"I was not…"
"And then?" Lord Deane was smiling now, clearly charmed by the image despite Vanessa's mortification.
"She sank." Edward made a descending gesture with his hand, complete with sound effect. "Straight to the bottom. Splash. Gone. Nothing but bubbles."
"To be fair, the pond was not very deep," Martin offered, with mock generosity. "She was never in any actual danger."
"Just in danger of complete humiliation."
"Which she survived admirably."
"She came up covered in pond weed," Edward continued, warming to his subject, "looking like some sort of creature from the deep. Hair full of green slime. Dress absolutely destroyed. And this expression on her face…"
"Pure murderous rage," Martin supplied. "I have never seen anything quite like it, before or since."
"She chased Edward around the garden for a full ten minutes," Edward said, speaking of himself in the third person with evident pride, "threatening all manner of creative violence."
"She threatened to strangle me with lily pads," Edward continued. "To drown me in the very pond that had betrayed her. To tell Mother that I was the one who had ruined the dress."
"Did you?" Helena asked, her eyes bright with amusement. "Ruin the dress, I mean?"
"Certainly not. I merely... suggested that the lily pads might hold her weight. I never actually told her to test the theory."
"You told me you had seen a fairy do it," Vanessa said, unable to keep the indignation from her voice even after all these years. "You said you had witnessed it with your own eyes."
"I said no such thing."
"You absolutely did. You said…"
"I said it might be possible. I never claimed personal verification." Edward's grin was unrepentant. "It is hardly my fault that you chose to interpret my speculation as fact."
"You were fourteen years old and deliberately misleading your twelve-year-old sister."
"I was conducting an experiment. You were a willing participant."
"I was a naive child who trusted her brother!"
"And look how well that turned out." Edward raised his glass in a mock toast. "You learned a valuable lesson about the reliability of secondhand information."
"I learned that my brother is a menace."
"Also valuable knowledge."
Martin was watching this exchange with evident enjoyment, his grey eyes dancing between the siblings. "I must say, the twoof you are enormously entertaining. It is almost worth suffering through dinner parties just to witness your arguments."
"We do not argue," Edward said. "We engage in spirited debate."
"Is that what we are calling it?"
"It is what civilized people call it, yes."
"I was twelve years old," Vanessa repeated, though she knew it was futile. This story had been told at every family gathering for a decade. It would probably be told at her funeral. "I was a child. Children do foolish things."
"True enough," Martin agreed. "Though I seem to recall you attempting something similar at thirteen. The tree-climbing incident?"
"We do not speak of the tree-climbing incident."
"Oh, but we must." Edward's eyes lit up. "Martin, you tell it. You have a gift for narrative."
