bold souls even told jokes, those indoors gentlemen chortling into their sleeves. Someone—one of the wives—eventually went to the piano. A ripple of ragtime filled the room.
Lord Armand and I sat without conversation; everything I’d practiced to say was for the duke. I picked at the jeweled bits of petits fours on my plate, wishing I was alone and had a thousand more. Armand merely pushed his around with his fork. Neither of us looked at the other.
I had to salvage this somehow. I had to at least make an effort.
I searched through the mental pages of my script. “You have a lovely home.”
His dark lashes lifted; his eyes held mine. “Do you think so?”
“Of course.”
“Then you haven’t seen enough of it.”
He went back to pushing around his food. Chocolate was getting smeared all over the tines of his fork.
“Where is your friend?” I tried. “That boy from the train station?”
“Laurence? Exeter, I imagine. He was only here for a night. Had a pass to go home before shipping out. So Exeter. Or maybe even France by now.” He stabbed viciously at a fresh petit four, impaling it all the way through.
“Oh? He signed up?”
“That’s what I said, wasn’t it?”
“Not really.”
Armand sighed, clearly put upon. “Yes, Eleanore. He signed up. He signed up and his father allowed it. There. All sorted now?”
“You seem different here,” I said.
He looked up once more, waiting.
I clarified, “Even less charming than usual.”
Oh, well. I’d tried enough.
Armand set aside the plate and fork. He reclined back and crossed his legs, perusing me up and down. “Nice frock. Did you steal it?”
“Not yet. Is your mother dead?”
“Yes. Is yours?”
“I’ve no idea. Is your father mad?”
“Possibly. Is it jolly fun to be an orphan?”
“Absolutely. The most jolly fun ever.”
“Poor little waif, desperate for a proper home.”
“Poor little lordling. It must be sad to act like such a bastard and have no one actually care.”
We regarded each other for a moment in crackling hostility. I was aware, dimly, of a figure suddenly next to us and the spare chair being pulled free.
“Dearest,” said Chloe, settling in with her back to me. In this place, before these people, it was a massive, deliberate slight. “I was just regaling your father with all the woes of Sybil’s wedding in Norfolk. I saw Leslie there, did I tell you? It’s no wonder he hasn’t joined up yet, Kitchener probably wouldn’t take him, anyway. He looks perfectly dreadful, utterly enormous since he inherited the title, and he said it was merely the cut of his coat! Can you believe it? It was Parisian if it was anything, a first-rate merino. He’s fortunate it wasn’t Italian or he’d have looked like a stuffed sausage—”
“Chloe,” said Armand. “Why don’t you have a go at the Steinway?”
“What?” I couldn’t see her face, but I could envision the pout. “But Mrs. Fredericks is already playing. She’s doing an acceptable job, for a squire’s wife.”
“I’d like to hear you sing.”
“Oh. Really?”
He sent her his cold, cold smile. “Really, truly.”
She wavered, but there was no overcoming that smile. “All right, then.”
She left far more reluctantly than she’d arrived.
“You’d better marry her before she reaches eighteen and the spell wears off,” I said.
“Spell?”
“Yes. The one that’s hiding her fangs and pincers from plain sight.”
“I don’t find them especially hidden,” he said mildly.
“Then perhaps you’re a pair.”
His brows lifted. “Now, that’s the cruelest thing you’ve said so far.”
Mrs. Fredericks cleared off, and Chloe took her place before the piano. A beam of sunlight was just beginning its slide into the chamber, capturing her in light. She was a glowing girl with a glowing face, and Joplin at her fingertips.
“Give me time,” I muttered, dropping my gaze to my plate. “I’ll come up with something worse.”
“No doubt.” Armand pulled a flask from his jacket and shook it in front of my nose. “Whiskey. Conveniently the same color as tea. Are you game, waif?”
I glanced around, but no one was looking. I lifted my cup, drained it to the dregs, and set it before him.
He was right. It did look like tea. But it tasted like vile burning fire, all the way down my throat.
“Sip it,” he hissed, as I began to cough. His voice lifted over my sputtering. “Dear me, Miss Jones, I do beg your pardon. The tea’s rather hot; I should have mentioned it.”
“Quite all right,” I gasped, as the whiskey swirled an evil amber in my teacup.
Chloe’s song grew bouncier, with lyrics about a girl with strawberries in