duke’s eldest daughter. She hadn’t powdered her hair this morning, and her skin looked particularly creamy against her dark locks.
Locks?
He truly was losing his mind, finally.
Locks. He felt his mouth twist into a sneer.
“That expression looks more like you,” Betsy said cordially. “Thank goodness. I was growing worried that you might have transformed into the sort of man who offers compliments and poetry over the breakfast table, when the only thing one wants is some buttered toast and silence.”
“Not poetry?” Jeremy asked. “Dear me, Mr. Parswallow, it seems you broke one of Lady Betsy’s cardinal rules.”
The poet bridled, but Betsy flashed her smile and he melted into an embarrassing puddle of adoration.
“I discovered my calling at Eton,” Parswallow announced, “and as a p’hoet, I can assure you that p’hoetry belongs at every meal.”
When no one showed much enthusiasm for this idea, he lapsed into sulky silence.
“I don’t remember being taught to write poetry at Eton,” Jeremy said. “You?” he asked Thaddeus.
“I was more engaged by the sciences,” Thaddeus replied.
“He was brilliant,” Jeremy informed the table at large. “I’ve never forgotten when Master Swinkler got irritated and said that if Thaddeus wanted to teach at Eton, he had to wait until he graduated from Cambridge.”
“Did you go to Cambridge?” Betsy asked Thaddeus.
“Of course he did,” Jeremy answered. “Bucked tradition, too, because generally dukes’ progeny are off to Oxford, in witness whereof: your brothers. But the brilliant lads all went to Cambridge.”
“Lord Jeremy and I were there together,” Thaddeus said. “Almost lived together one year.”
“I got in trouble and was sent down,” Jeremy said, unrepentantly. “Putting my disreputable career at Cambridge to the side, let’s return to Eton. Thaddeus had got hold of a book by a fellow named Kant, arguing that stars aren’t stars, but that each twinkle is a collection of them. He used to drive Swinkler mad by quoting from it.”
Thaddeus intervened. “Master Swinkler was teaching us theology, and he had an unreasonable attachment to the idea that God created our planet and put us at the center of it, the stars existing as a mere embellishment for the pleasure of our nightly strolls.”
“That is not the case?” Betsy asked, curiously. No one had ever indicated otherwise to her. She nudged her sister. “Did you know that, Viola?”
Viola was staring down at her plate, and just shook her head.
“Astronomers—Mr. Kant among them—surmise that what we see is a galaxy, or rather universes of them, at such a far distance from us that they can scarcely be seen,” Jeremy said.
Betsy looked at him, astonished. “Each star is one of these galaxies? Universes?”
“Single stars are close to us and those that seem far away are actually groups,” Thaddeus put in. “It’s an interesting idea, and astronomers since Kant first posed the theory have confirmed it, as far as they were able.”
Jeremy gave a bark of laughter. “Thaddeus was a galaxy above the rest of us.”
Then he watched as Betsy buttered toast and gave a piece to her little mouse of a stepsister, who looked as if she’d like to slide under the table. Jeremy narrowed his eyes. The poor girl was convulsively swallowing, a sensation he’d come to know all too well.
A cluster of smells could drive him to lose a meal—the obvious ones like blood and gunpowder, but also rotting autumn leaves, wet hay, wood smoke . . .
He wrenched his mind away from the battlefields of America because, damn it, Betsy’s younger sister was about to make a scene that people wouldn’t readily forget. Vomiting Viola wouldn’t do well on the marriage market.
Behind Betsy, Lady Tallow had returned to her original topic. “The girl’s peculiar, if you ask me,” she hissed. “Of course, she doesn’t have bad blood, unlike . . .” She finally lowered her voice to a discreet level, apparently realizing that insulting the children of her host might not be a good idea.
Betsy was turned in her chair to face Viola. “Oh, no,” Jeremy heard. “Viola, please don’t.”
Jeremy would have snorted, but there wasn’t time. “Please” would never stop his stomach from emptying if the right smell came along. His body had learned the trick of expelling emotion along with his breakfast, and he had the feeling Viola was a kindred spirit.
He pushed back in his chair and launched into his favorite, well-practiced performance: drunken lout. He stumbled, clutched the back of Betsy’s chair, and let out a loud belch, followed by a curse and a belated “’Scuse me, ladies.”
Back when he was in school, he