“Olivia, have you ever met Mr. Henry Evesham?” this vision said to someone behind her shoulder. “He wasn’t at our wedding.”
A second woman walked in quickly to catch up with the first, and she was equally striking, though her hair was blond, and her gown was a deep, saturated pink adorned with fine, whispering feathers.
Alice knew that women like this existed, theoretically, but she rarely came across such creatures in the wild. The wealthy women who held keys at Charlotte Street did not come to the establishment in such regalia. She tried not to stare, despite desperately wanting to.
Henry looked perplexed to be the center of these two ladies’ attention, though the rest of the family looked on as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Alice watched as he was introduced to the blond woman, Miss Olivia Bradley-Hough of Bath, who Alice gathered was the cousin of the other woman, who was married to Henry’s brother and who the family called Isabel.
Josephine introduced Alice to the ladies, who gave her gracious smiles. The elder Mr. Evesham gave a signal to the servants, who opened a door to a long, grand dining room. Inside, the table was dressed with more dishes than Alice had ever seen at once. The spread was thoroughly delightful, arranged on gleaming silver platters in towering heaps that seeming to quiver in excited anticipation of being eaten.
Alice felt the long day of cold and worry melt away in the face of such a feast.
This was going to be fun.
She was shown to a place between Henry and the senior Mr. Evesham, who headed up the table. Josephine sat across from her, and Miss Bradley-Hough sat at Henry’s other side, beside Jonathan Evesham, who would be handsome were it not for a pinched expression that made him seem permanently cross.
As soon as everyone was seated, a retinue of servants emerged, graceful as ballet dancers, holding more trays of food, which they proffered to the guests. A footman went around to fill their cups with wine. When he reached Henry, Henry politely waved him away with a soft “no thank you.”
“Why, no wine Mr. Evesham!” Miss Bradley-Hough said, laughing. “How sensible you are. The gentlemen of Bath are forever in their cups at supper. It drives my mother to fits, trying to keep her cellar filled.”
“She should host more Methodists,” Henry quipped. “We’re mostly a temperate lot, easy on the purse strings. If she’d like to set an example, I’m sure we can arrange for a revival.”
Miss Bradley-Hough laughed, but Alice noticed Henry’s father scowling at the exchange.
Another servant came by with a mousse of fish and Henry waved that onward too, taking none. He piled his plate with potatoes in cream sauce and a dish of greens. When a platter of pork filets in butter came by him, he waved that away too. He did the same with a big, beautiful leg of lamb that smelled like heaven itself.
With each dish he declined, his father became more visibly annoyed.
“Take some lamb, Henry,” he ordered his son in a voice pitched low enough, Alice suspected, to avoid being overheard by Miss Bradley-Hough.
“No thank you,” Henry said pleasantly, instead accepting a dish of jellied fruit.
“A man cannot subsist on potatoes and jelly,” his father hissed.
Henry looked taken aback. “I prefer not to eat meat, as you know,” he said calmly.
“You’ll make yourself ill,” his father barked. His voice lacked the educated smoothness of his children’s and his wife’s. His accent reminded her of the blacksmith’s in Fleetwend, Mr. Flaiff, who’d gown up poor in Bristol.
Henry laughed—a forced kind of laugh that held no amusement. “I have not eaten the flesh of God’s creatures in years, and I have yet to waste away.”
“Indeed,” his brother said slyly, leaning over Josephine so as to better hear the conversation. “He’s built like an oxcart as it is. If he ate properly, I imagine he wouldn’t fit through the door.”
Henry’s mouth curled up in an utterly acidic smile. “Quite,” he said evenly.
“Well I’ve never met a gentleman who lives on vegetables!” Miss Bradley-Hough remarked, no doubt trying to smooth away this disagreement—an act of graciousness that Alice thought admirable. “Are you also a vegetarian, Mrs. Hull?”
Alice glanced down at the generous portion of red-blooded, silky lamb she’d heaped on her plate, and hoped a meatless diet was not some characteristic of Henry’s sect that would expose their lie about her being a member of his worship circle.
“Evidently not,” Alice said to Miss Bradley-Hough, jauntily spearing a piece with her fork and putting it in her mouth with delectation.
Beside her, Henry laughed appreciatively.
In truth, she could not imagine turning down such luxurious food. She was shocked when the plates were cleared, a whole new array of dishes was brought to the table, and the process repeated.
As the dishes came around the two lady cousins chattered of this and that—evidently they had both grown up in Bath, and Alice gathered they were quite popular there. Isabel Evesham seemed to be doing her best to forward a friendship between Henry and Miss Bradley-Hough. Oddly, Isabel’s husband seemed to be doing his own best to block his wife’s efforts—to the obvious agitation of his father. Meanwhile, Josephine and Mrs. Evesham told Alice of their preparations for the Christening, as though none of this was happening.
Observing the Evesham family at supper was like watching a game unfold, without quite knowing what the object of it was.
“Tell us of your work in London, Henry,” Isabel said. “It sounds so very important.”
Henry’s fork paused in the air. The entire family stopped talking.
“Yes, how is your little flock these days?” Jonathan asked. He’d been drinking heavily throughout the meal, and his words had grown thicker and less clever with each sip. “Still giving farmers’ wives conniptions in the streets?”
“Not as often as I like,” Henry said smoothly. “My work for the House of Lords leaves little time for preaching.”
Jonathan turned to Miss Bradley-Hough. “Olivia, my brother has always had quite a way with women. He makes them faint, y’see. Claims they’re moved by the spirit of the Lord, but—” he paused to take a swig of claret—“I’ve always said it was boredom at the sheer duration of his sermons.”
He chuckled at his own joke, smiling at his wife’s cousin as if he was certain she would also find this very droll. Miss Bradley-Hough looked nervously down at her plate. Henry’s face continued to be fixed in an expression of sardonic boredom.
Alice had lost her appetite.
Imagine, not seeing one’s family in years, only to be subjected to drunken mockery within an hour of arriving. And mockery that came at no provocation. Alice’s mother could be critical, but at least she did not behave that way for sport.
“The Lord Lieutenant’s sermons are in great demand in London nevertheless,” Alice interjected, looking Jonathan Evesham directly in the eyes and employing the arctic tone she’d perfected under Elena Brearley’s tutelage. “People gather from across the town to hear him on Friday afternoons. ’Tis why he was made a deputy of the House of Lords.”
“He was made a deputy,” Jonathan rejoined, “because he traffics in obscene tales under the guise of Christian virtue.”