Page 26 of The English Wife

“So you’ve made your plans,” Kitty said when she saw Mr. Van Duyvil at the theater again and again.

It wasn’t like that, but Georgie knew Kitty wouldn’t believe her that their relationship consisted of nothing more than food and conversation. If she weren’t so afraid of using the word, she might even call it friendship.

At first, Georgie had been punctilious in accepting nothing, not even the cost of her port and lemon or a slice of meat pie. She’d had admirers before—if admirers they could be called—men who tried to follow her home, men who didn’t take kindly to no as an answer. She’d learned quickly that some men believed the price of a meal entitled them to more.

But Mr. Van Duyvil remained as correct in his behavior as though Georgie had been Miss Lacey of Lacey Abbey rather than Georgie Evans of the Ali Baba. Being with him, even in the rude environs of the Feathers, Georgie felt the veneer of the past three years melting away, felt as though she were a girl fresh out of the schoolroom again, proud of her company manners.

Which was ridiculous, of course. But it was pleasant to share a meal, to talk to someone who liked the same things she did—or the same things she had, a lifetime ago.

Bit by bit, she had relaxed her own rules, and when Mr. Van Duyvil put coins on the table to pay for her meal, she didn’t push them back at him. A meal at the Criterion may have excited expectations, but meat pie at the Feathers had an odd sort of safety to it.

It was the same with the gifts Mr. Van Duyvil brought her. They were never the sort that could cause offense or rouse expectations. Kitty had wrinkled her nose at the basket of oranges, fresh from the docks, but Georgie had felt a strange constriction in her chest at the sensation of the wrinkled rind against her fingers, the sharp scent of citrus as her nails dug into the flesh.

There had always been an orange buried deep in the toe of her Christmas stocking. The colonel had made a game of it, taking out the atlas from the library, charting the paths the fruit might have traveled.

“They smell like childhood to me,” Mr. Van Duyvil confided as Georgie buried her head over the fruit, breathing in that half-forgotten scent. “My father wasn’t well, so when it was particularly miserable in New York, we would take the train all the way down to Florida, straight into the sunshine. Nothing ever tasted so good as that first orange right off the tree.”

“He couldn’t have brought you roses?” said Kitty, but Georgie had slept with an orange beneath her pillow that night and woken with tears on her cheeks.

The next week, it was a slim volume of poetry: Edgar Allan Poe. “Don’t tell me you’ve never read ‘Annabel Lee.’ It is,” he added, his eyes meeting hers over the red morocco cover, “about an Annabelle lost.”

Georgie’s fingers fumbled with the book, flipping it open to the first page, using it as a shield. It had his name on the flyleaf, Bayard Van Duyvil, with a coat of arms comprised of a rising sun, three acorns, two annoyed squirrels, and the motto Omnibus Effulgemus.

“What’s this, then?” she demanded. “I can sing for you in Italian if you like, but Latin is Greek to me.”

“We shine for all,” Mr. Van Duyvil translated. He looked at her thoughtfully but, to Georgie’s relief, dropped the topic of Annabelle. His finger traced the rays of the sun, one by one. “It was a rather feudal situation in New York up until a few generations ago.”

“It’s not anymore?” They were at their usual table at the Feathers, where Mr. Van Duyvil was now tacitly recognized as belonging to Georgie. Georgie might have corrected them, but it saved Mr. Van Duyvil being bothered by the attentions of Long Mary or Leaky Sue, which, she assured herself, would have embarrassed him considerably.

“Not the same way—a fact my mother regrets bitterly. She’s constantly trying to stop the incursions of the new people.” Mr. Van Duyvil thought about it for a moment, idly running his finger over the shape of the shield. “I don’t believe she would have liked the old order, though. My father’s parents lived almost entirely in their house in the country, among the tenants they thought of as their people. When I was a child, there were a few elderly farmers who still spoke Dutch, or a version of it. They would feed me doughnuts and fried apples.”

It had been crumbly cheese and flat gingerbread biscuits for Miss Annabelle when she’d ridden out on her pony, or sometimes a salty bite of stuffed chine or pork loaf, rural delicacies that weren’t to be found in the abbey, where the cook had pretensions of gentility.

Georgie resolutely pushed away the memory. “Who has it now? The house, I mean.”

“I do.” When she looked at him in surprise, Mr. Van Duyvil amended, “The house is still there, but we never spent more than a few days at a time there. I don’t think I’ve been back more than once since my father died.”

“But why? If it’s yours, why not go back?”

Mr. Van Duyvil made a resigned gesture. “Newport has always been more to Mother’s taste. She lives to show her jewels and snub the new people.”

“Your mother, perhaps, but what about you?” Georgie cocked her chin. “Does she know her son likes to mingle with low company? Or is that just the prerogative of a gentleman?”

Mr. Van Duyvil interested himself in his toad-in-the-hole. “She knows I’m stopping awhile with friends in London.”

Friends. She supposed they might be called that. But it didn’t really answer the question. “Why don’t you want to go home?”

Their intimacy only went so far, apparently. Mr. Van Duyvil narrowed his eyes at her. “Why don’t you?”

Georgie picked up her port and lemon, inhaling the familiar acrid scent. “What, you don’t think it’s my love of the stage that keeps me at the Ali Baba?”

Mr. Van Duyvil cast her a skeptical look. “Is this the same woman who told me last week that she’s sick of the smell of greasepaint?”

Hoist by her own petard. “You listen too well,” grumbled Georgie. “What makes you think I have a home to go to? Most of the girls here don’t.”

She’d encountered all manner of stories since she’d arrived in London, stories that made her own troubles seem small and petty in comparison: brutal stepfathers, starving siblings, mothers out of their minds on gin. There were girls like her, too, who had run off for adventure’s sake or because they had a yen for the stage. But her acquaintance in London had opened Georgie’s eyes to real want, the sort of want she had never imagined in the security of a rural town.

“Because you’re not like the other girls.” Something about the way he said it, about the way he looked at her, made Georgie feel like the lost princess out of a novel, Sarah Crewe and Little Lord Fauntleroy rolled into one. “What about your colonel? The one who raised you?”