Ash affected a severe expression, though his eyes were dancing. “I do not scarper on my siblings.”
“We’ll talk,” Sycamore said. “And please give Della my regards.” He went up to the office to retrieve a box, checked his appearance in the cheval mirror, then gathered up hat, gloves, and walking stick and prepared to make a cake of himself.
The fellow who admitted him to the Tavistock town house was young and spry. “Where’s Peem?” Sycamore asked.
“Off to Derbyshire, sir. He’s taking the dower house in hand. Has family in the Peak and was happy to quit London.”
Sycamore passed over his hat and cane and peered past the butler. “I’ll announce myself.” For there was Jeanette across the foyer, amid big copper pots, a liberal sprinkling of dirt, and several large ferns removed from their pottery containers.
“My lady, good day.”
Jeanette popped to her feet and brushed at her skirts. “Mr. Dorning. The hour is early for a social call.”
One knee of her long white apron was damp, and dirt streaked both her hem and her cheek. Her hair was in its tidy chignon, but her hands were gloriously dirty.
To Sycamore, she had seldom looked more wonderful. “You’re repotting the old guard,” he said, stripping off his gloves. “I can help with that. They want room to breathe and grow, but not so much room that they’re lonely.”
“You did not come here to repot ferns, Mr. Dorning.”
Proposing marriage while the butler remained ever so attentively by the front door did struck Sycamore as imprudent.
“I came here to give you the rest of your knives,” Sycamore said, “and to see how you’re getting on. You want to tell me that you are perfectly capable of managing this job on your own, and you are, of course. How about if we send that helpful fellow for a tray, and I simply keep you company while you muck about?”
“Do you want a tray?”
Sycamore stepped closer. “I want to be private with you on any terms I can finagle, even if that means enduring the pretense of the tea tray. I’ve missed you abominably.”
Finally, a smile. A mere seedling of a smile, but all Jeanette. “Feeney, please excuse us.”
The butler bowed and withdrew, bless the fellow.
“Where shall I set these?” Sycamore asked, hefting the knife case.
“May I see them?”
He put the box down on a windowsill. “If you see them, you will want to throw them, and you can’t leave these poor fellows lying about with roots exposed for all the world to see. How are you, my lady?”
She surveyed the foyer, which bore the fecund scents of dirt and greenery. “I felt guilty every time I came in my own door. I imagined the ferns chiding me for my neglect of them, and nobody calls at such an early hour.”
“Friends call at such an early hour,” Sycamore said, unbuttoning his coat. “Friends who need not stand on ceremony. I have your dinner invitation. Is that how we’re to go forward now, Jeanette? An occasional quadrille, all smiles when we encounter each other in the park, and nothing more?”
He draped his coat over the bannister of the curved stairway, slipped his sleeve buttons into a pocket, and turned back his cuffs. Jeanette hadn’t made much progress with her project, but she’d nearly left it too late. Each of the plants showed yellowing foliage, and an abundance of tangled roots conformed to the shape of the old pots.
“I will happily offer you an occasional quadrille or a smile in the park,” Jeanette said, “but I had hoped to offer you a proposition. That invitation was for a private dinner, Mr. Dorning.”
Sycamore did not want another perishing proposition from her. He knelt among the ferns and chose the largest of the lot.
“You got to this fellow just in time,” he said, gently brushing dirt away from the roots. “When the roots in the center go weak, you know the plant’s in distress. He’s still managing, but it’s a near thing. Were you thinking to divide your ferns or simply repot them?”
“I was thinking to offer you one slightly used marchioness,” Jeanette said, coming down beside him. “I was wrong, Sycamore. I should not have tried to manage Beardsley, Jerome, and Viola on my own. I wanted to protect you, Orion, and Tavistock, but I was not thinking clearly.”
Sycamore pried patiently at tightly bound roots, an operation that took all of his focus when Jeanette was kneeling at his side. He detected her jasmine fragrance blending with the earthy scent of the ferns, his new favorite perfume.
“The business wants patience,” he said, untangling roots, “or you do more harm than good. My father claimed the plants preferred to be transplanted at night under a new moon, but how is one to see in such limited light?”
He fell silent lest he descend into outright babbling. The collective fraternal chorus in his head was shouting at him to tell Jeanette he loved her, but listening to what she had to say mattered more.
“I did not want you involved in my messes,” Jeanette said. “I did not want Beardsley to have an excuse to go after you and your club. He threatened to, before you arrived.”
“We should have sent him to darkest Peru,” Sycamore muttered, gently peeling the fern into two halves. Dirt showered the marble floor, and not a little of it got onto Sycamore’s breeches. “When does the great French exodus take place?”
“A fortnight hence. About my proposition?”
He set aside the two halves of the plant and sat back on his heels. “I don’t care to be propositioned, Jeanette.” Not a statement he could have made before he’d started courting her.
“You offered me marriage once.” Jeanette made the observation quietly, very much on her dignity.
“I realize you don’t want to be married, that the old marquess was a horror, the Vincents an embarrassment to the concept of family, and Goddard
