Besides herself and Lady Frances, there were two other women in the carriage. One—young, fair, and very pretty—sat next to Lady Frances on the forward-facing seat. The other—older, dark, and with a very long and stately nose—sat on Madelaine’s right, the two of them facing the back. Unaccountably nervous, her head seemingly full of bees, Madelaine had already forgotten their names.
“I barely slept last night for wondering what the weather might be,” Lady Frances said as the carriage sped down Piccadilly.Both the spanking trot of the team of four and the kingly liveries of their postillions provided the encouragement the other road users needed to pull aside and make room for their swift passage. “I’ve been reading up on weather portents and daresay I could now write a book on the subject. I spent a full half hour deciding whether the sunset was red—neither my mother nor my maid would venture a firm opinion—but in the end I had to concede it was only a salmon sort of pink, and there isn’t much to be found on that particular hue.”
“I thought you were at the Duchess of Devonshire’s banquet last night?” asked Madelaine’s neighbour.
“Yes, that’s true,” Lady Frances replied easily. “I’m making the whole thing up, of course. I never took a single glimpse out of any window. Really, to be sure of my success I had old Nashton sacrifice some chickens to the pagan gods.” She gave Madelaine a smile. “Do you think I’m mad, Mrs Ardingly, proposing a picnic in April?”
Madelaine smiled lightly back, channelling grace and serenity. “Wonderfully optimistic, I’d say.”
Lady Frances laughed, pleased. Whether it rained or not, Madelaine suspected she would be just as pleased. If the weather held, her courage was to be commended, and who was to say that God or the Fates were not in her favour? If it rained buckets, people would be amused and tease her and laughingly discuss the disaster. Either would be enough to make her talked of.
Having grown up by the sea, a stone’s throw from a fishing village, and hardly knowing anyone who was not connected to the water in some way or other, Madelaine’s view of the weather had always been deeply pragmatic. One wished for fair winds; one lived in fear of foul. One knew, living in a small, clifftop town positioned in a pincer grip between water and sky, that neither element cared for man. They worked together, those callous spirits, rain lashing the sea, wind forcing it on and up and on andup until the walls and dykes and ditches were breached and the sea came to reclaim the ancient levels, to drown the sheep and salt the grazings; water and wind alike smashing shepherd huts and ships and all men’s toys to kindling.
Madelaine cast a practiced eye up at the sky, noted the pearly hue to the thinning clouds, and told her host she didn’t think it likely to rain.
Lady Frances smiled, but it was too interesting a topic to settle just yet. “June is the month for a picnic, surely. But the season is so tired by then, and the days get so hot. Capricious as it is, there’s a freshness to April. The spring flowers are the prettiest, and the new leaves so very green. I’m so glad Greville and his atrocious Pic Nic Society are no more. Who needs carousing and theatrics when there is nature all around? We are to be very rustic, today, Mrs Ardingly, you’ll see. I suppose you’ve read Wordsworth? His‘rustic dinners on the cool green ground’are precisely what I love.”
Well. That explained the bonnet.
Madelaine had looked doubtfully at the neat straw creation Lord Cotereigh had sent to her yesterday. The brim was broad and soft in the country style, and it was trimmed in silk flowers of blue and white. She’d thought something grander would be more appropriate, but no, as soon as she stepped out of her aunt’s house, she’d spotted all the ladies in the landau wearing very similar styles. Lord Cotereigh had got it entirely correct.
Rustic.She smiled to herself, remembering patched blankets and a basket of oven-bottom bread and crumbling cheese with ruddy, wrinkled, over-wintered apples stuffed into the gaps, or brown speckled eggs, boiled in their shells, if the hens had been laying well. She and her mother and whichever of her brothers felt like it would walk down the steep bramble-lined road and across the marsh to the rounded ruins of Camber Castle, where wallflowers grew in the sandy mortar. They’d sit on the short,sheep-cropped grass, and, in between preventing the smaller boys falling to their deaths from wherever they’d climbed the castle walls, they’d sit and eat and talk, the sky a stage for that odd but familiar music of lark and jackdaw, widgeon and sandpiper.
Lady Frances laughed at some thought of her own. “This was supposed to be a surprise, but I can’t keep it to myself. You’ll never guess what I’ve done.” She grinned at all three of her expectant listeners. “I’ve ordered our silver plate to be used today. Father doesn’t know, but he won’t mind. There wasn’t quite enough for everyone, so I told Cote to bring his too. Unfortunately his main set is gold, but it will still look charming, all that gold and silver among the blankets and the grass. Like some old god somewhere has tripped and spilled the coin from his pockets.”
It took Madelaine a moment to translate the informal ‘Cote’ into Lord Cotereigh. She rolled the nickname around in her mind, rather as one rolls a cherry stone in one’s mouth, exploring it but inevitably spitting it out.Cote.She imagined saying it to his face, the narrowing of those too dark eyes, and had to screw her face up, diligently staring hard at the view of passing Hyde Park to hide her amusement.
The journey wasn’t so bad after all. Lady Frances took on most of the conversational burden, and Madelaine found all she had to do was smile, look interested or amused by turns, and occasionally say something to make the others laugh.
To her surprise, even that wasn’t difficult. The Lady Frances had her own brand of wit, often unexpected, appearing suddenly among the idle chatter like a thorn in roses. Madelaine found herself almost liking the woman. Or at least…as amused by her as she was impressed.
The Lady Frances’s definition of rustic, however, took another trial when they finally arrived at the picnic site. Madelaine’s laugh was unfortunately audible. But really…
Some distance away were a half dozen wagons and carts, their horses tethered in the shade of a thin copse of trees. All those vehicles had clearly been necessary to transport everything Madelaine now took in with a disbelieving look as they alighted from the landau.
There was a vast tent, long and rectangular and open all along one side, with triangular flags fluttering from its top. It was currently occupied by a small string band at one end. At the other was a huge wooden crate of ice, the chill of it gently steaming every time a servant opened the lid. But the huge tent was evidently a safeguard against any rain—the entire party could have fitted within it, if needed.
On the grass—yes, therewasactually grass, at least—was an enormous spread of incredibly valuable rugs, with silken oriental cushions scattered all around, bright as a bazaar.
Beyond, distant from the servants’ wagons, three lines of smart coaches and curricles, barouches and landaus were forming, most of the gleaming, high-bred horses already unharnessed and being led by their grooms to a river, far down the bottom of the slope. Lady Frances’s postillions drove the now-empty landau to join the vehicles.
If Lady Frances or her friends were stiff from their journey, none of them showed it, but set off with bright—butgliding—steps towards the rugs, where around twenty people already stood, conversing in small groups. Resisting the urge to stretch and ease the mild ache in her lower back, Madelaine followed in their wake.
Lord Cotereigh was there. He’d been glancing their way since the landau came into sight. Now his head was up, watching them approach, Sir Nathan Handley talking at his side. Another manwas with them, large and strongly built. Lord Leighton, perhaps? One of her aunt’sImpossibles, for sure.
Glide, glide,Madelaine repeated to herself, a beatific smile fixed over her gritted teeth. There was something like amusement in Lord Cotereigh’s dark-eyed study, but he soon looked from her to Lady Frances, greeting her warmly and bending to kiss the hand she held out to him.
“Doesn’t it look perfect, Cote?” she asked once all the bows and murmured greetings between the parties had been exchanged. “You brought your plate, just like I asked.”
“Of course.”
“And doesn’t it look just like I said?”
“Even better.”
“And Mrs Ardingly here has taken on the role of seer and promised us it won’t rain a drop. So I’m about as pleased as it’s possible to be.”
“What good news.”
