Page 40 of Vanquished By A Viscount
“No, no, you misunderstand,” Charlie said with a false laugh. “We thought you and the other ladies might perform the puppet show for the gentlemen.”
“Or vice versa,” Gray added.
Robert and Barbara were still clearly not convinced.
“But it does mean that we would need you to fetch the puppets and their theater from the attic,” Gray went on.
For the very briefest moment, as Robert and Barbara exchanged flat looks, Gray thought that a reconciliation might be on the horizon. The lovebirds might not have been pleased with each other, but they both seemed set against himself andCharlie. Barbara went so far as to cross her arms and huff out through her nose at her brother.
Except instead of relenting, she said, “Charlie.”
The single word held an ocean’s worth of derision.
“Yes, dearest?” Charlie asked, all innocence and pink cheeks.
“Have you no original thoughts in your head?” Barbara asked.
“Whatever do you mean?” Charlie continued, his innocence becoming painfully comical.
“You cannot be so ham-fisted that you would attempt to catch Robert and I in the same net that snared you and Grayson last week,” Barbara said.
Gray winced. His sister-in-law had seen through their ploy far faster than he would have expected.
Or perhaps not. It was a blatantly transparent plan.
“You can fetch the puppets if you’d like,” Robert said in a long-suffering voice, picking up his pen and concentrating on his ledgers once more, “but I wish nothing to do with it.”
“And I will not clamor around in a dusty attic simply to retrieve a puppet theater I have never seen before and have no wish to see now,” Barbara said.
“You would enjoy yourself,” Gray insisted. “Believe me.”
Barbara stared right at him and said, “I do not think I can believe a single word you say.”
She then turned sharply and marched out of the room, her chin held high.
Gray glanced to Charlie, seeing his own exasperation with their siblings reflected there.
“Go fetch the puppet theater, if you’d like,” Robert sighed, still focused on his ledgers. “I daresay it would be an amenable activity for the ladies one way or another, considering the weather does not appear to be improving.”
“Are you certain you will not go to fetch it along with Barbara?” Gray asked, giving his dying plan one last poke.
Robert glanced right up at him and said a sour, “No.”
Gray pinched his eyes shut for a moment and huffed. With every second that passed, he was certain he’d been trapped in a nightmare. “Very well then,” he said, opening his eyes. He glanced to Charlie, jerked his head toward the hall, and said, “Come along, then.”
They reached the small staircase at the end of the hall leading up to the attic before Charlie muttered, “Oh to be an only child!”
Gray snorted a humorless laugh before he could stop himself. “It would certainly make life less agonizing,” he said as he started up the stairs. Fortunately, he knew which of Hawthorne House’s numerous attics the puppet theater had been put away in.
“If I was not witnessing the behavior of those two for myself, I would not have believed it to be as unforgivable as it is,” Charlie continued as they turned a corner at the top of the stairs and walked through a narrow corridor that contained doors to some of the servants’ rooms.
The attic which housed a large amount of the family’s juvenilia stood at the far end of the hall. The space had very few windows, so Gray ducked into the bedroom right before it to borrow a lantern so that he and Charlie would not be completely lost in the space.
“I am half convinced that we should recall Nanny Lucinda from her retirement so that she might take both of them to task for behaving like children,” Gray said as they entered the stuffy attic.
“What could possibly be possessing them that would cause them to embarrass themselves this way?” Charlie asked, looking around the dim attic with a frown.
“My wager is that it all comes down to the issue of children,” Gray said, setting the lantern on an old bureau, then pushing a box of what appeared to be Christmas paraphernalia aside so that he could reach the puppet theater, which stood off to one side, leaning against the wall.
