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Beck looked at the baby crawling across the floor. “Meg is an angel as she doesn’t yet talk.”
All three of the girls giggled.
Mr. Donovan bent down and picked up the one with the wagon, holding her upside down. “Come along, then, all of you. It’s teatime.” He walked across the room with the one girl hanging upside down and squealing with laughter, and bent down to pick up the baby. At the far end of the large room was a child’s table, set with a child’s play tea service.
It was a remarkable scene of domesticity that Lila had never in the wildest of dreams imagined she would see in Beck’s house. The last she’d seen him, he’d preferred the gentlemen’s clubs and ladies’ salons to home.
“So good to see you, Lila,” Beck said. “And how does Valentin do?”
“He is very well, thank you. He’ll join me soon.”
Beck gestured to a settee and the two of them sat. “I was delighted to receive your note. I told Blythe—that’s my wife, formerly Blythe Northcote—I said, you will like Lila very much. She was the only one who could ever convince Caro to do anything she didn’t want to do.”
Lila laughed. “As I recall it, Eliza Tricklebank could talk her into anything that her sister Hollis couldn’t. I was a mere bystander.”
“You were all incorrigible.”
Just then, a plump, broad-shouldered woman with thick ringlets of ginger hair entered the room. She was quite obviously pregnant. She walked up behind Beck, and with her hands on his shoulders, she leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Is this the incomparable Lila Aleksander?”
Incomparable?
“Lady Iddesleigh, allow me to introduce my friend, Lady Aleksander.”
Lila stood. Lady Iddesleigh came around the settee and looked her up and down, a smile on her face. “How well you look! Darling, you didn’t tell me she was pretty. You’reverypretty, Lady Aleksander.”
“Ah...thank you.”
“Lila and I were childhood friends,” Beck said.
“Then why have I never made your acquaintance?” his wife asked.
“I live in Denmark with my husband now.”
“Oh, how lovely!”
“She was forced to leave London because of a dreadful scandal,” Beck added.
Lila’s eyes flew wide with surprise.
His wife settled into a chair and leaned forward, all ears, her eyes shining with eagerness. “Whatsortof scandal?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Beck said.
The child Maisie had escaped the pretend tea service and climbed over the back of the settee where Beck was sitting, then began to make her way down his body, headfirst, covering Beck’s face in skirts and petticoats. He batted the fabric away with one hand. “You must tell us what brings you here,” he said.
“Maisie? The tea is served,” Mr. Donovan announced. The girl rolled over the arm of the settee and landed...well, Lila didn’t know how she landed, as she couldn’t see her. But in the next moment the girl was up and running across the room. She watched with fascination as Mr. Donovan draped a towel over one arm and stood back as the two oldest girls began to argue who was going to pour. Maisie, having arrived too late to be considered for pouring, yanked a lock of hair of one of the older girls.
The howling that commenced was enough to almost launch Lila from her seat.
The girls’ parents seemed not to notice or pretended to ignore the caterwauling at the other end of the salon.
Lila tried to do the same. “How is Caroline? Is she well?”
“Exceedingly,” Beck said. “She’s a gardener now, of all things. She’s married to a prince, as you know. She’s coming to London in the next week or so, so you must come round and see her! How long will you be in town?”
“A few weeks, I think.”
“Yes, yes, and as to that, whatareyou doing in London, darling?”
