“No!” she protested.
“Miss Evans,” Lord Harcourt said, “do not fret. We shan’t keep you here against your will.”
It wasn’t that so much as she refused to be a permanent interloper, to intrude on the gentlemen’s holiday beyond more than a short visit. “I have to be back in London by Wednesday at the latest.” That was three days hence—threenightshence. She couldn’t spend them all here.
Could she?
“You are welcome to stay as long as you please, but we can come up with a scheme to get you out of here whenever you like,” Lord Harcourt said, and Lord Marsden murmured his agreement.
For his part, Effie made a vague noise of resigned acceptance. But, recovering quickly, he clapped his hands together. “What shall we do today?”
* * *
They spent the day gamboling. The cook packed them a picnic, and they rambled: through the village, along some roads that stretched out beside fields of barley and oats, and eventually back to the beach, where they set up their lunch.
“Oh, look, Effie, strawberries,” Lord Marsden said. “Have you told Miss Evans your theory of strawberries and salt?”
Julianna was gratified that Effie’s friends did indeed call him “Effie.”
Effie shot Lord Marsden a quelling look.
“You haven’t told her?” Lord Marsden, apparently immune to quelling looks, said. “Not even about the legs of lamb and pots of cream?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Effie said. “She isn’t interested in that nonsense.”
“Yes, she is,” Julianna said.
When Effie didn’t say anything, Lord Marsden turned to her and said, “We’re all food. People are food.”
“People are food?” she echoed, bewildered.
“Simon,” Effie said, his tone laced with affront. “You’re going to tell it all wrong.”
Lord Marsden made a gesture to indicate he was yielding the floor to Effie, who heaved a put-upon sigh.
“It is a metaphor,” he explained, “about how people sometimes find themselves born into the wrong families, and about how they might endeavor to find the people with whom they truly belong.”
“Please do go on.” She was terribly anxious to hear this theory. She hadn’t known how to react to Effie’s stories of his father’s cruelties. Her instinct had been to provide a solution, a means of escape, though she understood and respected his assertion that he was trapped by the title he stood to inherit. But perhaps she needn’t have fretted. Perhaps he had made his own way out of the mire with this theory of his—and these friends of his.
“Some people are strawberries, say,” Effie said, “and some people are salt. If you’re a strawberry born into a family of salt, you’re out of luck. Or, I should say, you have your work cut out for you. For you must go out into the world and find people who are pots of cream.”
Julianna was struck with the urge to laugh. She suppressed it. “I see.”
“And what do the salt people do?” Lord Marsden prompted.
“They’re off to find legs of lamb, which are improved by salting.”
Julianna did laugh then. She hoped it hadn’t come out as mocking. “How delightful and absurd.”
“Absurd?” Effie echoed, and she was almost certain his affront was put on. “It is perfectly logical. Simon—Lord Marsden—calls it ‘found family.’”
“Isn’t that lovely?” she exclaimed, understating the matter entirely, for the phrase had lanced her chest.
“That’s exactly what I said when he came up with it,” Effie said. If only it were so easy. If only one could “find” a family as easily as buying a newspaper. Julianna loved Amy and her nieces and nephew—she loved Mother, too, even if it was a more abstract sort of love—but she sometimes felt as if she didn’t quitebelongwith them. She was lonely in a full house. And, of course, there was the hole in her life where Father had been.
But now was not the time for rumination, or grief. She turned to Lord Harcourt, who’d been watching the exchange with a kind of silent fondness. “What do you make of Lord Featherfinch’s theory, my lord?”
“I think it brilliant, like he is.”
