“Which dowager, my lady?” the girl answered, big brown eyes peeking over the top of the folded sheets.
“The younger,” said Claire with an encouraging little smile. “Imagine if I’d asked for Lady Bentley instead.”
“You wouldn’t be the first today,” the girl replied, those eyes crinkling at the corners. “I’m not certain, but I think she’s in the solar. I heard the harpsichord.”
“Thank you,” Claire said, and then, two steps later, she turned. “Marianne! She … is she with Lord Bentley?”
The girl stopped, her stack teetering precariously, and she turned her head. “No, my lady. He went down to the green with Lord de Faria.”
“Who?” Claire paused, tilting her head. “Oh, Dom Raul?”
The girl blinked again, this time in profile. “Isn’t his name de Faria?”
“Call him Dom Raul, Marianne,” Claire said gently. “It is his title, and many fellow Portuguese are with us now.”
“Yes, my lady,” said the girl, “of course, my lady.”
“And thank you!” Claire called as she turned to take the stairs.
“Yes, my lady!” the girl’s voice answered, from much farther away this time, as though she’d broken into a sprint the instant Claire had turned her back, tower of sundry and all.
She gave a little crane of her neck from side to side, reminding herself not to frown lest she wrinkle her face. Dom was an odd sort of title, certainly. She, too, might have balked at it when she still lived at her parents’ house in Bloomsbury, but was it really all that different tosirorbaronor what have you?
She wasn’t actually sure what Raul’s title was in Lisbon. Given the way titles and nobility and the attitudes of the people were going there, she thought it perhaps unkind to ask.
In any event, he was at least partially British, by way of his grandmother. After the wedding, he was taking his new bride on a tour of the country to choose a new home in which to settle.
Claire hoped they did not go far.
She followed the strains of the harpsichord, which only ever sounded so well under Patricia’s fingers. There were not many people about, she noted, as they drifted through the afternoon. She wondered where everyone had gone. Perhaps they were napping to recover from their journeys. Perhaps they’d gone out to enjoy the sun.
Perhaps they ought to have invited Claire to either event, rather than the panicked hell she was currently embodying.
She walked into the solar, immediately caught about the wrists and ankles by the toccata and dragged closer. It sparkled like the sunlight on the carpets, light and sharp and glinting. If her mother-in-law saw her enter, she did not look up from her sheet music to acknowledge it.
Claire was used to that much. One must always await the needs of the music when the dowager was at her keys.
She crossed her arms and gazed out over the green.
She could see Freddy again, she realized, this time standing at the edge of the little duck pond with Dom Raul. It was absurd, but upon spotting him there, even mostly in saturated silhouette under the high sun, she could suddenly smell him again too.
Had he been in this room?
Recently?
He was holding Raul’s wrist, placing something in his palm.
Claire frowned. Was Freddy already bribing someone, not even half a day into his parole? And, heavens above, was Raul accepting?!
The other man seemed pleased with whatever he was just handed, allowing Freddy to tap at his wrists and gesture out over the pond as a flock of geese passed overhead. Freddy wound backward and mimed throwing something far away.
His integrity?!
“Darling, what are you doing?” Patricia’s voice cut in, just as her husband-to-be began to wind his own form up, just like Freddy’s.
“I …” Claire attempted, unable to look away. “Look there!”
Raul released whatever he’d been handed. A stone, Claire realized. A bloody stone.
