LITMIR.BIZ

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and I don’t really fancy chewing on these things. What’s up next?”

      “I’ll check straightaway, madam,” Riley said, gathering up the “snail course” and piling the plates on his arm. “Just nip belowstairs to ask Mrs. Timon.”

      “Evening, all. Started without me, I see. Riley, you rotter, you look better than me, and I consider that an insult, I truly do.”

      Riley, and the rest of the company, turned in the direction of the sound, to see Clifford Clifford lurching into the room like a man who has been at sea for months and was just now touching down on dry land, holding on to chair backs until he could collapse into his own chair, beside his sister.

      “About time you showed up, you pernicious little weasel,” Fanny said from her position at the bottom of the table. “Shameful, a man who can’t hold his spirits. You look terrible.”

      And he did. Other than the lurching from chair to chair, Cliff’s dark hair appeared faintly greasy, and one lock hung down unflatteringly over his normally light gray but at the moment quite bloodshot eyes. His cravat was askew, his waistcoat misbuttoned, and his jacket still resided in his room rather than across his shoulders.

      Daphne gasped at her beloved son’s disheveled appearance and rose from her seat, grabbing up her serviette and dipping it into the floral arrangement in the middle of the table. “Here, darling, cool water for your aching head,” she said, after racing around to the other side of the table, trying to dab her son’s forehead. “Mama will fix.”

      Cliff fought his mother away by turning his head this way and that, and finally by grabbing the serviette and tossing it to the floor. “Don’t do that, Mama, I’m not a child,” he said, and Daphne, accustomed to taking orders from anyone in breeches, promptly returned to her chair and sat down. And proceeded to sulk. Over the course of her marriage, she had quite mastered the injured sulk.

      “If you’re not a child, Cliff, I propose you stop behaving like one,” Emma said, resigned to her role as her brother’s keeper.

      Cliff took great exception to his sister’s mild rebuke. “Child, am I? I’m head of this household, remember? I’m the man. So what’s he doing, sitting at the head of the table?”

      Sir Edgar looked up from his plate—the one that now held three servings of escargot, because he was one, hungry, and two, sitting closest to Riley as he’d tried to leave the room with the rejected dishes.

      “Forgive me,” he said, smiling at the ladies. “In an attempt to render myself politely deaf during a domestic upheaval that I, as a gentleman, have chosen to ignore—have I missed something? Oh, hallo there, Clifford. Mind if I pretend I didn’t see you join us?”

      “Ha! Very good, Sir Edgar,” Fanny said approvingly. “Now, if you can say you likewise didn’t notice my daughter-in-law’s silly outburst, I’d say you were kin to my late husband, who could blissfully ignore me if I entered the room with my hair on fire if he thought I might ask him to put it out.”

      “My thanks, madam, for being compared to your beloved husband. I am honored, at least I think I am,” Sir Edgar said, smiling as Riley laid a plate groaning under the weight of roasted beef in front of him.

      “Not if you knew him,” Fanny said, winking at Sir Edgar. “Cliff, over there, puts me in mind of him most, after my late son. None of the three of them cared a jot save for their own comfort. Luckily, my late husband paid so little attention to me that I was free to find my own pleasures. Greatest pity of my life has to be that my son turned out to be his son as well. Could have gone either way, you understand. Several ways, actually.”

      “Mother Clifford!” Daphne exclaimed, looking straight at Emma with a look meant to say “in heaven’s name, Do Something.”

      “We missed you at luncheon today, Sir Edgar,” Emma broke in gamely, smiling at the man as she leaped toward the first thing to jump into her head. “Were you out, in this horrid fog?”

      “Only for a few hours, Miss Emma,” Sir Edgar said, “and I chanced to meet a delightful man. Mr. John Hatcher. Is the name familiar to anyone?”

      “No, I can’t say that it is,” Fanny said, sitting back in her chair, sorry to have the subject changed, just when she was having so much fun.

      “I fear not,” Daphne apologized, still looking at Cliff and mentally rebuttoning the boy’s waistcoat.

      “I knows him,” Mrs. Norbert said, her mouth full of beef. “Sent his latest fillies to our shop, to dress ’em out. Great fondness for red satin he had, John Hatcher. Paid his blunt on time, sometimes with a little extra for us in the sewing room. A real toff.”

      Thornley, who had decided it was cowardly to completely avoid the dining room, heard this last bit of wisdom from Olive Norbert as he pushed open the swinging door…and immediately retreated to the kitchens. And he’d tried so hard to fit together a comfortable group for the Season. Next year, he promised himself, he would require extensive references!

      JOHN HATCHER STOOD in the middle of the enormous study holding the extensive library his family had collected over the years, and frowned as he approached the wall entirely devoted to blue and green covers.

      “Anderson?” he called over his shoulder to his man of business. “Be a good fellow and find me a book on alchemists. We must have one. Lord knows we have everything else.”

      Anderson put down the newspaper. “Alchemists, sir? I know what they are, or what they were purported to be.”

      Hatcher snatched up his snifter of brandy and plunked himself down in the facing chair in front of the fireplace. “Purported? Is that good? Tell me.”

      “Well, sir, the most venerable practice of alchemy is believed, by most scholars and devotées, to have been originally generated in—” He hesitated, realizing his life would be made immensely easier if he employed as few large words as possible. “That is, alchemists began their work a very long time ago, in a faraway country. Very wise men.”

      His employer leaned his elbows on his knees, and grinned. “Wise, eh? How do you know?”

      Anderson hadn’t kept his position for fifteen years without learning how to please his employer. “I…I think they wore pointy hats, sir.”

      Hatcher nodded eagerly. “Yes, they would, wouldn’t they? With stars on them, I’ll wager. So where are they now? These alchemists?”

      “Unless there are a few more recent adherents to the tenets, I think it would be safe to say that they’re all quite dead, sir. Although there are those who say that, before succumbing to their mortal ills, they may have succeeded in discovering a way to turn base metals into gold.”

      “Ah-ha!” Thatcher said, thrusting his fist into the air. “And they probably wrote it all down somewheres, how they did it. I mean, you’d write it down, wouldn’t you? How to do it?”

      All right, so now Anderson was interested. “Yes, sir. I’d write it all down. Why do you ask?”

      “None of your business, boy, none of your bloody business,” Thatcher bit out, and quit the room.

      AS WAS CUSTOMARY in all the great houses, the females gathered in the drawing room after dinner, taking their tea there while the men remained in the dining room, tossing back brandy, gnawing fruit and blowing a cloud with their cheroots.

      “There’s something havey cavey about Sir Edgar,” Fanny pronounced, sipping brandy—not a lady’s drink, but Fanny had her own definition of what a lady does, which had a lot to do with what that lady wants.

      As Daphne had picked up her embroidery and was busy counting stitches, and Emma was pointedly ignoring her grandmother, it was left to Olive Norbert to ask, “Like what? Seems all right to me.”

      Fanny rolled her eyes. “And, if I but valued your opinion, Mrs. Norbert, that would weigh heavily with me, I assure you. The man is too clever. Too clever by half.”

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