“Invented by the Americans just recently.”
Goodness, these Americans with their innovative reels and their flashy magazines.
Lord Marsden, having insisted Lord Harcourt take his rod while he was helping Julianna, refused its return and said he would go sit by Effie for a bit.
His departure left Julianna and Lord Harcourt standing side by side in companionable silence, occasionally reeling their lines in and recasting. Julianna noticed that Lord Harcourt was casting without having baited his hook. At one point, he noticed her noticing, and, with a twinkle in his eye, made a shushing gesture with his finger against his lips. She smiled and nodded, miming buttoning her lips.
When she reeled in her line and found the hook empty, she baited it with a new worm.
“I suppose I ought to actually bait mine if I mean to keep standing here going through the motions,” Lord Harcourt said.
“You needn’t on my account,” Julianna said, but he was already done by the time she finished her sentence.
She glanced over her shoulder to check on the others, who were several yards away lounging on a patch of grass. Lord Marsden was talking earnestly about something, but the wind was such that she couldn’t hear what. Effie was twirling a long reed or cattail of some sort—beyond the flower-arranging advice the magazine occasionally ran, Julianna did not know plants—and nodding as Lord Marsden spoke. He must have felt her regard, for he turned his head and shot her a wink.
She smiled and returned her attention to the pond, to the meditative act of casting and reeling. As she repeated the motion over and over again something inside her . . . came unraveled. Not in the distressing way the phrase generally implied, as in the destruction of a garment one had spent a great deal of time knitting and/ or was relying on for warmth. No, this was an unraveling of something that had become so tangled as to form a solid mass.
Perhaps the better word wasunlatching. An unlatching of a gate she normally kept closed, a gate she normallyhadto keep closed.
The sun was warm on her face—the benevolent fairies were doing their agreeable prickling—and she was struck with the urge to remove her bonnet. She suspected no one here would mind if she did.
“Lord Harcourt,” she said, “would you think it terribly shocking if I took off my bonnet, and if not, will you hold my rod as I do so?”
“No, and yes,” he said mildly.
“I suppose I’ve done things far more shocking in your brief acquaintance with me,” she remarked as she de-hatted herself.
“No and yes,” he said again, drawing her attention.
She had been jesting. She was aware that spending the night in the gentlemen’s borrowed house ought to, by polite standards, be considered shocking. Scandalous. As should impersonating Effie’s sister. Swimming with Effie.
Lyingwith Effie.
Lord Harcourt’s tone just now had been temperate, but had there been a rebuke in his response?
“It would take a great deal more than a glimpse of your hair to shock me,” Lord Harcourt said as he accepted her rod.
She waited for more, for an explanation of the “yes” part of “no and yes,” but he said nothing further, so she loosened the ribbons of her bonnet and pushed it back off her head.
It wasn’t until a few minutes later, when she had her rod back and was entering again into that state of calm contentment conferred by fishing, that state ofun, that Lord Harcourt said, “What I find shocking, Miss Evans, is how well you seem to know our Effie. How you . . . appreciate him.”
“Yes, well, there is much to appreciate about . . . Lord Featherfinch.”
How she hated calling him that. Lord Harcourt had called him “our Effie” just now, but Julianna did not know if she was included in that “our.” It felt safer to err on the side of formality.
“There is, isn’t there?” Lord Harcourt said, again with the appearance of mildness. Yet Julianna felt certain there was an observation underlying the seemingly inconsequential question, perhaps even a warning.
“Effie gives his trust, and affection, so easily,” Lord Harcourt elaborated. “And following on that, his loyalty.”
“I am not sure I agree with that.” It probably wasn’t her place to say so, but the objection wouldn’t stay in.
There,thathad shocked him—his eyebrows had flown up. “What do you mean?”
“You may think he gives those things easily, but that may be because you have always had them.”
“Effie is quite close to my wife’s sister, Miss Olive Morgan. They became fast friends from almost the moment they met.”
“I do not think giving one’s affections rapidly is the same as giving them indiscriminately. I believe Lord Featherfinch is in fact quite picky about on whom he confers his regard. His circle seems small, for a peer.”
