Telling Michel she was going for a walk in the sunshine, she joined Malcolm, appearing as two working-class people strolling along the quay.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Boulanger,” she greeted him as if he were a baker. To her surprise, he didn’t appear amused.
“This isn’t a game,” he scolded.
That sliced with a shard of truth. She had treated it as such for a long while, the way she treated all of life. The way she’d behaved during her only Season in London. And every day, Serena readily played the part of a French female as if it were indeed an amusement. Moreover, while her grandparents’ well-being was vitally important to her, whoever ruled France was less so. Until lately.
Now it seemed she had to make a choice and stick to her convictions because people on one side or the other could be hurt.
Regardless, she didn’t care for a fellow Englishman taking her to task.
“I am fully aware this isn’t a game,” she insisted. “And I am not a chess piece, a mere pawn for you to use.” Although that was precisely what her grand-père had done, and Serena had willingly allowed him to. As for Malcolm, she’d fallen into helping him almost unintentionally.
“A pawn, no,” Malcolm said, looking at the dappled light on the water and not at her. “How about a queen? Or at least a viscountess, were it possible.”
She caught her breath.What was he saying?He was teasing her, she supposed, and she would call his bluff.
“What’s stopping you? I am perfectly happy to be a viscountess.”As long as she was his.
He turned to her, his expression unreadable, but they both stopped walking.Was he a viscount?
Once upon a simpler time when she was about to enjoy her first Season, she’d been presented to Queen Charlotte at St. James’s Palace, and it had sorely rattled her nerves. Serena had performed a deep curtsy with as much grace as she could muster while wearing the outdated but mandatory court fashion of a high-waisted gown paired with a full-hooped skirt. With the obligatory train that nearly tripped her as she’d backed away upon being dismissed and despite the tall ostrich feathers that had collapsed over her face, Serena had been relieved when her ordeal was over. Luckily, by then, the queen had no longer been looking at her.
All in all, going to court was a nerve-wracking experience from the long wait until the difficult backward exit. But lately, she’d strolled with an emperor. And now, in her plain green-and-white striped cotton dress, she felt brave and fearless, and she imagined being a viscountess could hardly be so very difficult, even on a daily basis.
Malcolm offered her a rueful smile and then pronounced an entirely inaccurate statement.
“You know nothing of my world,” he said beginning to walk again. He directed their footsteps to the old Pont de la Tournelle, a bridge which took them across to the Île Saint-Louis. They were surrounded by four, five, and six-story buildings in the elegant old neighborhood first developed for aristocrats and politicians in the seventeenth century. The most fashionable Parisians were strolling in the midday sunshine on their small island in the middle of the Seine.
“A viscount’s wife, or indeed, any female member of theton, has many social duties and little freedom, nothing like you have here in Paris. Your life would be a series of restrictions and demands. And you would have to be above reproach and beyond any suspicion of French support, or they would eat you alive.”
“An English paragon of virtue?” she asked. She hadn’t been one before, and she doubted she would be considered one now.
“Something like that,” he agreed.
“Are you truly a viscount?” she asked.
“No,” Malcom said. Then to her surprise, he added, “Not yet.”
Oh!Suddenly, her view of him shifted for the worse. A handsome lord and heir to a viscountcy could do quite a bit of damage as a rake.
“You, as a male member of the gentry, can do exactly as you please without consequence. You may take a lady down a dark path at Vauxhall and be considered in no less good-standing if discovered, while she would be all-but ruined.”
He frowned. “How do you know about such things?”
She shrugged. Since they’d reached halfway along the Rue des Deux Ponts and she had no wish to walk across the second bridge to the Right Bank, she turned around. While she might be thinking of life as a viscountess, on this particular day, Serena needed to get back to her work at the wine market.
“Anyway,” Malcolm said, “you’re wrong. Gentlemen, especially noblemen, are expected to behave well, and if they don’t, they get a reputation.”
“As a rake,” she surmised.
“Exactly. And then they aren’t as welcome as they once were, although not ruined, to be sure. If single, they aren’t considered quite as good a match for the young ladies, and if married, all the sympathy goes to the wife, as it should.”
“I wouldn’t want sympathy,” she told him. “I would want revenge.”
His eyebrows rose questioningly.
“If a man pledged his troth to me,” she explained, “then I would expect his fidelity. That’s not such a difficult or unreasonable concept, is it?”
