“He was quite handsome,” Eloise said, even though she could barely see him in the dim light. She motioned to the picture to the right. “Is that your father?”
Phillip nodded once, curtly, the corners of his lips tightening.
“And where are you?” she asked, sensing that he didn’t wish to talk about his father.
“Over here, I’m afraid.”
Eloise followed his direction to a portrait of Phillip as a young boy of perhaps twelve years, posing with someone who could only have been his brother.
His older brother.
“What happened to him?” she asked, since he had to be dead. If he lived, Phillip could not have inherited his house or baronetcy.
“Waterloo,” he answered succinctly.
Impulsively, she placed her hand over his. “I’m sorry.”
For a moment she didn’t think he was going to say anything, but eventually he let out a quiet, “No one was sorrier than I.”
“What was his name?”
“George.”
“You must have been quite young,” she said, counting back to 1815 and doing the math in her head.
“Twenty-one. My father died two weeks following.”
She thought about that. At twenty-one, she was supposed to have been married. All young ladies of her station were expected to have been married by then. One would think that would confer a measure of adulthood, but now twenty-one seemed impossibly young and green, and far too innocent to have inherited a burden one had never thought to receive.
“Marina was his fiancée,” he said.
Her breath rushed over her lips, and she turned to him, her hand falling away from his. “I didn’t know,” she said.
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Here, would you like to see her portrait?”
“Yes,” Eloise replied, discovering that she did indeed wish to see Marina. They had been cousins, but distant ones, and it had been years since they’d visited with one another. Eloise remembered dark hair and light eyes—blue, maybe—but that was all. She and Marina had been of an age, and so they had been thrust together at family gatherings, but Eloise didn’t recall their ever having very much in common. Even when they were barely older than Amanda and Oliver, their differences had been clear. Eloise had been a boisterous child, climbing trees and sliding down banisters, always following her older siblings, begging them to allow her to take part in whatever they were doing.
Marina had been quieter, almost contemplative. Eloise remembered tugging on her hand, trying to get her to come outside and play. But Marina had just wanted to sit with a book.
Eloise had taken note of the pages, however, and she was quite convinced that Marina never moved beyond page thirty-two.
It was a strange thing to remember, she supposed, except that her nine-year-old self had found it so astounding—why would someone choose to stay inside with a book when the sun was shining, and then not even read it? She’d spent the rest of the visit whispering with her sister Francesca, trying to figure out just what it was that Marina was doing with that book.
“Do you remember her?” Phillip asked.
“Just a little,” Eloise replied, not sure why she didn’t wish to share her memory with him. And anyway, it was the truth. That was the sum of her recollections of Marina—that one week in April over twenty years earlier, whispering with Francesca as Marina stared at a book.
Eloise allowed Phillip to lead her over to Marina’s portrait. She had been painted seated, on some sort of ottoman, with her dark red skirts artfully arranged about her. A younger version of Amanda was on her lap, and Oliver stood at her side, in one of those poses young boys were always forced to assume—serious and stern, as if they were miniature adults.
“She was lovely,” Eloise said.
Phillip just stared at the image of his dead wife, then, almost as if it required a force of will, turned his head and walked away.
Had he loved her? Did he love her still?
Marina should have been his brother’s bride; everything seemed to suggest that Phillip had been given her by default.
But that didn’t mean he didn’t love her. Maybe he had been secretly in love with her while she had been engaged to his brother. Or maybe he had fallen in love after the wedding.
Eloise stole a look at his profile as he stared sightlessly at a painting on the wall. There had been emotion on his face when he had looked at Marina’s portrait. She wasn’t sure what he had felt for her, but it was definitely still something. It had only been a year, she reminded herself. A year might make up the official period of mourning, but it wasn’t very long to get past the death of a loved one.
Then he turned. His eyes hit hers, and she realized she’d been staring at him, mesmerized by the planes of his face. Her lips parted with surprise, and she wanted to look away, felt as if she ought to blush and stammer at having been caught, but somehow she could not. She just stood there, transfixed, breathless, as a strange heat spread across her skin.
He was ten feet away, at the very least, and it felt as if they were touching.
“Eloise?” he whispered, or at least she thought he did. She saw his lips form the word more than she actually heard his voice.
And then somehow the moment was broken. Maybe it was his whisper, maybe the creak of a windblown tree outside. But Eloise was finally able to move—to think—and she quickly turned back to Marina’s portrait, firmly affixing her gaze on her late cousin’s serene face. “The children must miss her,” Eloise said, needing to say something, anything that would restart the conversation—and restore her composure.
For a moment Phillip said nothing. And then, finally: “Yes, they’ve missed her for a long time.”
It seemed to Eloise a rather odd way to phrase it. “I know how they feel,” she said. “I was quite young when my father died.”
He looked over at her. “I didn’t realize.”
She shrugged. “It’s not something I talk about a great deal. It was a long time ago.”
He crossed back to her side, his steps slow and methodical. “Did it take you very long to get over it?”
“I’m not certain it’s something you ever do get over,” she said. “Completely, that is. But no, I don’t think about him every day, if that’s what you want to know.”
She turned away from Marina’s portrait; she’d been focusing on it for too long and was beginning to feel oddly intrusive. “I think it was more difficult for my older brothers,” she said. “Anthony—he is the eldest and was already a young man when it happened—had a particularly difficult time with it. They were very close. And my mother, of course.” She looked over at him. “My parents loved each other very much.”
“How did she react to his passing?”
“Well, she cried a great deal at first,” Eloise said. “I’m sure we weren’t meant to know. She always did it in her room at night, after she thought we were all asleep. But she missed him dreadfully, and it couldn’t have been easy with seven children.”
“I thought there were eight of you.”
“Hyacinth was not yet born. I believe my mother was eight months along.”
“Good God,” she thought she heard him murmur.
Good Godwas right. Eloise had no idea how her mother had managed.
“It was unexpected,” she told him. “He was stung by a bee. A bee. Can you imagine that? He was stung by a bee, and then— Well, I don’t need to bore you with the details. Here,” she said briskly, “let us leave. It’s too dark in here to see the portraits properly, anyway.”
It was a lie, of course. It was too dark, but Eloise couldn’t have cared less about that. Talking about her father’s death always made her feel a bit strange, and she just didn’t feel like standing there surrounded by paintings of dead people.
“I should like to see your greenhouse,” she said.
“Now?”
Put that way, it did seem an odd request. “Tomorrow, then,” she said, “when it’s light.”
His lips curved into a hint of a smile. “We can go now.”
“But we won’t be able to see anything.”
“We won’t be able to see everything,” he corrected. “But the moon is out, and we’ll take a lantern.”
She glanced doubtfully out the window. “It’s cold.”
“You can take a coat.” He leaned down with a gleam in his eye. “You’re not afraid, are you?”
“Of course not!” she retorted, knowing he was baiting her but falling for it, anyway.
He quirked a brow in a most provoking manner.
“I’ll have you know I’m the least cowardly woman you’re ever likely to encounter.”
“I’m sure you are,” he murmured.
“Now you’re being patronizing.”
He did nothing but chuckle.
“Very well,” she said gamely, “lead the way.”
“It’s so warm!” Eloise exclaimed as Phillip shut the greenhouse door behind her.
“It’s actually usually warmer than this,” he told her. “The glass allows the sun to warm the air, but except for this morning, it’s been quite overcast for the past few days.”
Phillip often visited his greenhouse at night, toiling by the light of a lantern when he could not sleep. Or, before he’d been widowed, to keep him busy so that he would not consider entering Marina’s bedchamber.
But he had never asked anyone to accompany him in the dark; even during the day, he almost always worked alone. Now he was seeing it all through Eloise’s eyes—the magic in the way the pearlescent moonlight threw shadows across the leaves and fronds. During the day, a walk through the greenhouse wasn’t so very different from a walk through any wooded area in England, with the exception of the odd rare fern or imported bromeliad.
But now, with the cloak of night playing tricks on the eyes, it was as if they were in some secret, hidden jungle, with magic and surprise lurking around every corner.
“What is this?” Eloise asked, peering down at eight small clay pots, arranged in a line across his workbench.
Phillip walked to her side, absurdly pleased that she seemed truly curious. Most people just feigned interest, or didn’t even bother to pretend and made a quick escape. “It’s an experiment I’ve been working on,” he said, “with peas.”
“The kind we eat?”
“Yes. I’m trying to develop a strain that will grow fatter in the pod.”