Amy launched into plan B. She squared her shoulders and looked directly at her uncle. “Uncle Bertrand, I am going to France. If I cannot leave with your assent, I shall leave without it.” She braced herself for argument.
“Feisty one, ain’t she!” Mr. Meadows declared approvingly. “Would’ve thought the French line would weaken the blood,” he continued, eyeing Amy as though she were a ewe at market.
“The dam’s line bred true! You can see it in my girls, too, eh, Marcus? Good Hereford stock.” It was highly unclear whether Uncle Bertrand was referring to his niece, his sheep, his daughters, or all three.
“Bought a ram from Hereford once . . .”
“Ha! That’s nothing to the ewe I purchased from old Ticklepenny. Annabelle, he called her. There was a look in her eye . . .” Uncle Bertrand waxed lyrical in the candlelight.
The conversation seemed on the verge of degenerating into a nostalgic catalog of sheep they had known and loved. Amy was mentally packing for a midnight flight to the mail coach to Dover (plan C), when Jane’s gentle voice cut through the listing of ovine pedigrees.
“Such a pity about the tapestries,” was all she said. Her voice was pitched low, but somehow it carried over both the shouting men.
Amy glanced sharply at Jane, and was rewarded by a swift kick to the ankle. Had that been a “say something now!” kick, or a “be quiet and sit still” kick? Amy kicked back in inquiry. Jane put her foot down hard over Amy’s. Amy decided that could be interpreted as either “be quiet and sit still” or “please stop kicking me now!”
Aunt Prudence had snapped out of her reverie with what was nearly an audible click. “Tapestries?” she inquired eagerly.
“Why, yes, Mama,” Jane replied demurely. “I had hoped that while Amy and I were in France we might be granted access to the tapestries at the Tuilleries.”
Jane’s quiet words sent the table into a state of electric expectancy. Forks hovered over plates in midair; wineglasses tilted halfway to open mouths; little Ned paused in the act of slipping a pea down the back of Agnes’s dress. Even Miss Gwen stopped glaring long enough to eye Jane with what looked more like speculation than rancor.
“Not the Gobelins series of Daphne and Apollo!” cried Aunt Prudence.
“But, of course, Aunt Prudence,” Amy plunged in. Amy just barely restrained herself from turning and flinging her arms around her cousin. Aunt Prudence had spent long hours lamenting that she had never taken the time before the war to copy the pattern of the tapestries that hung in the Tuilleries Palace. “Jane and I had hoped to sketch them for you, hadn’t we, Jane?”
“We had,” Jane affirmed, her graceful neck dipping in assent. “Yet if Papa feels that France remains unsafe, we shall bow to his greater wisdom.”
At the other end of the table, Aunt Prudence was wavering. Literally. Torn between her trust in her husband and her burning desire for needlepoint patterns, she swayed a bit in her chair, the feather in her small silk turban quivering with her agitation. “It surely can’t be as unsafe as that, can it, Bertrand?” She leaned across the table to peer at her husband through eyes gone near-sighted from long hours over her embroidery frame. “After all, if dear Edouard is willing to take responsibility for the girls . . .”
“Edouard will take very good care of us, I’m sure, Aunt Prudence! If you’ll just read his letter, you’ll see—ouch!” Jane had kicked her again.
“You know I don’t hold with gadding about with foreigners,” Uncle Bertrand was saying with a forbidding shake of his wineglass. “Why your sister ever . . .”
“Yes, yes, dear, I know, but that’s all past, and Edouard is our nephew.”
Amy clenched her hands in her lap. It took all of her willpower not to speak; she could feel her chest heave with the effort of containing the angry words. Noticing, Jane gave her a small, warning shake of the head. Noticing something else entirely, Derek leered at Amy’s décolletage. Amy glared at Derek. Derek failed to notice. His eyes, after all, were not on Amy’s face.
“. . . just for a few weeks.” As Aunt Prudence’s words drifted past her, Amy realized she had missed a couple of rounds of the conversation. “It’s not that terribly far, and we can fetch them back if there’s any trouble.”
Uncle Bertrand, Amy noticed, with the dawning of delight, was visibly weakening. He was regarding Aunt Prudence across the table in a rather bemused way. In a younger man, Amy would have called the look besotted. As for Aunt Prudence, if she had been a younger woman, Amy would have termed her expression positively coquettish! Her head was tilted at its most becoming angle, and she was smiling fondly at Uncle Bertrand. Amy’s twelve-year-old cousin Ned looked horrified.
So did Derek. His head swiveled anxiously back and forth from one to the other. “You can’t mean to let them go!” he yelped, adding belatedly, “sir,” as Uncle Bertrand dragged his eyes away from Aunt Prudence.
Mrs. Meadows’s lips narrowed into a tight line. To Aunt Prudence, she said, “You won’t be able to send the girls off for months, anyway, I suppose. You’ll have to hire a proper chaperone, and that can take quite some time. Good duennas are so hard to find these days.”
“I’m sure Edouard has a chaperone waiting for us in Paris,” Amy said hastily. “If we left immediately—”
“But who is to travel with you?” Mrs. Meadows drew herself up and cast a censorious eye across the table at Amy. “You and Jane cannot think of traveling alone! Two delicate young ladies at the mercy of ruffians and highwaymen!”
“You could send a manservant with us, couldn’t you, Uncle Bertrand?” Amy asked her uncle. “To fight off all the highwaymen?”
Derek slumped down in his chair, an unattractive pout blowing out his thick lips.
Mrs. Meadows redoubled her efforts. “Think of your reputations!” she howled.
“I suppose I shall have to advertise,” sighed Aunt Prudence.
“You shall have to,” Mrs. Meadows declared officiously. “There’s really no other alternative.”
Amy wondered if she would be able to make the midnight mail coach if she crept out of her room by eleven.
“I shall chaperone them.”
Ten heads (Ned was still involved in coaxing the remains of his vegetables down Agnes’s back) turned to stare at Miss Gwen in astonishment. Ten mouths opened at once.
“When can we leave? I can be finished packing by tomorrow morning!” Amy shouted gleefully above the din.
In the hullabaloo, nobody even noticed when Agnes clapped a hand to the back of her neck, shrieked, shook Ned by the collar until he turned a rich shade of purple, and fled from the room scattering small green blobs.
Still calmly cutting her meat, Miss Gwen stared down the various speakers one by one. “You may be assured, Prudence, I shall keep a close eye on Jane and Amy. As for you, Miss Amy, you may be packed, but I am not.”
Miss Gwen speared a pea with military precision.
“We leave in two weeks.”
Chapter Four
At the sound of the door cracking against the wall, Richard automatically whirled toward the entrance, his whole body tensing for trouble. Blast it all, nobody was supposed to be on the packet from Dover to Calais but him. Ten crowns he had pressed into the hands of the rather oily-looking captain, ten crowns of good British sterling, with another five promised upon arrival. The captain had assured him that the boat would be his alone and would set sail at the next promising gust of wind, instead of lolling about for a week, waiting for passengers.
So who was banging doors? The sound of oak bashing oak, in his experience, generally preceded flying chairs, toppling candlesticks, snarled oaths in three languages, and, if one were really unlucky, the acrid smoke of powder from a pistol. The cabin of a Channel boat was a damnable place to be ambushed. The ceiling was too low for a man to stand and fight properly. And if the bloody boat began swaying . . . Richard winced at the prospect. It could lend a whole new aspect to fencing. Richard whirled towards the door in a grim frame of mind.