Page 36 of Miss Desirable
“That undergroom, Nevin Thurlow? He’s a sot. He’s fair worn a path to The Boar’s Bride and calls it walking the dog.”
Fournier passed the boy some coins. “You have an aptitude for this, my friend.”
“I’m good at it. The colonel says the same thing.”
“Has Colonel Goddard asked you to keep an eye on the Fairchild household?”
“No, sir. He says I’m on assignment to you for the duration.”
“If Dorning or Goddard ask for a report, be truthful with them. That also means if they ask for a report on my own comings and goings, Victor.”
The boy took to studying the worn toes of his boots. “What about Mrs. Dorning?”
MacKay would call Victor a canny lad. “The same, and that applies to Mrs. Goddard, Mrs. MacKay, MacKay himself, or the Welsh cousin, if he’s back in Town.”
“He’s not. Not yet.”
“Then be off with you, and my thanks for your vigilance.”
“Bomb-swoir, miss-sue!” Victor melted into the shadows with a jaunty wave, and Fournier resumed walking.
* * *
“You like your French competitor,” Ann Goddard said, tipping her chin up to allow her husband to untie her bonnet ribbons.
Colonel Sir Orion Goddard took his time with the ribbons because he was going mostly by feel in the shadowed foyer of their home and because he treasured any moment of domesticity with his wife.
“I respect Fournier. I always have.”
Ann undid the frogs of his cloak. “Youlikehim, Orion, and your standards in this regard are quite high.”
He turned so she could sweep the garment from his shoulders, then performed the same courtesy for her. Theirs was not a grand household, and Goddard saw no point in asking a porter or underfootman to remain awake when a key to the front door would suffice instead.
“Fournier is honest,” Goddard said, lighting a carrying candle from the sconce above the umbrella stand. “When he saw that my champagnes were superior to anything he could procure or make himself, he ceded the field to me at the Coventry. I felt I owed him some pointers on the newer methods for making champagne, and he’s been more than gracious critiquing my clarets.”
Ann slipped her arm through this. “And you’d become so unused to anything approaching civility from most of London that a Frenchman’s decency caught your eye?”
Goddard let himself be escorted up the steps, knowing quite well that Ann—having allowed him to look in at the club—wasn’t about to permit him to look in on the ledgers or the inventories, or any other late-night temptations waiting for him in the office.
As if her company on a rare early night wasn’t temptation enough? As if she, too, hadn’t wanted to see how the Coventry’s kitchen had fared without her directly supervising the making of every sauce and side dish?
“Fournier grasps, as my cousins do to some extent, what it is to be an outsider,” Goddard replied. “And yet, he carries on. I eventually put to rest the rumors surrounding my military career.”
“Thank God.”
“But he will never put to rest being French in London, and when he goes to France, he’s likely regarded with equal suspicion, even as he gives employment to dozens of families, and his winemaking brings in revenue and cachet for the French government. He won’t be scorned, exactly, but neither will he be thanked for the choices his family likely made for him.”
Ann yawned behind her hand as they gained the first floor. “Socializing takes effort.”
“For us. For others, remaining at home of an evening is the greater chore. The Coventry thrives on keeping such souls entertained.”
Ann leaned into him. “I thought Fournier came to London more or less as an adult.”
“He was here as a child as well, then sent back to France as Bonaparte stabilized matters, then apparently came back to London at the urging of his wife.”
Ann straightened. “I should have known he was married. He’s patient in the way a husband learns to be patient, a good husband. He’s also… Maybe there’s a word for it in French. Unto himself? Self-possessed? Self-contained? Those words don’t convey quite the solitariness I sense in him.”
The word Ann sought might belonely. “Seul mais complet.”
