“If it hurts, let me know, and we’ll take the bandage off until you’re done for the night.”
Henry rose. “Best get back to work, Han. No telling how long Jules will keep Miss Ann from her post, but the customers show up hungry just the same.”
“Don’t turn your back on Jules,” Hannah said, collecting her journal to add the correct measure of walnuts to her pear recipe, once Miss Ann told her what the correct measure was.
“What’s that?” Henry asked, pulling on his second glove. “A ledger?”
“In a manner of speaking. The colonel gave it to me.” The journal was handsomely bound, the pages smooth and already cut. “Henry, if I asked you to take a note a couple of streets over for me after you finish tonight, could you do that?”
Henry flexed the fingers of his injured hand. “I’m usually working until the wee hours, Han.”
“Doesn’t matter. I want you to deliver the note to a boy who sleeps in a stable. Has to be in the night, or he’s not alone to receive it.”
Henry slanted her a look. “You sweet on this boy?”
“I am not. He smells like horse poop and skips his lessons.” Though Victor could get a message to Otter, and that mattered.
“As long as he’s not trying to turn your head. I saw you first.”
“Away with you, Henry Boardman, and I will give you the note when I take my evening break.”
Henry grinned, made her a pretty bow, and marched off.
Hannah remained at the table, took out her pencil, and carefully tore a sheet of paper free from her journal. The colonel had said to send to home if she ever needed help, and right now, Hannah needed help.
“That was the best recitation of a poem ever in the history of verse,” Rye said. “I am impressed.”
Nettie curtseyed before the hearth. “Thank you, monsieur. Tante says I am very clever. I will make the poem into French, and you will like it better.”
“You can translate the poem if you wish, but I will want another by heart in English next week,” Rye replied. He would also make sure Tante Lucille’s coal supply had been replenished by next week. “The first half of a Shakespeare sonnet, if the whole thing is too much at once.”
“Might I have a tea cake, Tante?”
“You are too forward, Nettie.” Tante passed over a tea cake nonetheless. She still wore only the one shawl, but she’d also draped a robe across her lap. “Back to the nursery with you, and take a tea cake for Nurse too.” The second tea cake she wrapped in a table napkin.
“Nurse will be proud of me for the rainbow poem.” Nettie hugged Rye about the neck and skipped from the room, waving her tea cake.
Tante took a placid sip of her tea. “The child will fall and choke. She will leave crumbs on my carpets. She will gobble both cakes, and Nurse will never be the wiser.”
“She will arrive at the nursery in great good spirits,” Rye said, trying to find a way to sit in the venerable wing chair that didn’t annoy his hip, “share her booty with Nurse, and know an entire sonnet from memory by this time tomorrow.” Nettie would be proud of herself, too, and to a child, that mattered.
To anybody.
“Why are you sad, Orion?” Tante asked, setting her cup and saucer on the tray. “You watch Nettie like a man going off to war watches the children playing in the churchyard.”
Tante had seen too many men go off to war. French and English, and both nationalities had doubtless watched the children playing in the churchyards with the same wistful heartache.
“You have suggested I could take Nettie back to France, but I don’t want to uproot her.”
“Children adjust. I will not live forever.”
Rye told himself that Nettie and her playmates kept Lucille young. Tante had left her homeland more than a quarter century ago, though, and the intervening years had been difficult. This refrain—I will not live forever—had become more frequent of late.
“Are you well, Tante?”
“I am tired, Orion. The English weather ages a woman.” Had this pronouncement been accompanied with sighs, pleas sent heavenward, or other dramatics, Rye could have dismissed it as commonplace histrionics.
But English winters were miserable to old bones, and to not-so-old bones.
Poverty was a weight no woman should have to bear, much less in her later years.
And homesickness tore at the heart, regardless of age.
“I might well be returning to France for a time, Tante. Would you like to accompany me?”
Lucille considered him. “To Provence?”
“I can escort you there if you’d like to return. Nettie’s siblings are there.”
“First, you say your customers are here, then you say you can return with me to Provence. Not long ago, you were tarrying in Champagne with Jeanette’s young relatives. What is afoot, Orion?”
Why did he prefer the women who dealt in honesty to the pretty flatterers? “The business with Deschamps has escalated. Somebody has stolen a substantial amount of champagne from my warehouse, and that same somebody took my cavalry sword from my very home.”
Tante sliced into the apple tart Orion had brought from Roberts’s bakery. “You had Monsieur add the calvados. I can already smell the fragrance.”
“He offered me a choice of pommeau or calvados. You had specified calvados.” The cost of the tart had been outrageous, but Roberts would put the rest of the bottle to good use, and Tante would invite her friends over to sample the sweet.
“A good, robust calvados too,” she said, cutting a small serving. “You must try it.”
“Another time, when I haven’t overindulged in tea cakes.”
Tante’s look said she could count to two in several languages, thank you very much. “Tell me of Deschamps.”
A goddamned snowflake wafted past the window, a warning shot fired by the approaching winter. The air wasn’t cold enough that the snow would accumulate, but the weather had turned, and Channel crossings henceforth would be rough.
“I’m not sure Deschamps has anything to do with my situation, but I’ve noticed a pattern. When he’s in London, the rumors start up again. This has been going on for more than five years. I looked back over my journals, and the connection is plain.”
“Or the coincidence. Have you spoken with him?”
“He denies the charges, though I sensed he was lurking in the park for the express purpose of accosting me.”
Tante closed her eyes as she ate a morsel of the tart. “Most men lurk in the park to meet the ladies. You might consider doing that yourself, Orion. Take a wife and forget about the rumors. We can find you a nice French girl when we are in Provence. Monsieur Roberts has outdone himself.”
She did homage to the tart while Rye admitted to himself that no nice French girl stood a prayer of catching his eye.
“Does somebody wish for you to shoot Deschamps, perhaps?” Tante asked. “They instigate mischief against you, hoping you will call out Deschamps?”
An interesting theory. “Not a reliable or efficient plan, is it? As you say, Deschamps is quite skilled with both pistols and swords, while I am impaired by poor hearing, bad eyesight, and an unreliable hip.” None of which affected Rye’s aim with a pistol, but all of which impaired his fencing.