Page 90 of Miss Delectable
A nap and a cuddle with Jeanette was, in fact, a very good idea, leaving Sycamore feeling drowsy, sweet, and in charity with the world, despite the upheaval afoot at the club. As he drifted off in Jeanette’s arms, a last thought floated through his mind.
He would try to have a word with Ann Pearson about her sudden desire to quit the Coventry, but he would assuredly have a much more pointed word with Orion Goddard.
Chapter Fifteen
“Children aren’t like foot soldiers,” Alasdhair said. “You cannot simply tell them to march this way one day and back the other way the next. They need for life to make sense.”
The reading room offered its usual sense of sanctuary, a particularly English sort of haven that came from comfortable chairs arranged around a venerable hearth on a chilly evening. That the brandy was French also somehow made the Aurora Club’s ambience more British, and more dear.
“This lot of children has never been the pampered darlings of anybody’s nursery,” Rye said. “They are tough and resilient.”
“They are loyal, Goddard,” Dylan said, propping his feet on a hassock. “They won’t want to be parted from you or from one another.”
Nor I from any of them. “The separation cannot be helped.” Ann had seen what Rye had tried to hide from her: For him to remain in Town would endanger innocents—more innocents—andthathe was unwilling to do.
“How will you choose which children go with you to France and which remain here with us?’ Alasdhair asked.
Rye sipped his brandy and pondered that conundrum. His cousin Jacques had faced such a choice under more fraught circumstances and sent his most vulnerable child, the infant Nettie, to safety.
Who among the children was most vulnerable, and should that boy stay in London or go to France?
“Theodoric will want to protect you,” Dylan observed. “Choose another boy who gets on well with Theodoric. I’ll take the youngest two, and MacKay can take whoever’s left over.”
“You’ll send the youngest two to your sisters,” Alasdhair retorted. “You want the easy ones.”
“I’ll think about who goes and who stays.” Rye would probably air his ideas before the boys and see what they had to say. A competent general held a council of war and listened to his subordinates.
And then he alone made the hard decisions.
“What of your émigrés?” Dylan asked, toeing off his boots and crossing his feet at the ankle. “I know of at least a half-dozen old ladies who recall you nightly in their prayers tole bon Dieu.”
“There’s also Angus and Angie,” Alasdhair murmured, getting up to add a half scoop of coal to the fire. “Angus is getting on, and a coachy’s hands don’t last forever.”
Angus had been with Rye in Spain and France, and a tougher, more irascible batman—and kinder, more conscientious horseman—had never cursed the London traffic.
“I’ll ask if he and Angie want to go with me.” Though neither one spoke even passable French.
The fire leaped up at the addition of fresh fuel, while Rye’s spirits were sinking to new depths.
“Are we to start calling on the fair Mrs. Dorning?” Dylan asked. “Comporting ourselves like the doting cousins we’ve never been? Sending you regular reports?”
“Dropping by the Coventry to swill your champagne for free?” Alasdhair added, settling back into his chair.
Each query was the same question in different words:Goddard, what the hell are you doing?
“Fournier and Deschamps both claim innocence,” Rye said, finishing his drink. “Jeanette’s in-laws once had a hand in spreading gossip about me, but the guilty parties are no longer in London. Somebody with a long memory has decided that I need banishing, but I’m still at a loss to know who or why.”
“And if you tarry in Town, the next warning might be to send your warehouse up in flames,” Dylan said.
“I can make more champagne. I cannot make more of the people I care for.” More cousins, more darling old ladies who tatted the most exquisite lace to edge Rye’s fancy cravats, not that he ever wore fancy cravats.
He could not make more dear, courageous boys, who all deserved to have their gifts appreciated and their shortcomings forgiven, even if those shortcomings stank like hell’s privy.
Rye could never make more sisters, when only the one had been allotted to him, and he’d bungled being her brother. God help him, he’d probably miss even Sycamore Dorning.
“So why does it feel,” Dylan asked, “as if you’re choosing the champagne over the friends?” He laced his hands on his belly and closed his eyes, apparently unwilling to absent himself from this wake for a life more dear than Rye had realized.
“Will you write to her?” Alasdhair asked. “To Miss Pearson, I mean. Mrs. Dorning will send her husband to hunt you down if you neglect to correspond with your sister.”
