You once told me that children should sprout like lemon trees, far from their parents,” I remarked to my husband.
Hugh grinned at me. He had a boy clinging to his back like a limpet, and two smaller girls—the twins—wreathed around each leg as he (a giant) “fee-fi-fo-fummed” across the lawn. Finally, he managed to shake them off and collapsed into a chair.
“Feodora and I shall be entirely civilized about child-rearing,” Lord Boucheron said, his eyes resting proudly on Feodora’s balloon-like waist. “We’ve made up our mind to raise the little chap the way the French do.”
“Not that Bouchie is unenthusiastic about your lovely family,” Feodora said, “but coming at this juncture later than our friends has allowed us to make careful plans.”
Hugh reached out and wrapped his fingers through mine. His eyes were gleaming with laughter. “Oh? It’s not too late for us, if you care to share a few choice recommendations.”
“Do you know how a gardener trains a tree to grow flat against a wall? They call it espalier,” Boucheron said.
I knew all about it because Colonel Brandon prided himself on his garden walls, covered with (he claimed) the best fruit trees in the country.
“The tree supposedly makes a better display,” I replied. I couldn’t help thinking that it was a grim but apropos metaphor for a young lady’s debut.
“Bouchie thinks that’s the perfect way to raise a child,”Feodora said. I could interpret my best friend’s eyes almost as well as my husband’s, and the idea had her in fits of laughter. Though she was too kind to crush her husband’s dreams.
“The gardener trains the tree to grow on the best wall, one that faces east,” Boucheron reported. “It doesn’t hurt the tree in the slightest, and in fact, they bear more fruit as all their branches are in the sun.”
“Hmmm,” my husband said. “What do you think, Snaps?”
“I think that your son and heir is eating a grasshopper,” I said, nodding at Peter.
Hugh turned his head and bellowed, “Sally! He’s murdering insects again.” Peter was only a few hours old when my beloved maid decided that she’d prefer to be a nanny.
Sally dashed over, one of the twins dangling under her arm like a sack of flour. “Peter, don’t eat that. Now how will it be able to sing to us at night?”
“It won’t because Peter has eaten its brains,” Elsbeth said, her head hanging as she tried to brush the grass with her fingertips. She was the most like me, without a spark of romance in her soul. I’d finally accepted that the novels I was inclined to write didn’t talk about blazing hearts.
“I believe you can train a child so that its mind sparkles with delicacy and charm,” Boucheron said, as Sally started back to Vaughan Hall.
“Did you hear that my darling husband’s latest book is a bestseller?” Feodora asked, tactfully changing the subject.
“As is my wife’s,” Hugh said, kissing each one of my fingers. “You and I, Feodora, married above our touch.”
Remember when I thought that love was like a meteor and a fiery sun?
I was right. Love burns the whole world until you create a new one, you and your beloved, and your children who grow lanky as lemon trees.
It persists through a couple of years jaunting around the world, and then coming home to conversations about drains and efforts to train children to use the water closet (or, at the least, a chamber pot).
I never imagined that someone could be so in love that a day out of their sight felt like a thousand years, but it’s true. Hugh had to join the House of Lords when he inherited the title. I missed him so much that the whole family moves to London when the session opens.
“Nap time,” Hugh said, hoisting his grasshopper-eating heir into his arms and holding out his hand for me.
“Do forgive us,” I said to Feodora and her husband, who looked rather surprised. “We find napping one of the most delightful aspects of child-rearing.”
Hugh and I left them on the lawn and retired to our bedchamber to dance in the marital sheets. And if I was like Juliet and didn’t want my Romeo to get out of bed, even when it was time to dress for dinner, who would blame me?
We were in love, after all.
My husband likes to remind me that his favorite poem promised a hundred years to praise my eyes, two hundred for each breast….
And thirty thousand for the rest.
The ElizasAUDREY BELLEZZA AND EMILY HARDING
“I cannot remember the time when I did not love Eliza; and my affection for her, as we grew up, was such, as perhaps, judging from my present forlorn and cheerless gravity, you might think me incapable of having ever felt. Hers, for me, was, I believe, fervent as the attachment of your sister to Mr. Willoughby, and it was, though from a different cause, no less unfortunate. At seventeen she was lost to me for ever….”
