic heart.
She laid her fingers on his arm, and walked with him.
* * *
As they approached the castle, Archie had been intending to suggest they meet on the roof again after dark. On the roof, he would talk Clem out of her ridiculous proposition. He needed the timebetweenthen and now to rehearse his speech. He wasn’t good with words at the best of times. And even though in some ways Clem offering herself to himwasthe best of times, her doing so had him completely and utterly befuddled. That feeling he got when he tried to read something important? Where the words started to look wrong and the letters began to slide out of place and his head felt as if it would burst from the pressure?
He usually got that feeling from books, but for a moment back there, the entire world had done that to him. So much so that he’dfallen out of a tree. He couldn’t think straight, so he’d known he’d never be able to talk straight. So he’d landed as best he could from that fall, dusted himself off, and allowed himself to pretend, just for a while, that he was in agreement with Clementine. That hecouldhave her.
They would sort it out later, in the dark, where it was easier to talk.
He wasn’t able to whisper an instruction to meet him on the roof, though, because they were met in the gardens by Effie, Simon, and Olive, who were running around like Bedlamites.
“Clemmie!” Olive shrieked when she caught sight of her sister. “I’ve lost Hermes!”
“Pardon?” Clem took her hand off his arm, and even though Archie had a sense that the laws of nature didn’t work this way at all, he felt the removal of her hand as the slamming of a door. She was releasing his arm, but he felt the opposite: a sort of imprisonment.
Olive launched into a story about how she had decided to sketch a picture for Clementine to memorialize their time at Quintrell Castle. “I asked the gentlemen to pose for me, and I thought we ought to include Hermes.” She sniffed loudly, seeming to Archie more distraught at losing her sister’s turtle than she had been at stealing her sister’s fiancé. “So I got him out of his enclosure, and Ilosthim!”
“Miss Olive,” Effie said, “I cannot allow you to take the blame for this unfortunate turn of events. Miss Morgan, it was I who suggested the introduction of Hermes to our tableau. I am truly sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Simon called from where he was on his hands and knees beneath a cracked stone bench surrounded by overgrown grasses. “Hermes can’t have gotten far, and if you lot would spend as much time helping me look as you have in hysterics, we might actually get somewhere.” He paused and twisted his head over his shoulder. “Hello, Harcourt. Hello, Miss Morgan.”
And so Archie found himself not whispering instructions to Clementine for a clandestine rendezvous but scrabbling around the overgrown estate looking for her turtle.
“It is all right, everyone,” Clementine kept saying. “It’s unfortunate we’ll have to skip the races, but it isn’t as if Hermes can’t survive in the wild. He’ll be fine. In fact, he’ll be better off. I’ve been feeling increasingly guilty about confining him. Captivity, no matter how comfortable, is still captivity, after all.”
She was roundly ignored. Well, she was ignored by everyone else. Archie heard her as if she’d been speaking into his ear, nay, into his very soul, as absurd as that was.Captivity, no matter how comfortable, is still captivity.
The phrase brought to mind her instance that he not take a marriage-minded approach to their liaison—not that there was going to be a liaison. It had never seemed out of character for Clementine to be opposed to marriage, but he hadn’t thought about it in the context of the wordcaptivity. No wonder she hated the idea. Wild Clementine could never thrive in captivity.
“I found him!” Olive screeched a few minutes later, sounding for all the world like a banshee foretelling death rather than a girl proclaiming victory. She strode up from the banks of the pond, holding poor Hermes over her head like a trophy. Her hem was dirty and wet—she resembled her sister that way.
“Oh, Olive, you’ve ruined your dress,” said Clementine, whom Archie knew had never spared a care for her owned ruined dresses.
