An Affair Before Christmas (16 page)

“I shall speak to Poppy.”

“As soon as she moves back into this house, I shall return to my establishment,” Lady Flora said brightly. “Although I might point out that the dearth of children produced by you in the past four years implies that the offspring of a young scientist might be just the thing to revitalize the family tree!”

Fletch had never hated anyone so much in his entire life. The feeling went through his head like a wildfire. His fingers shook slightly with the wish to—to—

She rose and walked rather quickly to the door. “I wish you good night, Your Grace,” she said. And paused, turning her head in such a way that one of her ostrich plumes bent against the doorframe. “I trust that you will not inform Perdita of our conversation. She, poor angel, hopes to drift through life without talking about unpleasantries. But relations between men and women are always unpleasant, don’t you think? I find that candor is a healthy way to cope.”

She walked through the door, finally, and from where he stood Fletch could see two feathers proudly rearing to the ceiling and one hanging drunkenly over one ear. Which served her right.

She sniffed and wiped her nose with her handkerchief. “Well, I must be leaving,” she said. “This has been utterly charming, and I’m so grateful that I was able to succor you in your last hours.”

“Here,” he said, “you can’t go yet.” He actually started to struggle up in bed.

“Stop that,” she snapped. “You’re too weak to sit up. I certainly shall leave. I don’t know you very well. I am sorry you’re dying, but you obviously don’t want me to read you Bible verses—”

“You haven’t offered,” he put in.

“Well, that is the comfort generally offered to patients in your condition.” She stood up. “I wish you the very best, Your Grace.”

“No, you must stop.”

“I made a huge mistake coming here, and you never wanted to see me anyway. Then I made a greater fool of myself and I think that I really have had enough humiliation for the day. Goodbye.”

Charlotte got herself out the door and down the stairs before he could say another word. “A hackney,” she told one of the four footmen in the hallway.

She occupied herself until the footman returned by staring at the marble statues strewn around the entryway.

Villiers was strangely appealing. Perhaps all dying people were. But appealing or not, he had no call to make her feel so wretched.

Though he said nothing that wasn’t the truth.

She almost turned to go back and tell him so when the front door opened and she left. It was better anyway.

Jemma groaned. She groaned even louder when the first person they saw was Miss Tatlock, who was greeting people at the entrance to the society’s chambers. Miss Tatlock smiled at them quite as if she wasn’t notoriously in love with Jemma’s husband.

“This is such a plea sure, Your Graces,” she said. “I am certain that you will find Mr. Belsize’s talk incantatory.”

“
Incantatory?
” Jemma whispered as they made their way into a large room, already crowded with people. “What a jackass she is.”

“Jemma!” Poppy exclaimed.

“Honestly, Poppy, didn’t you think that she’s revolting?”

“No,” Poppy said. “She looks like a most intelligent young woman to me.”

“Revolting,” Jemma said with a shudder. She sat down and unfolded the paper Miss Tatlock had handed them. “The evening opens with a discussion of male tamarin monkeys. Excellent. I’ve always been fascinated by short, hairy males.”

“Hush,” Poppy said, elbowing her.

“And then a lively debate between Mr. Brownrigg and Mr. Pringle regarding the question of whether Adam and Eve had bellybuttons. Poppy!”

“Well, it’s an interesting question,” Poppy said. “But look, after that Mr. Moorehead will talk about his recent travels in Africa. That will be fascinating.”

“Humph,” Jemma said. “Goodness, there are a lot of people here. There’s Lord Strange. Do you think I ought to ask him to sell me the rest of the chess set?”

“Where?”

“By the window. Talking to that exquisite young woman.”

Sure enough, leaning against a beautifully arched stone window was a hawk-faced man, lean and excitable looking. He was talking to a young woman whose hair was more gold than Poppy’s and whose lips were definitely redder.

“Hmmm,” Poppy said.

“I did warn you,” Jemma said cheerfully. “So, do you think that he would sell me the rest of the chess set?”

Just then Strange turned away and looked over the room. His eyes slid over Poppy and Jemma without hesitating, as if they were no more than potatoes waiting to be planted.

Poppy turned to Jemma. “No.”

“No, he wouldn’t sell them to me?”

“Not unless you are prepared to bargain intimacies.”

“Poppy, you surprise me! I thought you were such an innocent.”

“I am not blind to the fact that some men are uninterested in respectable women.”

“By all accounts he loved his wife dearly. She died after the birth of their child.”

“He had a wife?”

Jemma nodded and turned away to greet a friend, so Poppy sat there and thought about the fact that a nobleman notorious for his illicit liaisons had apparently desired
his
wife and loved
his
wife. But she was learning that this wasn’t a fruitful way to think—so she banished all thought of Fletch, at least until he bowed before her.

For a moment she just gaped up at him. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“I could say the same for you,” he said. “I had no idea you were interested in scientific matters, Poppy.”

She rose, finally, and dropped a curtsy, wishing that Jemma would return, but Jemma had drifted away into a cloud of chattering noblemen. “This is my first visit,” she said. And then: “Could you leave, Fletch. Please?”

“Leave?” he said. “Why would I do that?”

“Because this is very awkward,” she hissed, sitting down.

He promptly sat down beside her.

“Jemma is sitting there.”

“Why should I leave?”

“You cannot possibly be interested in things of this nature,” Poppy said. “And I am.”

“You are?”

“Yes, and I would feel awkward if you were here. Please, may I ask you as a favor to leave?”

“You may ask but I’m not leaving.” He scowled at her and folded his arms. “After all, you said we were to be friends.”

Poppy felt a pulse of anxiety that he was irritated. She gave herself a mental shake and said brightly, “Then of course you’re welcome to stay. Surely your friend Gill must be here? Isn’t he coming to greet me?”

“He is not here. Why do you ask?”

“Because you never do anything without Gill?” she suggested. “Because if you’re at an intellectual pursuit, it must be an interest of Gill’s?”

“That’s quite an insult,” he said in a very even tone.

“I don’t mean it to be. Look, there’s Dr. Loudan, and since I explicitly asked him to come, I must greet him. If you’ll excuse me, Fletch.”

She was gone.

Fletch stared after her in dumbfounded surprise. When he pictured meeting Poppy, he didn’t imagine her prancing away from him. Or smiling up at a young man with a long nose and…Fletch felt his fists curl and he was on his feet before he realized it.

He walked through the crowd and eased behind Poppy where she couldn’t see him. For some reason he was quite certain that she wouldn’t welcome his presence.

“I found the notes you sent me on the sloth’s hind feet fascinating,” she was telling this Dr. Loudan. He was short. Well, perhaps he wasn’t short but he was shorter than Fletch. I could take him, Fletch thought contemptuously. Then, eyeing his shoulders, it would be a fair fight too.

But I could take him.

I
will
take him, said a thrumming beat in his head as he watched the scientist beam at Jemma. They appeared to be talking about sea otters. What did Poppy know of otters? Oddly, she seemed to know quite a lot, given that she was comparing the beasts to common English river otters.

Five minutes later, Poppy hadn’t looked up from Dr. Loudan’s face as he droned on and on about otters.

Fletch fell back a pace. As far as he could tell, she hadn’t even glanced at him. He sat down, folded his arms, and waited.

Sure enough, as the audience began to tumble into their places, she made her way back to him, fussing a bit about where Jemma would sit.

“Jemma,” he said, “has made a new friend in Lord Strange. Wait until Beaumont hears that!”

“Lord Strange has an astounding collection of curiosities,” Poppy told him. “I understand that he mostly collects art, but he has a number of fascinating scientific relics as well. I would give anything to see his collection.”

“I wouldn’t let you within a furlong of his estate,” Fletch hissed. “You don’t know what goes on there, Poppy.”

“I believe the word for it is
orgies
. I read all about them in a history of ancient Rome.”

“Poppy!”

“Surely you don’t think that I’d be tempted to join the festival?” she asked him. The edges of her lips tipped up but there was no humor there.

Fletch opened his mouth but no words came out.

“I didn’t think so,” Poppy said coolly. “That’s one thing you should be celebrating, Fletch. I’m unlikely to cuckold you, after all.” There was something so bleak in her eyes that Fletch’s heart dropped in his chest.

“You—”

She turned her head away and waved at Jemma, who had seated herself on the other side of the room.

“It’s not a question of cuckoldry,” Fletch said, fumbling for words. “But Strange is a dissolute man.”

“Oh, dissolute,” Poppy said. “I used to think that any man who took a mistress was dissolute. My sort of rank naïveté exists only to be dispelled, don’t you think?”

At the front of the room, Mr. Moorehead was starting a discussion of a tribe called the Karamojong, who lived in Africa. Poppy and Fletch sat silently beside each other.

“That was appallingly boring,” Fletch said when it was over.

“I don’t agree,” Poppy said coolly. “I intend to buy his
No Room in the Ark
at my first opportunity.”

“It sounds like a nursery rhyme.”

“I have initiated a standing subscription for all travel and nature titles at Lackington’s. You pay for them.”

“We never discussed books like that.”

“What on earth would we have to discuss? Unless you’ve been hiding an interest in natural discoveries?”

He opened his mouth but she wasn’t done.

“I assure you that if I read an article about new designs for clocks on stockings or a revolution in satin embroidery, I will be sure to draw it to your attention.”

“You rarely remind me of your mother,” Fletch said, “but all of a sudden I see a resemblance.”

“I imagine that sort of event must be rather frequent, since you are living with her. How is everything with my dearest mama? I knew we’d get around to speaking of her. There had to be some reason you were here.”

“I didn’t come here to talk about your mother!” He almost bellowed it.

“You surprise me,” she said. But the so-called “lively debate” on the stage was quickly degenerating into a mud-slinging match between two bearded antiquarians.

Since Poppy didn’t look any more interested in Eve’s bellybutton than he was—although who knew, given all the secrets she’d kept—Fletch felt free to continue their conversation under cover of the choleric debate.

“God would never have placed false evidence on Adam’s body,” Mr. Brownrigg stated, looking as if he’d addressed the point with the Almighty just last week.

“Your mother seems fine,” he hissed at Poppy. “But how are you?”

She listened intently to Mr. Pringle’s infuriated response to Brownrigg and turned to Fletch with a brilliant smile. “I’m having a
marvelous
time,” she said. “I can’t remember being so happy in my life. I trust you are just as happy?”

“Of course,” he muttered.

“God has no need for false history,” Mr. Brownrigg said, going head to head and jowl to jowl with his opponent.

“Jemma says that you gave a speech in the House of Lords,” Poppy said. “What was it about?”

“It was about Pitt’s fitness for the position of First Lord of the Treasury.”

“I didn’t know you were interested.”

“It was an utter disaster.”

She finally turned her head to look at him. “What do you mean? The paper reported that your speech was extremely lively.”

“Lively, it was. And well received by the opposition,” Fletch said. “Halfway through I began arguing for my opponent’s viewpoint.”

Poppy gasped and—to do her credit—managed not to smile. “How on earth did you do that, Fletch?”

“Lord Temple asked me to present his point of view, and I thought it would be easy. Then halfway through my speech I realized that I didn’t quite agree with the line of argument I was making—so I turned it around.”

“You can’t do that!”

“I did.” He grinned a little, remembering. “I thought wigs were going to start steaming.”

“I would have never thought it of you,” Poppy said, staring at him.

“What part of it? Making a hash of the speech? From what you said earlier, I’d think that was a natural for me.”

“Speaking in Parliament. I never thought you cared about that sort of thing.”

“Nothing but the color of my coat?”

She was starting to look a bit guilty. “I know that you take excellent care of the estate, of course.”

“I enjoyed it,” he told her. “It became a farce, of course, when I realized that I was arguing the wrong side, but my fault: I should have taken the time to think it through.”

“Well, I’m sure that took courage,” Poppy said, touching him on the arm. “Admitting you were wrong, I mean.”

“I didn’t admit it,” Fletch said. “I just talked so much that no one had the faintest idea what precisely I said until I rounded into my conclusion.”

“Adam was formed from dust with no scars!” one of the antiquarians said with huge emphasis.

“I think they’re almost finished,” Poppy whispered.

“How do you know? My guess is that they could go all night. They really hate each other, don’t they?”

“Oh no, I don’t think so. I believe it’s staged. Why, in the last issue of
Philosophical Transactions,
Mr. Brownrigg quoted Mr. Pringle and said that his treatise on the trochus shell was one of the best of its kind.”

“On the trochus shell?” Fletch asked.

“Yes, I ordered the treatise on that basis, but I didn’t find it very interesting. Pringle argued that the concentric rings on the shell indicated the number of seasons a clam had lived.”

Fletch just blinked at her.

“That suggests that a clam grows a new ring every year,” Poppy explained to him.

“Why not?”

“It could be,” she said.

On the stage Brownrigg and Pringle were glaring at each other in one final burst of scientific fury before they stamped off. Watching them, Fletch guessed that Poppy was right and they were about to retreat into some back room to swig a glass of brandy together. The whole event was like an odd shadow of debates in the House of Lords.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were interested in shells and slothes and that sort of thing?”

She frowned at him, obviously puzzled. “You aren’t interested in the concentric rings on shells, are you, Fletch?”