“She’s adarling,” Penelope said. “Where did you find her?”
“She foundme, Penelope. Three years ago, in a market in Palermo, looking like a scrap of nothing on the cobbles, and she fixed me with one yellow eye and informed me that my heart was now her property. Who was I to argue?” He laid one hand over Penelope’s, on the bench between them, as though they had been confidantes since childhood. “Major Beauchamp, my dear man, is Mercè comfortable in there? She does not like to be jostled.”
“She is comfortable, sir.”
“You see how Beauchamp looks after her? He is a treasure!”
Beauchamp shifted on his feet and said nothing. Penelope’s gaze had moved to him over the rim of her reading glasses, taking him in properly for the first time. He inclined his head and returned his eyes to the middle distance, where they belonged.
“And is Beauchamp the reason you came to England, then?” Penelope dropped her voice. “You two are very sweet together.”
Beauchamp’s spine performed an involuntary correction that he was certain registered on the Richter scale. The clarification was on the tip of his tongue —Madam, I am the Principal’sseconded military attaché and we have known each other for a little over a week— but Vidal was already moving.
His hand came to rest on the inside of Beauchamp’s forearm, just above the wrist. “Penelope.” Vidal’s voice had dropped half an octave. “You are very perceptive. Very. But I must beg you not to speak of it, because the situation, you understand, isdelicate. Major Beauchamp is…how shall I put it? He isforbidden fruit. He is in my employ. He is a man ofhonour, Penelope, of the old school, the kind you do not find any more, and he has made it clear that under the present arrangement nothing can — ” he sighed, and the hand on Beauchamp’s forearm tightened, “—nothingcan pass between us. I must respect his principles. I must resist his allure. It is the cross I bear, and I bear it daily. Some days the cross isvery heavy, Penelope, but I persevere.”
“Oh, mydear…” Penelope breathed.
“Please. You must not pity me. I have Mercè. I have my freedom. I have Major Beauchamp’s sparkling company, even if I cannot have —” another sigh, theatrical enough to stir the dried hydrangeas, “— his cock. It is enough. Itmustbe enough.”
Beauchamp had been on the receiving end of some version of this for nine days now, and he was starting to get the measure of it. He’d tried weathering the steady drip of innuendo and teasing on parade rest, and it had got him nowhere, because Vidal could happily perform to a statue from now until Christmas. Stillness wasn’t starving the bit; it was feeding it.
What might stop it more quickly, he was beginning to think, was joining in, and throwing Vidal off-balance. So he covered Vidal’s hand with his own.
He let his palm settle over the back of Vidal’s fingers where they curled against his sleeve. Then, with extreme care, he lifted Vidal’s hand from his forearm and gave it one final pat.
“His Serene Highness is too kind, Madam.” Beauchamp folded his hands behind his back. “The cross is mostly his to bear.”
Penelope’s mouth had formed a soft O, her eyes glistening.
Vidal was looking down at his own hand, where Beauchamp had left it. The brightness in his expression was still there, but it had gone a bit wobbly at the edges, and Beauchamp felt the private pleasure of a man who had won this little skirmish.
“Mr Montcada?” A young woman in mint scrubs had appeared at the inner door with a tablet. “We’re ready for Mercè.”
“Vidal, please, we have been through this at the desk. Penelope —” he was already on his feet, both hands clasped around hers, “you have saved my morning. I will not forget your advice on the butcher. Ottoline, my love,adéu.”
He swept towards the inner door and was halfway through it before he turned and looked back over his shoulder, eyebrows raised, and Beauchamp followed with the carrier.
Beauchamp set the carrier down on the examination table, unzipped the mesh panel, and reached inside.
Mercè was hunched at the back, her bald flank quivering against the fleece liner. Beauchamp slid one hand beneath her ribs and the other under her hindquarters and lifted her out. She fitted entirely into the span of his palms. The shivering didn’t stop when he brought her against his chest, so he allowed himself, in the absence of any witnesses who mattered, to run the pad of his thumb very gently along the bony ridge between her ears.
“There,” he said under his breath. “Steady on.”
The trembling subsided into something more manageable, and the vet, a brisk woman in her forties whose name badge read DR AINSWORTH, came in with the import paperwork already open on her tablet and got to work.
The examination was thorough and unhurried, and Mercè bore it with resigned dignity. At the end of it, Dr Ainsworth listened to her chest, made a noise of professional approval, and pronounced her in decent order.
“She’ll need her titres redone in six weeks, but the chip reads clean and her vaccination history checks out. You can tell the Home Office she’s not bringing rabies into Mayfair.”
“Doctor, you are an angel of the Lord.” Vidal had risen from his chair and now took both of her hands in his. “An angel. I shall have a candle lit for you at the Brompton Oratory by Sunday at the latest. That will have to do —” he cut a look at Beauchamp across the room, slow and pointed, “— as I have yet to acquire my Diptyque candles. Now tell me, and I ask this as a man whose dog is his only remaining dependant, what do you make of her coat? Be honest with me, doctor. I can take it.”
Dr Ainsworth told him what she made of her coat. This led, by a route Beauchamp could not entirely follow, to a discussion of Mediterranean climates versus British ones, then to the doctor’s own holiday in Menorca the previous summer, then to a particular cove that Vidal insisted she must visit on her next trip and which he proceeded to describe in some detail, complete with the name of a man who ran a beach bar there and would, on the strength of Vidal’s name alone, pour her something cold and complicated on the house.
Beauchamp stood to one side with Mercè cupped against his chest and watched the second hand of the wall clock complete two full revolutions. Mercè had stopped shivering altogether by the end of the first. By the end of the second, she had tucked her face into the gap between his lapel and his shirt and gone to sleep.
At length, Vidal kissed Dr Ainsworth on both cheeks, accepted a printed copy of the certificate, and swept out into thecorridor towards reception still talking over his shoulder about the beach bar.
Beauchamp followed, with the dog.
