How odd that such blunt speech comforted. “You are attempting to talk sense to me. I appreciate that far more than telling me not to worry.”
“Could your brother be of any use?”
The question was posed with a studied casualness, though the suggestion made sense. Marriage created family connections, and in earlier years, Rye and Trevor had developed a passing cordial acquaintance.
“My brother is more in need of help than he is capable of giving it, I’m afraid. The extent to which Rye has kept his distance from me appalls me, but I conclude that he has his reasons.”
Mr. Dorning held the dining room door for her and ushered her into a cozy parlor lightly fragranced with lemon blossoms.
“This is lovely,” she said, for the table was elegantly set, the lemon blossoms forming a low centerpiece among lit candles and gleaming silver warming dishes.
“Please have a seat,” Mr. Dorning said, pulling out the chair closest to the hearth. “And tell me more of your brother. Is he that far sunk into scandal that he’s protecting you by keeping his distance?”
Jeanette sat and draped her table napkin across her lap. “The old Rye would do that, but the man who came home from the war… I hardly know him, and I miss my brother terribly.”
Mr. Dorning took a seat at her right hand and patted her arm. “Family is the very devil. I troubled myself to learn of your brother’s direction. You could call on him.”
He poured Jeanette a glass of white wine, twisting his wrist just so to prevent any drops from running down the side of the bottle.
“I know his direction, but I haven’t toured the surrounds lest he catch me at it. I gather the neighborhood is decent?”
Mr. Dorning poured himself half a glass. “Decent, yes, though colorful around the edges. Perfectly acceptable for a bachelor. Perhaps you and Tavistock could call upon him together. My experience of young men is that they need badly to feel useful. My oldest brother saw that and cast his younger siblings out into the world to find the places where we could make a contribution. We have all come out the better for being evicted from the ancestral pile.”
Jeanette tasted her wine, a delightful, slightly dry Riesling would be her guess. “But you are homesick, aren’t you?”
Mr. Dorning picked up his wineglass, and the picture he made, lounging elegantly, expression slightly wistful, hair not quite perfectly combed, made Jeanette hungry for sustenance other than food.
“I am worse than homesick,” he said, sipping his wine. “I am nostalgic. I was a miserable boy, always getting into scrapes, spying on my siblings, stealing from them and having my larceny flung in my face at dinner. I was possessed by a mischief demon, probably trying to get myself noticed by my parents, a futile endeavor. My mother referred to me as ‘that dreadful imp.’ If my father called me by name, he had to first fumble through a litany of wrong guesses—‘Valerian, Ash, Oak, I mean, Sycamore, dammit, boy…’”
“And you miss those days now?”
“No, but I miss something about them, something about being part of a family that had a place, however awkward, for even a dreadful imp of a boy.”
“I can see that boy in you,” Jeanette said as Mr. Dorning ladled a creamy hot soup into a bowl. “You are too smart for your own good, and you have a wicked sense of humor.”
He set the steaming bowl before her—not too full, but enough to take the edge off an appetite—and ladled himself a similar portion.
“And your sense of humor is not wicked?” he asked.
Jeanette tried a spoonful of soup and found that it went exquisitely with the wine. A vichyssoise, whether hot or cold, could be little more than leeks and cream, but in this recipe, the leeks were either absent or too subtle to be detected.
“My sense of humor used to be wicked, and then I was married off at seventeen to Lord Tavistock. The joke was on me.”
“Tell me about that,” Mr. Dorning said, picking up his spoon.
As the meal progressed, Jeanette did tell him, though the topic did not qualify as polite.
She told Mr. Dorning about Tavistock choosing her from a list, not bothering to court her beyond a few public gestures, and explaining to her on their wedding night that her sole redeeming feature was her womb, which he intended to fill as often as possible with healthy boy babies.
“I was a crashing disappointment as a marchioness,” Jeanette concluded, as Mr. Dorning retrieved a tray of brie and fruit from the sideboard. The presentation was a beautiful arrangement of dried apricots, pear slices, and raspberries, all arranged around the cheese and a little white ceramic pot of honey. The finishing touch was a raspberry sauce artfully drizzled over the whole, with more held in another little white ceramic pot. “This is almost too pretty to eat.”
Mr. Dorning resumed his seat and took up a cheese knife. “I gather Tavistock was an even worse disappointment as a husband?” He held up the knife, which bore on the end a dried apricot smeared with pale cheese, a skein of honey across both.
Jeanette steadied Mr. Dorning’s hand with her own and took the treat with her mouth, suggesting the excellent selection of wines had made her a bit tipsy.
“A wealthy, titled marquess cannot be a disappointing husband,” Jeanette said. “The most excellent authority on the subject assured me of that.”
“Meaning Tavistock himself,” Mr. Dorning replied, smearing brie on a sliced pear. “Did you kill him?”
From Sycamore Dorning, at the end of a good meal and a bad throwing session, the question was merely conversational.
“I was too busy praying for conception to plan murder. Praying for conception and enduring the necessary preliminaries. I ought not to have said that, but I gather you are hard to shock.”
“Nearly impossible.”
