“But what about hunting?” Even as Archie asked the question, the old sentiment, the thrill of the hunt, seemed very far away.
Effie tilted his head, looking intently at Archie, and Archie wasn’t sure he didn’t prefer being laughed at. “I hardly think you can hunt if you have given up eating meat.”
“Well, youcould,” Simon said, “but it doesn’t seem very morally consistent.”
“Right,” Archie said, nodding decisively. “I cannot.” And that was . . . fine. Surprisingly so.
He thought back to Earls Trip 1818, the year of the hunting mishap. Archie had considered the ban that resulted from the near-miss a fair trade. Decided he would rather be the kind of man sought out by a friend who wanted urgently to tell him about his dreams than the sort of man who hunted.
He substituted Clementine for Effie in this mental exercise. Her tears when he shot that bird. The way she’d opened up to him later, explained how it affected her. It felt likemorethan a fair trade. It felt like . . . everything.
“Although,” he posited, thinking ahead to the coming days and weeks, “perhaps all this will . . . wear off once Miss Morgan is back in London, and I am back at Mollybrook.”
The thought was more than a little discomposing.
When Clementine arrived with Olive after dinner, he was stricken by a longing-in-advance. To watch her talking and smiling, and to know that tomorrow everything would be different. To know that the effect of her might indeed wear off. The bittersweet nature of it all was enough to make him maudlin.
He consoled himself that at least they had tonight. One more night.
The evening was tinged with melancholy, and Archie was fairly certain he wasn’t the only one feeling it. They were chatting and laughing as usual, and everyone was recounting the moment when Hermes had overtaken the leader of the pack back at the race. But the evening was overlain with a kind of unspoken, anticipatory wistfulness.
Well, unspoken until Olive spoke it. “I don’t want this holiday to end!”
The boys heartily agreed, and though it was coming on midnight, Effie proposed a game of whist, and everyone got up to move chairs and settle themselves in the new formation. Archie took drink orders. Clementine joined him at the sideboard. His heart thudded when she brushed close, and he spilled some of the ratafia he was pouring for Olive. And it sank when he registered what Clementine had whispered to him. “I am staying in Olive’s room this evening, so I cannot come to you.”
“What? Why?”
“Shh!” She looked around and, once content no one was paying them any mind, said, “She needs me.”
She floated away, drink in hand as if she’d been visiting the sideboard for mere refreshment, rather than to crush Archie, to absolutely level him.
What an ignoble way for this extraordinary fortnight to end.
18
Girls Just Want to Have Fun
“That was not nearly as horrible as I was expecting,” Olive whispered to Clementine. They were in the parlor in London, and Father was seeing Archie out. Their return had been anticlimactic—at least so far; Clementine had no doubt there was more to come. Archie’s leave-taking had been anticlimactic, too. Archie had merely bowed to Clementine—and to Olive, as if Olive and Clementine were interchangeable in his estimation—and taken his leave as if it were an ordinary day. As if they were ordinary friends.
Which, she supposed, they were.
He had given no indication, on the journey from Cumbria, that he thought of her as anything else. Of course, he could not have done otherwise. They’d all been on top of each other, both in the coach and in the inns they stayed in along the way. But Archie’s indifference, which had been so dismayingly convincing, left her wondering: Had all that occurred between them been a mere fever dream?
“All in all,” Olive continued, “it could have been much worse.”
“Oh, it will get worse,” Clementine said. “Mark my words.”
“You think so?”
“Once we are alone, yes.” Clementine leaned forward to try to see her way out into the foyer where Archie and Father were still talking in low tones.
“Hmm,” Olive said. “I wouldn’t have thought Father would censor himself around Archie, given all that Archie has done for us, but I suppose you are correct.”
“I am correct.” Clementine gave up her attempt at eavesdropping and slumped back on the settee. “Alas.”
Indeed, she was proven so not a minute later when Father reappeared, the graciousness and gratitude he had directed at Archie no longer in evidence. She braced herself as he sat across from them. She started to take Olive’s hand but stopped. They’d been holding hands so much lately, but was that another thing that was now only a fever dream? That last night at Quintrell Castle, when she’d given up Archie in favor of lying in Olive’s bed, holding her hand, and listening to her talk about Ralph—what was going to happen to all that had been said that night? Would it change things permanently between the sisters, or would they slip back into their old ways, pretending Olive’s confessions had not occurred?
When Father did not speak, when he merely pondered them—and not even grumpily—Clementine entertained the notion that perhaps she had been wrong. Perhaps the drama of Clementine’s botched engagement and Olive’s botched elopement had finally made Father see. Hehadembraced both girls—one arm for each—in an uncharacteristically sentimental display the moment they arrived. Perhaps that meant something. Perhaps thingsweregoing to change.
