“Yes, I know the feeling.”
She was starting to get that sensation again, the one she’d come to think of as the aspic feeling. A significant proportion of her body felt wobbly, and she was overtaken with a kind of . . . not shyness exactly. Not trepidation. More akin to . . . Oh, she was frustrating herself. What did it matter how she felt? She needn’t struggle over naming the unfamiliar sentiment inside her. She knew what she wanted, and for once, she was in the presence of a man who listened to her. So she blundered onward. “Archie, may I come to you again this evening?” She hoped they would not have to relitigate the matter. They hadn’t, last night, discussed the specifics of a second assignation.
“You may,” Archie said carefully. “I shall tap lightly on your door on my way to my room. When you hear that tap, wait ten minutes and come to me—carefully. Check the corridor.” Clementine refrained from telling Archie about her meeting with Lord Featherfinch in that same corridor yesternight. “And for Heaven’s sake, do not come in your nightclothes. If someone should discover you, you’ll be better able to make a credible excuse if you are properly attired.”
She waited for more, but there was none. The aspic feeling intensified. “The evening is going to feel very long, I fear. It is going to be a struggle to act as if everything is the same as ever.”
“Well, you must,” he said. “We are among friends, but if word of our . . . activities should reach my friends or your sister, I am afraid I shan’t be able to suppress my ‘overdeveloped’ sense of honor any longer.” He paused. “And I know how fervently you wish to avoid marriage.”
Yes, she . . . did desire to avoid marriage. And, as previously established, Archie paid attention to what she said. “Indeed. So we must act as we always do.”
“Yes.”
“Well, let us practice right now.”
“How do you mean?”
“Stop being so agreeable about today’s meals. Stop inquiring so earnestly about whether I’m getting enough to eat. Start telling me again that fish aren’t animals!”
“What about eggs?”
She smiled. “What about them?”
“Do you eat them?”
“I do not.”
“You say you don’t want to come face-to-face with an animal on your plate. Eggs do not have faces.” He grinned. “Therefore, eggs are not animals.” He sat back and turned his palms to the sky, triumphant.
* * *
Dinner was perhaps the greatest experience of Archie’s life to date, and it didn’t have anything to do with the food. The meal had been delicious, he had to admit. The cook’s now famous six-hour mushroom pie had been the centerpiece. Its pastry had been divinely flaky, its filling rich, and he dared say, meaty. It had been accompanied by various vegetable dishes as well as a savory cheesecake that was both odd and delightful.
And now they were enjoying some of those pears everyone loved. The boys were interrogating Clementine about their preparation.
“It’s vinegar!” she exclaimed when pressed about the mystery ingredient.
“Vinegar!” Simon exclaimed right back. “Never in a million years would I have thought of putting vinegar on pears.”
“Nor would I. The cook suggested it. It’s a locally made fig vinegar, so perhaps that makes a difference.”
“One hears the adage about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, but perhaps that is not the case here,” Olive said laughingly, “for I do believe these pears would attract more than their share of flies were we to leave them unattended outside.”
“Oh, but thereishoney in them, too,” Clementine said.
“I knew it!” Effie said.
“So to test the theory,” Simon said, putting on his serious face, “we would need to prepare two batches of pears: one with just vinegar and one with just honey. Put them both outside and observe their respective insect visitors.”
“You know, I think I might paint those pears,” Effie said suddenly. He turned to the Morgans. “I dabble in painting. I’m not very good at it, but I persist in trying.”
Archie was attending to the conversation but not participating in it. He sat back and let it wash over him. Here were all his people: Effie, Simon, Clementine, and Olive. Everyone together, yet each person so very much him- or herself.
He remembered that first dinner, when he’d sent poor Mrs. MacPuddle on a goose chase—a Morgan sister chase—trying to lure the ladies to the dinner table. He thought then that he wanted the Morgans to know his friends and his friends to know the Morgans.
Now they did. It felt right. It felt right in the way that few things in his life did, or ever had.
And oddly, it felt different from the other times they’d all been together, the evenings spent in the drawing room after dinner. Perhaps the act of sharing a meal created an even more convivial atmosphere than usual. Or perhaps time spent in close quarters far from home had knit them more closely together, created a kind of easy familiarity. He couldn’t imagine what else it would be. Nothing else had changed.
