Page 49 of The English Wife

“Pax!” Bay held up both hands in mock defense. “Aren’t married people meant to have disagreements? We should toast Sir Hugo. He’s helped us to our first argument.”

“If you can call it that,” Georgie grumbled. It wasn’t much of an argument when the other party wouldn’t argue back. Although Bay did, she realized. It was just that he did it so quietly and in such reasonable tones that it was impossible to maintain any sense of being wronged. Carefully, she said, “It doesn’t feel real, does it? Being married.”

“I imagine,” said Bay wryly, “that it will feel more real than you like once you meet my mother. You will instantly be instructed in the vast responsibilities attendant on being a Van Duyvil—and you’ll wish I’d never set foot across the threshold of the Ali Baba.”

“Never that.” She hadn’t meant to speak so vehemently. Displaying that sort of emotion made Georgie feel more naked than she had ever been on the stage. She could say something frivolous, turn it all into a joke; Bay would laugh with her, she knew. But why? If she didn’t want to be set in a case, she shouldn’t put herself in one.

On an impulse, Georgie rose on her knees and pressed a kiss to Bay’s lips, clumsy, inexpert. She felt his start of surprise, his arm close around her waist.

Better to be hanged for a sheep than a lamb, she told herself. Her voice ragged, she said, “If we’re to leave for New York soon, then we’d best make the most of our time here, hadn’t we? It’s nearly time for the cinq à sept.”

“It isn’t quite three.” There was a question in his voice.

Georgie looked into Bay’s blue eyes and wished she were bolder, braver. Facing down Sir Hugo was one thing, propositioning her own husband quite another. Fear made her curt. “I don’t mind the time. If you don’t.”

Bay’s lips twisted in a crooked smile. She felt his fingers fan out against her back, warming her, steadying her. “Though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run?”

“Something like that.” Georgie drew in a shallow breath, wondering where all her words had gone. Her world had narrowed to the space between her body and Bay’s. “It is France, after all.”

Bay gave a choking laugh. “Truer words.” He rose to his feet and held out a hand to her, and Georgie saw that his fingers were shaking. He was, she realized, her own fears easing, as nervous as she. “Shall we retire, Mrs. Van Duyvil?”

“Yes,” said Georgie and put her hand in his.

New York, 1899

January

The bedroom Bay and Annabelle had shared was relentlessly tidy.

It made Janie feel more than a little unclean, pawing through Bay’s and Annabelle’s things, dresses that had never been worn and now never would, books with the pages still uncut, a pristine blotter on a new writing desk in Annabelle’s private sitting room.

Janie retreated to the baronial splendor of the breakfast room, where Mrs. Gerritt had set out tea and toast for her, both of which had long since gone cold. What had she expected, really? A page torn out of a parish register, with the details of Annabelle’s birth? She set the toast down on the plate, recalling, dimly, something Annabelle had told her in one of their rare conversations. Annabelle hadn’t been born in England. She had been born in India, she had said, in a hill station, whatever that was.

Did they keep parish records in India? They must, Janie supposed. One presumed that Colonel Lacey had had his infant daughter baptized. But India was such a long way off.

It was, she thought, really very clever of Giles Lacey to have created a story that could be neither proved nor disproved.

Odd. She hadn’t thought him clever. He’d seemed a poor actor, uncomfortable in his own lines, blustering and awkward when charm had failed. Cunning, then. One didn’t need to be clever to be cunning. One didn’t need to be able to work knots with words like Mr. Burke to achieve a successful deception.

“Will there be anything else, Miss Van Duyvil?”

For a large woman, Mrs. Gerritt was surprisingly light-footed. “No, thank you, Mrs. Gerritt.” The full oddity of the housekeeper waiting at table struck her. The sense of emptiness in the house might be more fact than metaphor. “Where is the rest of the staff?”

“Let go,” said Mrs. Gerritt. She had, Janie vaguely recalled, been a maid in her grandmother’s household when Janie was a child; her husband a tenant farmer’s son. They were as Van Duyvil as the Van Duyvils and stood on no ceremony.

Janie frowned up at her. “By whom?”

“Mrs. Van Duyvil.” The of course was implied. “She didn’t see the point of keeping a full staff for an empty house.”

But it wasn’t empty. The children were still here. And it was, Janie presumed, not her mother but Sebastian who was now the master of this great pile and all it contained. She hadn’t thought of that before. The reading of the will, like everything else, had been delayed while the coroner deliberated.

It was, she thought wryly, very much like her mother to have assumed the authority, without waiting for the imprimatur of law. And why not? It seemed unlikely anyone else would be appointed guardian. They had been an unlucky family, the Van Duyvils. Where there ought to have been a gaggle of them, in her generation there was only her and Bay.

And Anne. But Anne wasn’t a Van Duyvil. She was the daughter of Janie’s mother’s sister, a pale wisp of a woman who had married a war profiteer, a man whose immense energy had flared briefly and then been extinguished in scandal and ruin.

Which left only the two children upstairs in the nursery.

“Mrs. Gerritt?”