“He’s part of a fringe movement that holds to the precept that men should abstain from eating animal flesh for moral reasons.”
“Fascinating.” Effie’s brow furrowed. “The dilemma, however, is that animal flesh tastes good.” The furrow deepened. “Do you think animals are aware of their own mortality? Do you think Sally knew she was going to die?”
“Mr. Bull was briefly popular in the drawing rooms of Mayfair,” Simon went on, ignoring Effie. “He made a splash among the sort of hostess who fancies herself an arbiter of taste. You know the type: séances today, turnip gratin tomorrow. I believe, as Sir Albert wrote, that Mr. Bull has fallen out of fashion of late.”
Archie was agog. He had never heard of this vegetable-championing bounder, though that wasn’t saying much as he made no effort to keep up with society doings. It was all so incomprehensible, though, both the man’s ideas and the fact that such a man had enchanted the fickle Olive Morgan in a way that she was ready to jump the anvil with him. And the self-contained, unflappable Clementine Morgan before that? The world had turned upside down.
He shook his head. Time for agog later; action was required at present. He conferred with his driver about the change in plans, and Simon and Effie climbed back into the coach. When he joined them, they’d repoured the brandy, and he was handed a glass.
“You weren’t done with your speech,” Simon said.
“Yes, you were just about to remind us of the most important rule of Earls Trip,” Effie said with a twinkle in his eye. “It suddenly seems all the more relevant this year.”
“Right.” Once again, Archie and his friends lifted their glasses. “No poems, no Parliament, no hunting, and, finally, the most important rule of Earls Trip . . .”
They spoke in unison. “What happens on Earls Trip stays on Earls Trip.”
3
Clem Shoots Her Shot
Two days later
Clementine could not wait to get out of these blasted trousers.
That part was a disappointment. In novels, when girls disguised themselves as boys, they always remarked on the freedom they found in the wearing of breeches. They could ride faster and scale fences more efficiently and undertake all manner of pursuit with greater ease.
They never talked about how terriblyuncomfortableit was to wear breeches. Breeches cut into the flesh of one’s midsection in amostunpleasant way. Perhaps if one was accustomed to wearing stays, this sort of pain was familiar. But when one was a country lass at heart and on the verge of spinsterhood—and may she soon return to that verge, where she belonged—one managed to avoid stays quite a lot of the time.
Thinking of all the instances recently when she had worn stays—when she’d worn them forhim—made her blood boil. That blunderbuss. That knave. That—“Oh!”
The coach lurched to a stop, throwing her up against the passenger next to her, a Bible-clutching man who hadn’t spoken a word since Chorley and smelled of cabbage and mildewing parchment. He turned to her, no doubt startled by some combination of her regrettably girlish exclamation and the regrettably girlish mound of bosom she had inadvertently brushed against his shoulder.
Clementine had learned a great deal about bosoms of late, during her conscription in London, her forced march through the Marriage Mart. She had learned that some women powdered theirs. Sometimes they even traced the veins there with blue paint, for reasons that entirely escaped her. Some inserted busks in their stays, stays apparently not being torturous enough on their own. Others even turned to wax and cotton in service of a mission of augmentation.
Everything Clementine had learned in this regard was about enhancement. The drawing of attention. She had not, alas, learned anything about thedeflectingof attention from the often inconvenient mounds of flesh with which ladies were burdened. Today, to her dismay and despite her most ardent efforts in the art of concealment, her own rather ample bosom wasnot staying where she put it. Namely, beneath a long piece of muslin she’d wound around her torso before sneaking out of the house two days ago.
Two days or a lifetime, one or the other.
The cabbagey man narrowed his eyes at her. She lowered her voice, muttered a vague apology, and the moment the coachman opened the door and called, “Oi! Five minutes!” she was out, blinking into the bright sun.
The yard of the coaching inn was, as coaching inn yards were wont to be, unpleasantly populated with people chattering, ostlers changing horses, and trunks being heaved in and out of conveyances. But there was also the dirt beneath her feet and the sky above her head. She couldn’t remove her boots and wiggle her toes in the mud like she wanted to, but she could imagine all the creepy-crawly friends below the surface, going about their days profoundly undisturbed by the machinations of the men above them. And she could tip her head back and narrow her eyes, not in suspicion like her erstwhile seatmate, but strategically, so as to block out the roof thatch of the inn and the chimneys rising from it, until all she could see was sky. The bolstering, beautiful blue of an English sky. The same one sheltering her home in the country.
She would soon be back at Hill House. She just had to rescue Olive first.
Olive.
Her heart squeezed. Clementine and Olive had never been particularly close. The same could be said for Clementine and all of her family. She loved them, but sometimes Clementine wondered if she belonged with them. Indeed, when she was young, she’d harbored a fancy that she was a changeling, that the fairies had come and taken her parents’ true firstborn and left Clementine in her place. But as Clementine grew tall and strong and failed to sprout elven ears, she had to accept that she was, in fact, a true, if atypical, Morgan.
Clementine had different interests and priorities from the rest of her family—especially Olive. Olive was at home in a crowded ballroom, wearing the latest fashions and giggling with her friends over which gentlemen they hoped would ask them to dance. Clementine felt most herself in the forest. The stream. Under the starry heavens. She preferred thickets to tea, would sooner visit a meadow than a modiste. There was a devastating sort of beauty all around if one only paid attention to it, discernable in the tiniest details: the veins of a leaf just as it starts to turn color in the autumn; a ladybird perched on a rose, red against red except for its signature black spots; even the cold iridescence of a fish washed ashore and left to perish on the sand by a receding wave.
Most people didn’t pay attention, though. Olive didn’t pay attention.
Still, they weresisters. Motherless sisters. And soon the gout, or something else, would take Father, and they would be alone together.
All this to say that Olive had hurt Clementine soverymuch more than Theo had.
And a week ago, Clementine would have said that Theo had hurt her very much indeed, in both body and spirit.
