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“Students were all in a pother.” Ponsonby spoke with his mouth full. “It’s one for the annals. Like Jack Reeve filching Sir Sloshua’s inkstand.”
Alan dropped the watch back into his pocket. “So infamous as that?”
Jack Reeve. He hadn’t heard the name in years. The Dutchified Dauber. Now his thoughts trended in a new direction.
The waiter began to clear the plates and his companions said their goodbyes.
Outside the restaurant, he faltered, only for a moment, blinking against the light, his hip mounting a delayed revolt against the uneven stair. The moment passed, unobserved.
The next moment, Alan was seated in his carriage, bowling toward Broughton’s Auction House.
—
The following days were bright and dry. Alan dictated one letter, informing Geoffrey that he’d decided the family portraits should remain in the gallery, for posterity, and another, lauding the fine weather and noting its suitability for an afternoon swim with his nephew. In the letters he sent back, Geoffrey praised the wisdom of the decision. But he doubted that any interaction between Claud and Alan would suit. Not until Alan gave a few more proofs of probity.
The smugness of the replies made Alan grind his teeth. He’d rather humor a hog.
When the invitation arrived to the Duchess of Umfreville’s ball, he snorted and cast it back onto the tray. When an invitation to Count Davanzo’s musical soiree arrived, featuring the Sicilian nightingale Signorina Bonaccorso, he groaned aloud.
Nina looked at him, intrigued, so he handed her the card.
“How lovely,” she said. “It’s finally her turn.” The dimples winked in her cheeks, and he strained a muscle in his neck as he kept his mouth at an appropriate distance from hers.
The days were not without their tortures.
Each day after breakfast, Miss Finch would knock on his study door with the letter tray, and he’d read and dictate responses to anything pressing. He’d dictate a notice, or part of an article, or—for the fun of it, as much to make her smile as to progress on the project—a page or two toward his novel of Mars.
After lunch, he’d send her from the house to Hyde Park to keep watch on the entrance nearest Umfreville House. If Arabella and Mary appeared with their nursemaid, she was to sneak Mary toffees and pass Arabella an envelope enclosing printed paper figures for her paper theater and a letter for Claud, along with an Italian astronomer’s map of the Martian canals and an advertisement for the Bramleys at the Royal Aquarium.
It was ridiculous, to involve her in a covert mission to communicate with children. But he couldn’t call on them at the house or direct letters through his brother or Fanny. To show his nieces and nephew that his affection was constant, he required a secret messenger.
Once Nina had departed, he felt a bittersweet alleviation of the ache in his heart. Then he began to count the minutes until her return, when he could linger with her in the warm, fragrant kitchen, receiving her report from Hyde Park, getting in the way of the baking, winding himself up again with lust and frustration.
He liked to lean on the glazed brick wall and watch her arrange copper bowls on the table and measure out flour and sugar. He liked to watch her precise motions as she cracked and separated eggs.
She talked as she whisked or sifted, wiping her hands from time to time on the light blue apron he’d sent Mrs. Dormody to buy, along with the cake tins, the dough docker—everything Nina had forgotten when she’d left home after that row with her brother.
On Wednesday, while making Victoria sponge, she informed him that Casa De’Ath was lacking in cats.
“And there are abundant candidates,” she said, as a prelude to revealing that Kuznetsov had been feeding a feral colony of the creatures in the back garden for the past year. “Won’t you let us put a hole in the door?”
“A hole,” he repeated, glancing at Rouget. The old communard came and went from the kitchen as Nina worked, but that day he was watching, too, as Nina uncapped the orange flower water and added it to the batter.
“Not in the front door,” she clarified, looking up. “And just a small hole. I’m a great hand at sawing.”
“You?” Alan raised his brows, then recalled her description of life with those spinster aunts. Baking, berry picking. Building hedgehog houses. “Should I assume you can also plane and hammer?”
She only smiled. “Butter the pan?”
“This hole,” he pursued, as he buttered the pan, a task he’d never imagined himself performing, but which at least—like the other tasks she gave him—provided a pretext for his spending so much time belowstairs. “It’s bound to admit all the wildlife in London. I won’t share my home with squirrels.”
“Sugar it too,” said Nina, peering. “As for the squirrels, the cats will scare them off.” She rounded the kitchen table, brushing past him to fling open the kitchen door. Kuznetsov nearly fell into the room. Listening in, the rascal. Nina beamed at him, and he joined the little party. His hands were splotched with black, as though he were the one who’d blackleaded the range until it shone.
Alan rather suspected he knew who’d tidied and polished and converted his kitchen into the house’s center of gravity.
She was explaining to Kuznetsov that you could spoil a sponge cake by mishandling the flour.
“You sift and sift, and then you fold it in gently,” she said, and made slow rotations with the spoon. Sweat broke out on Alan’s brow and he sidled away from the oven, which helped not a whit.
