Within seconds, a cork popped. Before he could blink, Pru grabbed it and took the first swig.
“No, you’re right,” she told him after a satisfying gulp. “I am ‘tetchy’ about the subject. There is no beloved in Vietnam, though, sorry to report.”
“Really? No grand love blasting away the VC?”
Eyes stinging, Pru shook her head.
“Nope,” she said. “None at all.”
“Thank Christ! That’s a relief. I almost piddled myself. If you haven’t noticed, I’m brilliant at putting my foot in my mouth. I bodge everything. Always.”
“You didn’t ‘bodge’ this,” Pru said. “You simply didn’t know.”
He reached for the bottle but she pulled it back for one more gulp.
“You want to know something funny?” he said as Pru finally relinquished the wine. “When Mrs. Spencer was talking about betrothals … huh.” Win looked pensive for a second. “A discussion not involving domesticated birds. Outstanding. At any rate, as Mrs. Spencer sermonized on the importance of racking up fiancés, she gave you this look.”
“Mrs. Spencer gives me many looks. Eye rolls. Winks. Glowers of spite.”
“This was a conspiratorial look,” Win said. “It made me wonder if that’s why you were here. Figured you’d ditched some poor bloke, a warmonger perhaps, and came to hide out in jolly old England.”
“Well, you were wrong,” Pru said, head weaving. “No jilted fiancés. No ditched warmongers for miles.”
“Damn, I hate to be wrong. Happens far too often.”
A junked fiancé in Vietnam? She should be so lucky.
Pru was the one ditched. Either intentionally or by circumstance, she had been cast off by every single person in her life. Charlie. Her parents. Various aunts and second cousins thrice removed. College friends. Even Charlie’s parents.
Oh, she was faring adequately at the Grange, caught up in the daily tasks of spaniel-grooming and writer-minding. But sometimes in the thick part of the night, when the owls had flown home and the old house stopped chirring, she would find herself panicked, breathless with just how very alone she was.
If she died at the Grange (gunshot wound, tetanus, name your poison) there’d be no place to send her remains. Murray, Edith Junior, Mrs. Spencer, now Win. These, the four measly souls who knew where Pru was. Only two of them were even on her same continent. Only one would bother hassling with the outcome, likely packaging her up with the cats.
“Put a smile on that mug, Miss Valentine,” Win said, discomforted by seeing someone more sullen than he. “Chin up. It’ll be okay.”
Pru pondered what Win might think if he knew the pictures playing in her mind. Dead cats. Obliterated fiancés. Her body parts boxed and stored away.
“I’m sure one day it will be okay,” she said, unconvincingly. “I’m just not there yet. So is there more wine? I feel like this bottle is smaller than the last.”
Win thought then that he probably should’ve kept the bird from the booze. Pru was young and fresh livered, her ability to battle alcohol’s dispiriting qualities heretofore untested. He was corrupting the only decent creature in the whole bloody place.
“Oh, Miss Valentine,” he said and uncorked a third bottle, healthy livers and bad influences be damned. “You’re a beautiful girl. There will be plenty of blokes to eighty-six in your future. Having been on the receiving end of many such exchanges, I know of what I speak.”
He inspected the wine before passing it to Pru.
“It’s not that I want to—”
“Think we can get Mrs. Spencer to partake in this swill?” he asked, ripping into her train of thought, ramrodding straight into the progress she was beginning to make toward the truth. “It might get her talking.”
Pru grunted. Mrs. Spencer. Of course. It always went back to The Missing Duchess. There was absolutely nothing else to the man. He was even more pitiful than she first surmised.
“You really are something,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“That was not a compliment.”
Pru snatched the bottle from Win’s hand and took another sip, the heat of the wine continuing to fill her body and mind.
“I don’t get it,” she said after a hard swallow. “Why are you so obsessed with her? Mrs. Spencer. Lady Marlborough. Gladys Deacon. Whatever you want to call her. This is the first you’ve met, right? Technically I’ve known her longer than you have.”
“That’s true. But it feels as though I’ve known her forever.”
“That makes no sense. Also, it’s highly irritating.”
“It’s like this,” he said with a contrived chortle.
Irritating? Was he really that terrible?
“My life’s been filled with these fairy tales,” Win continued. “Countless stories of the legendary Gladys Deacon. In my head, she’s this mythical creature, a chimera-witch hybrid whose powers never waned.”
“Plus she was beautiful,” Pru added. “So that helps.”