He let loose a very unmanly whimper and bonked his head back against the squabs.
“Poor Archie.” Effie patted his arm. “What a trying evening you’ve had. I almost want to write a poem about your doomed love.”
“It isn’t doomed,” Simon said firmly.
“Quite right. Perhaps we should call it a love at the edge of doom,” Effie said with a flourish. “A love flirting with doom.”
“You needn’t solve it forthwith,” Simon said. “Take your mother home. Get her situated with Miss Brown, and come back to Town. When you’re back, we can invite Sir Albert and his daughters somewhere he can’t reasonably refuse to attend, and come up with some kind of distraction that will allow you to speak to Miss Morgan alone.” He turned to Effie. “Can your very important letter at Highworth wait? A journey there and back would take so long I fear Archie might expire in the interim.”
Effie nodded. “I daresay things are about to take a turn for the dramatic here, and I shouldn’t want to miss that.”
Archie sighed. A turn for the dramatic sounded like a terrible idea to him. But what choice did he have? “All right. I’ll go home tomorrow, settle Mother, and aim to be back by the end of next week.”
“All right, then,” Simon said. “For now, let us part ways. Having been on holiday, I have mountains of work to attend to.”
“And I am going to work on an epic poem to be read at your wedding to Miss Morgan,” Effie said.
“She’s not going to—”
Effie talked right over Archie. “And as for this nonsense about being ordinary, I can think of many ways to beextraordinary, but none so much as to marry a vegetarian.”
* * *
That night, in bed, Clementine was reading—well, no, she was brooding whilst holding a book—when Olive appeared. She crossed the room silently, pulled back the covers, and settled herself next to Clementine as if this was something they did.
Perhaps it was. They’d shared a bed of necessity in the posting inns on the way home from Cumbria, but they’d also shared one at Olive’s request that last night at Quintrell Castle.
The night Clementine had given up Archie in favor of Olive.
She would do it again, but not seeing Archie that night, together with the odd way he’d left them in the middle of dinner earlier, had her fretting.
“Did you think it odd that Archie suddenly had parliamentary responsibilities this evening?” Clementine asked Olive. “Responsibilities so apparently urgent that he had to leave that very moment?”
Olive waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, that was surely a lie.”
“It was?”
Of course it was. Clementine just wanted it . . . not to be.
“Yes. He couldn’t get out of here hastily enough.”
“That’s . . .” Devastating.
“He was very stiff, didn’t you find?” Olive asked, stealing one of the pillows propping up Clementine and punching it into her preferred shape. “Not at all his usual easygoing self.”
Thatwas certainly true. He had been awkward, and at times, downright agitated. “He couldn’t even look at me when he left.”
“Yes. I noticed that.” The punching continued. If Olive was so particular about her pillows, Clementine didn’t know why she hadn’t brought her own. “He avoided you much of the evening, in fact, and when he finally took his leave, he bowed over my hand and smiled very prettily at me, whereas with you he was standoffish and looked at the floor.”
Well. Clementine felt positively deflated. She hadn’t thought her entanglement with Archie would end like this. If anything, given the ardency of their encounters those last few days in Cumbria, she’d have thought they might have trouble saying goodbye. She’d never imagined a scenario in which her old friend couldn’t even stand to look at her.
“I’ve come to plot.” Olive stole another pillow—or tried to. Clementine grabbed one end in an attempt to prevent its abduction.
“To plot?” she echoed as she stood her ground with the pillow.
“Yes.” Olive stood hers, so they were apparently having a tug-of-war. “I’ve rethought my aversion to Hill House. We must make Father take us. We need to spend a good long stretch there, the both of us.”
Clementine was so shocked she let go of the pillow. “What? Why?” Why was everything soconfusing?
