“There, madame, by that large landscape painting.”
“Why, so it is. I’ll go say hello. You two stay where I can see you.”
“Of course, madame,” Malcolm said affably.
As soon as her chaperone was out of hearing, Serena demanded, “Why do you say men with mistresses are not rakes?”
“I think Madame Fournier is correct,” Malcolm muttered. “This topic is inappropriate.”
“Tell me anyway,” Serena commanded.
He shrugged. “A man can be upstandingandhave a mistress. That is all. He isn’t necessarily doing anything one might call rakish.”
“Only adultery,” she pointed out.
“An adulterer is not necessarily a rake,” he explained, “although a rake can be an adulterer.”
“Are you mincing words?” she asked while sticking out a finger and nearly touching Apollo’s thigh before she realized where she was and snatched her hand away.
Malcolm didn’t seem to notice.
“Not at all,” he promised. “A rake is hardly ever a married man like the emperor. That’s all I mean. Because rakes don’t wish to marry. They are usually unsettled men who enjoy a bevy and bounty of women either at the same time or sequentially, although the termrakehellused to be applied to more of a dissolute and debauched individual.”
He tugged on his cloak and brushed off an imaginary piece of lint from the front.
“Referring to a man who participates in far too much gambling and drinking,” he added, “and thus not at all like myself.”
Serena tipped her champagne glass toward him. “Drinking?”
He laughed. “Not anything so refined as champagne,” he said, and sipped from his own. “More like bottle upon bottle of gin.”
She couldn’t help wrinkling her nose at the idea of drinking such vile stuff. But her thoughts were spinning at Malcolm’s explanation of various levels of debauchery and rakishness.
Madame Fournier returned. “Shall we move along?” And she strode ahead of them from one room to the next, giving them an unceasing view of her swaying red-and-black stripes.
“I feel like a child,” Malcolm quipped under his breath. “All we need is for her to attach our leading strings.”
Serena laughed.
“Whatis so amusing?” Madame Fournier called over her shoulder before stopping next to Veronese’sThe Wedding at Cana. “Nothing inappropriate, I hope.”
“No, madame,” Serena promised, and she wished right then that rules of decent society didn’t prevent her being alone with Malcolm. Assuredly, they would get up to exciting trouble, which was why those strict precepts existed in the first place.
Whoever had invented the notion of chaperones must have had a wayward daughter,she thought.
“You look as though you’re in a tweague, mademoiselle,” Malcolm remarked.
“No, not annoyed, monsieur. Merely feeling a little restricted,” she glanced at Madame Fournier, who was signing her name in a guest book, and then back at her escort.
“Are you going to sign?” she asked him.
“I think not. Rather imprudent of me given the circumstances, wouldn’t you say?”
Just then, Madame Fournier exclaimed loudly in surprise, making Serena jump.
