Page 56 of The Number of Love
“Really?” He drank now, chuckling as he did so, then set the glass down with a grin. “And here I wouldn’t have pegged you as a day over two hundred sixty-one.”
A bit of her irritation slipped off her shoulders, blast him. Hewasthe sort of person she liked, if he’d just keep his interest relegated to the confines of friendship. “It is my skin-care regimen, you see. I’m militant about it. It’s all I can ever think about.”
He laughed, splaying a hand over his side as he did so. “Exactly the impression I had of you. Why, it’s certainly all you’ve ever talked about in our previous conversations.”
Her lips pulled up, and her shoulders relaxed a bit. Perhaps she could simply ignore his too-long glances. Pretend his interest was no different from any of the men in Room 40. She’d hate to deprive herself of a friend, after all. “May I ask you a question, since you’re so fond of them?”
His brows lifted. “Of course.”
She nodded in the general vicinity of his face. “How did you break your nose?”
“Ah.” Leaning back in his chair, he seemed to lift his hand experimentally from his injured side. Apparently it passed the test, as he reached for his fork again. He’d eaten only half his food, and everyone else was finishing off their last bites. Perhaps he wasn’t quite as well as he pretended. “Got in a bit of a tussle with some older boys when I was a lad, that’s all.”
“Over what?” Dot, possibly. He seemed the type of brother who wouldn’t mind a few fisticuffs if it meant defending his sister from bullies.
But he didn’t look at his sister. He looked upward, and to the right. “My mother. Or her faith, more precisely. The neighbor lads thought it their Christian duty to throw a few literal stones at her for being Catholic.”
Margot’s blood went hot. In Belgium, everyone belonged to the Catholic church—that was simply the way it was. But when the Germans had invaded, they’d made it clear that part of their hatred was rooted in what they called their different faiths—as if the same Christ had not bled and died for all. “I hope you broketheirnoses too.”
That wasn’t the attitude God would want her to have about it, she knew. No false equations flashed through her mind now to tell her so, but they had often enough before when she’d had such thoughts.
Drake’s grin looked better suited to the lad he had been than the man of twenty-four she knew him to be. “I may have knocked out a few teeth—baby ones, lucky for them. And got in a bit of trouble for it too.”
“I can imagine. Their mothers?”
“No. Mine.”
Margot chuckled. “Our mothers were much alike, I think.” She darted a glance to Lukas, who was smiling across the table at Red Holmes, saying something clever and witty, no doubt. No one would ever know, to look at how the two bantered, that they’d only met the other night, when Lukas happily handed over a suit of clothes that he claimed didn’t fit his current tastes anyway. Rosemary had made a few quick alterations, and the result ... Well, the result was that Dot had been looking at Holmes even when conversation didn’t call for it.
Margot sighed. Whether to him or someone else, Dot would no doubt marry within a year or two. She’d move off into the world of housewives and mothers. Margot would shift into academia. Would they still be friends, when Dot was set on multiplying and Margot on limits? Simple arithmetic and calculus may have had a bit in common, but the one didn’t necessarily understand the other.
Drake leaned closer. Not by much, just an inch and a half, but it brought her gaze back to his face. It was serious now, the blue-grey eyes he shared with Dot absent the spark of jesting that tended to be there whenever he spoke. “I’m sorry, Miss De Wilde. For making you think of sad things tonight, when you ought to be celebrating.”
Smile, Maman said in her mind.Reassure him. But she couldn’t. She could only press her lips together and tilt the corners up a stingyfew degrees. “It isn’t your fault. And really, I’ve never understood the need to celebrate another year going by. Age is a pointless measure of who we are, anyway.”
“Oh, here we go.” Willa rolled her eyes, stood—Dot had stood too—and reached for Margot’s empty plate. But despite her words, she was grinning. “You’ve got her started on age. I’m evacuating the table before she makes me feel alternately like an old biddy and like a child.”
“It’s a valid complaint!” One she could fall back on easily now, rather than lapsing into a silent contemplation of how much she missed Maman. How empty her flat was every single day. How tired she was growing of sandwiches and toast, and the fact that there was no one to share anything more interesting with. “Our number of years is completely irrelevant when it comes to our life experiences and our mental age. An eight-year-old who has lived on the street for years already, for instance, is hardly the sameageas a pampered child of a lord on a manor in the country.”
The point she had made to Willa, who had found herself on the streets when she was six.
“True enough.” Drake rested his arm on the table in a way that would have made Maman scold her had Margot done it. But then, she had a feeling Drake did it to try to alleviate the discomfort in his side. Maman likely would have let that one pass. “But your early life was not the sort to demand you grow up quickly, was it?”
She arched a brow. “Perhaps not in terms of loss and hardship. But I was attending my father’s university when I was twelve. I could out-think and out-reason adults old enough to be my parents and grandparents. Yet they dismissed me solely because I was still in short dresses. It was infuriating.”
No one else at the table was paying her a bit of attention—they were all helping to clear the dishes away, laughing about something else.
Drake didn’t seem inclined to move yet though. He studied her. Not like he’d been doing before, but for an actual purpose this time. Or so it seemed to her. “I imagine it would have been.”
She leaned back in her chair. “I spent my last years in Belgium wishing I were older simply so that people would stop treating me like a child—I didn’t feel like a child.” Other than a few rather childish reactions to the Germans, of course. But plenty of adults fell prey to those as well. She summoned up another fraction of a smile. “And then my first years here needing to pretend to be older so that I could work in Room 40. So age really doesn’t mean much to me. I feel as though I’ve been eighteen for years already.”
“Eighteen, is it?” His grin smacked of victory. And the teasing light returned to his eyes. “I would have guessed older. Not a thing I’d usually dare say to a female, but in light of our current conversation...”
Margot grinned back. “You can say you thought me forty, and I’d only thank you.”
He chuckled—bracing his side again as he did so. He was probably tiring after sitting so long on that hard chair. But he was an adult. If he was tired, he could move. “We’ll stick with eighteen. Solely because I’m rather fond of the number.” His gaze flicked to the others, none of whom were paying them a bit of attention. Still, he dropped his voice down as if in conspiracy when he said, “It wasmynumber, you see. In Spain. Agent Eighteen.”
“It was...” Her smile froze. Her blood froze. Her very heart froze, and she could only stare at him. “You?You are Eighteen?”
