Verity found Michael smoking on the front stoop of the gamekeeper’s cottage. He wore an old tweed jacket that was both too loose and too short for him, mud-splattered boots, and a wool cap that rode low on his brow. He smoked not with a gentleman’s elegance, but with a laborer’s impatience, the cigarette pinched between his thumb and index finger, its tip reddening with each restless inhalation. Michael usually returned to Fairleigh Park by the middle of December. But this time he had been invited to a classmate’s home for a week after the end of term. And had arrived only the evening before.
“Been out working?”
Michael looked up, surprised—he must have been distracted; she’d walked up to him and he’d not seen her. “Shot some vermin,” he answered. He did not try to hide the cigarette. Instead, he reached into his pocket and offered her one.
She took it. She’d never smoked in front of him, but she wasn’t surprised that he knew her little vice. “Thank you. I’ll have it later.”
He took one last deep suck. Getting off the stoop, he dropped the fag end where he’d dropped the ashes, and kicked some fresh snow on top of it. He climbed back up and held open the door for her. “Come inside?”
She preceded him into the parlor. “Your parents resting?”
The Robbinses took naps early in the afternoon. She preferred to visit Michael at that time, to have him to herself, rather than interacting under his parents’ somewhat uneasy watch. The Robbinses were wonderful people. But Verity baffled and alarmed them. They weren’t sure what to make of her or what seemed to them their son’s continued closeness to her.
“They won’t be down for another three quarters of an hour,” Michael answered. “Have a seat. I’ll get us some water.”
She cleared newspapers and a pile of Mrs. Robbins’s knitting from the table. He returned with a small steel kettle—ducking his head so as not to conk it on the low lintel—and set the kettle over a spirit lamp.
“I brought some tuiles—almond biscuits. You’ll like them,” said Verity.
Madeleines were his favorites but she couldn’t bear to make madeleines now, not even for him. It had been a fortnight and a day since she left London, but the pain hadn’t let up at all—pain and regret and occasional outbreaks of angry, insensate hope that made everything even worse.
“Thank you,” he said. He took off his cap and hung it on a coat tree by the door. “I like everything you cook except liver.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Insulting my foie gras again, aren’t you?”
Wisely he did not respond to that. Instead, they spoke of her back, his chores, and Mrs. Robbins’s most recent bout of culinary disaster. Michael toyed with his pocketknife as he answered her questions. She observed his hands, as she always did. No bruises, no scrapes—no recent fights.
When the kettle sang she made tea and served the tuiles on a plate. Michael ate a dozen in a row, one after another. She watched him eat. She used to watch him for hours on end, as he played and read and talked himself through games he’d invented with sticks and rocks.
He glanced at her. She looked away. When he’d been a child, she’d badly wanted him to grow up and be the kind of man she hadn’t had the good fortune to marry. Now she wished time hadn’t gone by so fast, that he still reached only to her waist, and that she could hold him close and he would be content to remain in her embrace.
“I heard you were invited to a classmate’s place. Did you enjoy your visit?”
He shrugged. “You don’t refuse an invitation to Buckingham Palace, even if you’d rather have your tonsils removed than sit down with the queen for tea.”
“Was it that bad? I thought the Baldwins were a good lot.”
“I didn’t go to the Baldwins’. I went to the Cove-Radcliffs’.”
The tuile in Verity’s hands broke in two. The Countess of Cove-Radcliff was the Dowager Duchess of Arlington’s eldest daughter. “I didn’t know you were acquainted with anyone from that clan.”
“Nigel Granville worked with me on the newspaper this year. To be sure, I didn’t expect an invitation from him and he seemed almost embarrassed to be inviting me. But he did, and I went.”
“His sisters, did they treat you well?”
“How do you know he has sisters?”
“They always do, don’t they?”
Michael shrugged again. “They were perfectly decent to me. But enough about me, what is going on between you and Mr. Somerset?”
Miraculously she did not spill her tea all over the small table. That was another trouble with such elderly children. They saw and heard far too much. She looked to make sure the door to the parlor was firmly closed before taking refuge in the present tense he’d employed.