Mr. Beckman swallowed his food, taking a moment to study her, and then he murmured something under his breath, so softly that Ambrosia wasn’t sure quite sure she’d heard him right. “You look like a maiden who’s never been kissed,” was what she thought he said, but that couldn’t…
“Pardon?”
“You are missed, no? By your friends?”
“Oh, yes. Or, well—not really, you know.” She shook her head. “I suppose my sister-in-law, Winifred, seemed rather to enjoy having me around. If only to know there was someone who might listen to her complaints and bear witness to her piousness.” The last was accompanied by an uncharacteristically forceful stab of her fork into the small cut of meat on her plate.
Oh, but she sounded like the most ungrateful woman who ever lived. “I apologize,” she tacked on a little belatedly. “I shouldn’t say such things about Harrison’s family. You must think me a bitter old widow.”
He tilted his head, a funny expression on his face. “No, I don’t actually. Not old, certainly, and just a little bitter. I rather think one has a right to complain a little every now and again—when the circumstances warrant it, of course. And yours… well.”
Ambrosia wasn’t sure how to respond that.
“Even so,” she said, attempting to gather herself. “Enough about me. You’ve not told me anything about your family, Mr. Beckman. It’s obvious that French is your first language—though your English is very good as well,” she hastened to add, not wanting to offend. “Did you grow up in France?”
A FRENCH HEART
Dash bit back a bemused chuckle. “Your English is very good as well…” Ha! One should hope so. By this point, he’d spent more of his life on this side of the channel than the other.
“My father was English, but he met my mother in Paris,” Dash said. “She was young. Lovely. He was supposed to be passing through. But he lingered. After a hasty marriage, they lived near her family’s estate outside Rouen, initially.”
She looked intrigued. “Is that near Normandy?”
“Oui,” he said, staring into his glass. “In the North. Rouen is not unlike England, actually. Damp. Grey skies. But nothing like Northern England, thank God.”
Ambrosia smiled faintly. “Did your French grandparents own land?”
He nodded. “They were in textiles. Cotton, mostly. Dyes, weaving. Her father owned three mills along the river. It was,” he paused, “Lucrative.”
“But he still brought his family home to England?”
“Not exactly.” Dash’s mouth curved without humor. “My father left France alone.” Left my mother. Left me. “My English grandfather insisted his son return to Dasborough Park, to learn his duty, just as later he demanded of me.” His voice roughened on the last word. “I was two and ten when he appeared again, as if from nowhere. I had no choice but to return with him to England—to attend Eton, as he had done.”
“Was this because of the war?” Her brow creased with curiosity. “Was Rouen vulnerable to attack?
“Rouen was…strategic,” he said. “Trade moved through the Seine, so there was always some risk. But he had other reasons.”
“What about your mother?”
“She followed a few years later, before enemy troops came through. She didn’t say so, but I think she feared her welcome in France had grown as uncertain as her place in England.”
Ambrosia lowered her fork. “That must have been terribly confusing. Growing up between two worlds like that.”
Dash’s gaze drifted to her, then back to his plate.
He shrugged, and silence fell.
“So,” she asked softly, “do you consider yourself English or French?”
He looked up. In the candlelight, her eyes reflected a gentleness that disarmed him.
“My head is English,” he said at last. “But my heart… I think it will always be French.”
The admission sat oddly on his tongue. Sentimental. Unpractical. And yet undeniably true. He had always felt things deeply—more than was wise, actually.
She was watching him again—quiet, thoughtful. “Wartime would have been difficult for your family.”
Dash reached for his ale, taking a long swallow before answering.
