“It was Luc who rocked the boat.”
“Gerald was the one who rocked the boat.”
The two men spoke simultaneously and pointed an accusing finger at each other, as though they were still those mischievous boys.
“You must have stories to tell of your own family, Lady Philippa,” Sir Gerald said. “Do you have grandparents still living?”
“I do,” she said. “My grandmama and grandpapa Greenfield, my mother’s parents. I remember sitting on Grandmama’s knee one day when I was four or five and playing with her necklace though my mother told metwicenot to lest I break it. The string broke and beads went cascading to the floor and rolled everywhere. I remember Grandpapa on his knees, crawling about among the furniture legs to retrieve them all and pick them up while I ran to a corner in tears. My mother scolded me and Grandmama assured me that I had a silly grandpapa, who seemed to have forgotten that there was a houseful of servants with knees far younger than his own.”
It was a foolish, trivial story, and Philippa felt embarrassed even while they all laughed.
“Greenfield,” Sir Gerald said. “Is George Greenfield related to them? And to you?”
“He is my uncle,” she told him.
“A thoroughly decent fellow,” he said. “He rescued me from a ticklish situation when I made my first appearance in London at the age of twenty-one. I was a raw new member of White’s Club, shaking in my boots with terror that I would do something wrong and enrage the entire membership. But I went there alone one morning, having decided to take my courage in both hands. I strode into thereading room as though I owned the whole building, hailing everyone in sight with hearty good cheer. I daresay there was no one in there under the age of sixty. I was glared at by one half of them and shushed by the other half. Both groups looked murderous. I heard someone call me an impudent young puppy. My membership in the club and my very career as a gentleman seemed to teeter on the brink of extinction. But George Greenfield, whom I would not have known from Adam at the time, strolled in from outside the door, bade me a very civil good morning, shook my hand, slapped me on the shoulder, and led me away to have luncheon with him—all within half a minute. Speaking aloud in the reading room, he explained to me, is a cardinal sin at the club. Not quite a capital offense, but perilously close.”
Yes, Philippa thought, that sounded like Uncle George.
Voices hummed all around them and glass and china clinked as the other guests feasted upon the sumptuous tea set out before them. Spoons scraped upon dishes of fruit trifle. Philippa glanced down at her plate and was surprised to see that the cucumber sandwich had disappeared. She even had the taste of it in her mouth.
But would this tea, to which she had looked forward with such eager anticipation,neverbe over? She felt as though she were suffocating.
“I have just realized to my shame that I have not yet spoken with at least one-third of our guests,” Jenny said as she set her napkin down on the table. “I was so absorbed in my conversation with Pippa before you arrived, Luc, that I neglected everyone else. And I kept you from mingling too, Pippa, though I know you have very few acquaintances in London and came here to make some. I do apologize.”
“We can put your first concern to rest without further delay, Jenny,” Sir Gerald said, getting to his feet. “I see your wheeled chair in the corner here beside the mantel. Let me get you into it, and wewill move about together from table to table, greeting people we have not already spoken with.”
He was fetching the chair as he spoke. He bent over his cousin and, with what was obviously practiced ease, lifted her into it.
“That is kind of you, Gerald,” Jenny said. “But now I am abandoning Pippa after begging her to stay with me. Luc, will you be so good as to give her your company until everyone begins to move about again?”
“It will be my pleasure,” he said while Philippa smiled and her heart thumped uncomfortably and she felt robbed of breath.
The Marquess of Roath was on his feet, moving his chair out of the way so the wheeled chair could pass behind it, and bending to tuck the hem of his sister’s dress about her ankles so it would not catch beneath a wheel.
When he sat down again, he did not move his chair back to where it had been. It was now closer to Philippa than before. She was aware again of the voices around them, seeming to enclose them in a cocoon of silence, which neither of them broke for a few moments. Their eyes met. His were brown, but not very dark. There were hints of green in them. He opened his mouth to speak, but she forestalled him. She had learned something in the last seven or eight months, since Devlin’s return home from the wars. She had learned the importance of speaking truth rather than suppressing it and living with the illusion that all would be well in her world if only she kept quiet about what wasnotwell.
“Remember me?” she said.
—
The sound of many voices talking at once had grown louder as more of the guests finished eating. A few had risen from their places and were moving about to talk with fellow guests at othertables. Lady Philippa Ware had spoken quietly. Lucas was not quite sure he had heard her correctly.
But all through tea, while the four of them had chatted amiably and shared family anecdotes and laughed over them—his and Jenny’s and Gerald’s on the one hand, Lady Philippa’s on the other—he had been dragging up a distant memory from that place in the mind where one stuffs away gaffes one would dearly love to obliterate altogether if only it were possible. It was a memory from four or five years ago of going to spend Easter with James Rutledge, a friend from his Oxford years. James lived with his parents and siblings somewhere close to the village of... Boscombe? Lucas thought that was the name. It was in Hampshire anyway. When he had accepted the invitation, he had had no idea that the Earl of Stratton lived at Ravenswood Hall, a mere stone’s throw from the village. He had discovered it within a day or two of his arrival, however. James had taken him—because he had thought it would amuse Lucas—to watch a crowd of his neighbors practice maypole dancing in someone’s large barn, or what was supposedly a barn. It had clearly not seen either animals or hay for many a year, if ever.
Lady Philippa was not going to speak again, it seemed, until he did. But her eyes—those large, very blue eyes—did not waver from his own. And though she had spoken quietly, she had also spoken quite distinctly. He did not need to have her repeat the words.
Remember me?
“Have we met before, Lady Philippa?” he asked. But he had the ghastly feeling that they had.
Literally they had not—if she was the person he thought she must be, that was. They had certainly not been introduced to each other.He, as the stranger in their midst, had been introduced, but he seemed to recall James explaining to everyone gathered in that barn that there were too many to present to him individually—hewould never remember their names. Someone, surely as a joke, had then suggested that he join the dancers and try his skill at one of the ribbons dangling, bright and intimidating, from the maypole. He, in the spirit of the joke, he supposed, had suggested that he was willing to give it a try if he could dance with...the blonde.There had been only one pure blonde in the group of girls and young women gathered in a cluster closer to the maypole some distance away from the men. He had not seen any of them close up, including the blonde herself, though he had been given the impression that she was the prettiest girl among them.
It was surprising sometimes how clear certain memories could be even when one had buried them deep and not brought them out into one’s conscious mind since the events happened.
Totally unexpectedly he had learned that Stratton—the Earl of Stratton—lived nearby. His name had been mentioned as something of a joke—a warning that the blonde was not just anybody. She wasLadySomeone-or-other,daughter of the Earl of Stratton.He had not danced, with either the blonde or anyone else. Nor had he stayed to watch the others dancing. He could not remember leaving the barn, but hedidremember very clearly, now that the memory was in the forefront of his mind, that the normally mild-mannered James Rutledge had been furious with him. He had told Lucas that he would have planted him a facer as a prelude to pounding him to a bloody pulp if Luc were not a guest at his father’s home. He had settled for a blistering verbal assault instead, and Lucas had taken himself off early the next morning before the family was even up. He had neither seen nor heard from Rutledge since, though he did recall sending a carefully worded letter of thanks to Lady Hardington, James’s mother, for her kind hospitality, and some sort of fictitious and surely unconvincing explanation for his abrupt departure before Easter had even arrived.
He was quite sure they had never spoken to each other, he and Lady Philippa Ware. They had never been within twenty feet or so of each other. Not until today, that was. How was he supposed to remember her? He had the uneasy feeling that there was more to those two words than polite inquiry, though—Remember me?
