Darlington’s expression was one of pure rhapsody. “Ahh . . . the golden age of England, Miss Welles . . . the Renaissance . . . the flowering of literature . . . art for art’s sake. I have so often wondered what it would be like to travel back in time to have such an experience, sharing a bumper with Kit Marlowe in a Deptford tavern . . .”
“In that case, your lordship, you would be hobnobbing with the marginally rich and posthumously famous. Would you still wish to be a nobleman if you were to travel back two hundred years?” C.J. quizzed.
“Given the choice, I firmly believe that no one would elect to live in squalor, even if he is a poet. And for the briefest window of time, Miss Welles, if I may disagree with your assessment of Marlowe’s literary achievements, he was the most celebrated dramatist of the day. ‘Aunt Euphoria,’ ” he called to the dimpled dowager entertaining his blood relation, “will you make a loan to me of your crystal ball so that I may travel back to the Renaissance?”
“Absolutely not, Percy!” his hostess retorted. “The Renaissance the golden age? Pish-tush! Now my salad days were the golden age of England: the Enlightenment—the Age of Reason. Discoveries. Inventions. Art for man’s sake.”
“And the world has gone to the devil ever since,” Augusta concurred. “Look at France.”
“You are sufficiently enlightened then, Lady Oliver?” C.J. asked charmingly.
“It is unwise to bait her,” Darlington warned in a whisper, but his merry expression indicated that he quite enjoyed the young lady’s boldness. “However, on the subject of the French Republic, Aunt Augusta is well aware that we tread common ground.”
“How so, sir?”
“Miss Welles, we have spoken of my predilection for antiquities and touched upon the subject of my pastimes. It is not appropriate for me to venture into a discussion of politics in the presence of a young lady.”
“And why, pray, should I not be entitled to learn more about you, especially on the issue of something which so clearly strikes to the core of your beliefs as a man?”
“Suffice it to say,” Darlington said stiffly, his skin coloring a deep red against the stark white of his starched cravat, “that the French learned everything they know about revolution from the Americans!”
The earl’s jingoistic ignorance both shocked and surprised her. “I don’t believe they ever used guillotines in America, your lordship!” C.J. countered. He had been right. One passionate political remark and a barricade had been erected between them that threatened to unduly mar an otherwise charming acquaintance.
“It was not enough for them to take up arms against their sovereign,” Darlington continued hotly. “But the infant nation of heathens and savages had to pour their democratic pestilence into the ear of England’s other enemy . . . dispatching traitors like Jefferson and Franklin to Paris with the hope of winning converts to their perverted brand of government. And they found them—in Marat, Danton, Robespierre!”
C.J. drew in a slow, measured breath and counted to five before speaking, the better to control her temper. “I think . . . perhaps . . . it is an exaggeration on your lordship’s part to intimate that Thomas Jefferson played Claudius to the French monarchy’s Old Hamlet. In fact it was Jefferson himself who said that when you consider the character which is given America ‘by the lying newspapers of London and their credulous copiers in other countries, when you reflect that all Europe is made to believe we are a lawless banditti, in a state of absolute anarchy, cutting one another’s throats and plundering without distinction,’ how can a reasonable person expect a European to know that in truth, ‘there is not a country on Earth where there is greater tranquility, where the laws are milder or better obeyed, where everyone is attentive to his own business, or meddles less with that of others, and where strangers are better received, more hospitably treated, and with a more sacred respect’?”
The earl allowed the young woman to deliver her defense of America by proxy before issuing his challenge. “Have you been in France, Miss Welles?” Darlington asked, his voice rising.
“Well . . .”
“I was! And I saw innocent people—dozens if not hundreds of innocent men, women, and young children . . . babies ripped from their mothers’ arms—taken to the Place de la Concorde and bloodily dispatched with one stroke of a falling blade!”
“Have you ever met an American, your lordship?” C.J. demanded.
“I hope if ever I do, I am wearing a sword or carrying a pistol.”
What colossal bigotry! “You would kill an innocent, and perhaps unarmed, stranger simply because you do not like his kind or his countrymen? And yet you have the audacity to accuse others of barbarism?” C.J. thought the Englishman would spit in disgust right on Lady Dalrymple’s pastoral Aubusson. “Ah yes, ‘Rule Britannia! Britannia rules the waves!’ ” she added in a lilting tone intended to lighten the tenor of the conversation. It occurred to C.J. that her particularly impassioned defense of her own nation was predicated upon wounds inflicted to her homeland that were as fresh as France’s atrocities were to Lord Darlington and that they approached the subject from a chasm more than two hundred years wide. In this world, the Reign of Terror was a recent event, not something consigned, as it was for C.J., to the dusty pages of a distant history.
“Heavens!” Lady Dalrymple exclaimed. “The pair of you! I knew there was a reason gentlemen did not discourse on politics at tea. Percy, you’ll frighten my poor niece out of her wits with talk of heathens and pistols and Frenchmen.”
Offering a polite bow, the nobleman apologized for his outburst. “Forgive me, Miss Welles. It was entirely imprudent
