DOUGLAS QUICKLY ROSE. “Maybella. You are looking fine this morning.”
She looked as she always looked, wearing one of her many pale blue gowns that covered her from throat to toe. She nodded and headed straight to the cinnamon bread. The plate was empty.
Maybella merely held out her hand. With obvious reluctance, perhaps even a small whimper, Simon stuck out his hand. On his palm lay two slices.
She took both slices without a word, sat herself down on the small sofa facing Douglas, and smiled placidly at him.
“Corrie will be down presently,” she said, and proceeded to eat, both men watching her avidly. “I believe she was searching for a stocking.”
“As I was telling Simon, Maybella, you are going to have to take Corrie to London this fall.”
She said matter-of-factly, “I hadn’t informed him of it yet, Douglas, because he would figure a way to get out of it.”
Simon said, “The weather is uncertain in the fall, Maybella. Perhaps Corrie can be presented when the weather is finer, in the summer, perhaps, two or three summers after this one.”
Douglas said, “I have just recalled that the second week of October is always pleasant, Simon, and we will see every balloon ascension during that week. Perhaps several will be held. Trust me.”
Buxted’s throat cleared once again in the doorway. “Miss Corrie is here, my lord, and she is not wearing her breeches. I did not inquire about her stockings as such a query could be taken amiss.”
Since Maybella’s mouth was full, she only nodded. Corrie came into the drawing room dressed in a very old muslin gown the same pale blue as her aunt’s. It needed more petticoats and fewer flounces and perhaps an inch of her neck showing. At least she was straight and tall, her waist small enough to please even Douglas’s mother. On the other hand, probably not.
“Good morning, my lord,” Corrie said and gave Douglas a fine curtsy.
“I taught her to curtsy,” Maybella said, beaming at Corrie as she chewed on the cinnamon bread. “Isn’t that shade of blue particularly fetching on her?”
“It always is on you, my love,” Simon said, eyeing that final slice of cinnamon bread lovingly held in Maybella’s right hand.
Douglas said, “Good morning to you, Corrie. That was a lovely curtsy. You’re tall and that’s excellent. No, straighten your shoulders. That’s right. Never stoop. Small, mincing girls aren’t to any gentleman’s taste, unless he is very short himself. You do not wish to attract a short man, he will make you bow your shoulders. Hmmm, yes, your shoulders are nice.” Douglas rose and made a circuit around her. Her hair was in a single fat braid down her back. “I think with your height you will enhance any gown Madame Jourdan can make for you.”
“I don’t understand why you are examining me, my lord.”
Simon said, “Douglas is going to advise you on clothes, Corrie, for London. He is evidently superior to his wife in this. He is evidently renowned at it. We will listen to him.”
“Pale blue is such a lovely color, don’t you think, Douglas? What a girl needs is blue, a lovely pale blue, I’ve always said.”
“She will have one pale blue gown, Maybella, no more. Your coloring is very different from Corrie’s. Now, you must trust me on this.”
Maybella bit into a slice of cinnamon bread, then said, “Perhaps you are right. Corrie has never had my radiance.”
“Indeed,” said her husband, and pushed his glasses back up.
Maybella, having finished the second slice of cinnamon bread, cleared her throat. “I say, Douglas, why is Jason skulking out there leaning against one of the lime trees on the drive? Or is it dear James? One can never tell since they are like two heads on the same Greek coin.”
Corrie immediately whipped around and skipped to the windows. “It is James, Aunt Maybella. He isn’t doing anything at all.”
“Why is he outside, Douglas?”
Douglas gave Simon a harassed look and said, “Some idiot shot me in the arm yesterday and my sons must need keep me under close watch every waking hour.”
“Such good boys.” Maybella said. “I daresay Corrie would do the same for her Uncle Simon if some idiot shot at him. Do invite him in, Douglas. There isn’t any more cinnamon bread. However, Cook hides food in the expectation that we will have an earthquake or a flood, so Buxted will find something else for James.”
Corrie said, “I have noticed that young men are usually happy to eat anything one throws at them.” She walked to the windows and tapped on the glass. When James looked at her, she waved him in.
He raised a perfect dark eyebrow, and nodded. A moment later, he was making his bows to Lord and Lady Montague.
“So you are protecting your father,” Maybella said, smiling and nodding at the young Adonis who stood before her, all windblown, white-toothed, his lawn shirt open at his throat. “How very lovely. Your father is looking particularly fine this morning, James, don’t you think?”
James, who had known Lord and Lady Montague nearly all his life, nodded and smiled. The overly admiring gleam in Lady Montague’s eyes wiped the smile off James’s face in a hurry. He supposed his father looked fine, but the fact was, his father looked like his father-an aristocrat, tall and lean, silver threaded through his black hair.
“Throw him some food, Buxted,” Corrie said. James turned, eyed her up and down, and said, “Where is Corrie? I would swear I heard her voice, but all I see is a chit with a gown on that’s too short and too tight and comes almost to her chin. Also the color makes her look sallow.”
“I was looking at my eyelashes this morning, James, and they’re quite long. Mayhap even longer than yours.”
Douglas cleared his throat. “Be seated, James. I was about to tell Corrie that you were going to teach her to waltz.”
Lord Montague gave his full attention to his niece and said in an austere voice, “You know, James, Lord Hammersmith, is a young man of excellent parts, Corrie. He was quite the scholar at Oxford, fast becoming an expert on celestial bodies and their movements. In particular he knows all three of Kepler’s laws, the third one, simply stated, is-well I forget-but the fact is that Galileo observed that the moon is not a smooth, polished surface as Aristotle had claimed.”
“He must have had very sharp eyes,” Lady Maybella said.
“No, my dear,” Simon said. “Galileo was using the telescope, just invented by Dutch lens grinders. What was the year, my boy?”
James started to say he didn’t know when he happened to glance at Corrie and saw the sneer on her face.
“It was in the early seventeenth century,” he said.
“A nice guess,” Corrie said. “I don’t believe that you have any comprehension at all about Dutch lens grinders, James. I think you made it up to make yourself look intelligent.”
Maybella said, “James doesn’t need to know about stars and telescopes, Corrie. All he has to do is stand rather still and let everyone look at him.”
Corrie’s sneer was near to overflowing. Truth be told, she knew well enough that James had looked into the heavens since he’d been a boy, studied and learned and built his own telescope, but any chance she could find to bait him wasn’t to be ignored.
James was ready to run out the door, Douglas knew it, but there wasn’t the chance because Simon said, “So you see, James is not too pretty, Corrie. No one can be too pretty who understands Kepler, even though I can’t remember that third law. James has his father’s jaw, which is the most stubborn jaw in all of England. And that little hole in his chin, that’s his father’s as well.”
That was true, Douglas thought, pleased. Not everything on his face belongs to Melissande.
Simon bent then to pick up a journal off the pile on the floor beside his chair, and paged to an article titled The Workings of Black Air During an Eclipse.