Page 29 of To Swoon and to Spar
“That sort of thing” being narrow, winding cobblestone streets lined by whitewashed buildings set into a steep hillside that descended to a small cove. It was the sort of place where everyone knew everyone else, where families had run the same shops for generations, where it was impossible to so much as walk down the street without getting sucked into a series of seemingly endless exchanges of pleasantries and gossip.
It was, in other words, Jane’s nightmare.
It was also entirely counterproductive to her purposes at the house. How much better it would have served her plans had St. Anne’s been a grim, eerie sort of place, populated by buildings exclusively made of gray stone, plagued by a mysterious, improbably omnipresent mist. Instead, it looked downright cheerful today; the sun had even been disobliging enough to put in an appearance after the morning’s clouds. An implausibly adorable, rotund cat sat in a shopwindow, flanked by apair of oversize, exceptionally fluffy kittens. Somewhere, someone was baking something that smelled of cinnamon and sugar. Jane heard the distinct sound of a child’s delighted giggle. A church bell chimed the quarter hour.
This was all highly distressing.
“Atmosphere,” she muttered mournfully as she trailed her husband down one of the inconveniently picturesque streets. “What does one have to do to get a bit ofatmospherearound here?”
“Did you say something, Jane?” Penvale asked, turning; seeing that she’d fallen behind, he paused, extending an arm as she reached his side. She took it reluctantly, determined not to notice its reassuring strength under her hand. Howdareanything about him be reassuring? The nerve of the man.
“Nothing,” she assured him sweetly, which—in a credit to his intelligence, inconvenient as that particular trait might be—he appeared to find unsettling.
“Are you all right?” he inquired as they paused to look at hats on display in a shopwindow. “You look a bit unwell.”
“Perfectly fine,” she said through gritted teeth, attempting something approaching a smile—an attempt that was evidently unsuccessful, as he paled slightly at the sight.
“I think frowning might be your best option, if that’s what one of your smiles looks like.”
“Lovely,” she muttered, and that was the last word she spoke for quite some time as Penvale commenced their tour of the village.
At first it was tolerable. Jane would never use the word “charming” to describe Penvale—he was lacking in a certain easiness, a particular gleam in his eye and lilt to his smile. But he was compelling all the same, she realized. He spoke politely to everyone they met, realwarmth evident in his voice, and he listened carefully to questions, answering as best he could any concerns they raised. She wondered that she had ever thought him a typical overly smooth aristocrat; there was nothing in his manner that suggested he thought himself superior to any of the villagers. He made no effort to hold himself at a remove, as might have been expected of a haughty lord from town.
At one point, a young mother struggling to wrangle a naughty toddler while also juggling an extremely chubby baby unceremoniously plopped said baby into Penvale’s arms while she got a better grip on the would-be escapee. Penvale, who clearly had not been expecting to suddenly have an armful of baby, looked startled. He held the infant out before him and surveyed him.
“How do you do?” he asked the child solemnly.
“Eeeee,” the baby responded.
Penvale looked helplessly at Jane, who shrugged.
“I don’t speak baby,” she told him.
“What am I supposed to do with it?” he asked.
“Try… cuddling it?” she suggested.
The look he gave her implied that she may as well have suggested climbing into bed with a lion, but he gingerly pressed the baby to his chest. He looked at Jane. “Now what?”
“I’ve seen people pat them before,” she said helpfully. “On the back, I believe?” She reached out a finger to stroke the baby’s fuzzy head, which was improbably soft.
Penvale patted the baby gently on the back. The baby made a sort of gurgling noise, which seemed promising.
“I think it likes that,” Jane said encouragingly. A moment later, the baby spit up onto Penvale’s shoulder, and he cast her a look of wounded betrayal as the mother—having wrestled her other childinto submission—rushed back over to reclaim her younger offspring and offer a litany of apologies for the state of Penvale’s jacket, which he waved off with good humor. Once the woman was out of sight, he removed a handkerchief from his pocket and attempted to wipe away the disturbing substance glistening on his shoulder.
“Have I got it all?” he asked, and Jane took the handkerchief from him, standing on her tiptoes to wipe the rest of it away.
“Not the sort of mess that handkerchief usually has to clean up,” he said, giving her a grin that reminded her of the pirates from some of her books, and which made her nearly certain he’d just said something inappropriate that she didn’t understand. She paused to consider the things she had gleaned from her reading and shook her head, reflecting that even those works had occasionally cast a bit of a veil over the proceedings. Sometimes being a woman—or alady,at least—was very tiresome.
She had little time to dwell on this thought, given the whirlwind pace at which Penvale conducted their tour of the village. Following a lengthy conversation with Mrs. Rowe, the widow who ran the bakery and who did not stop badgering Penvale until he professed his preference for cinnamon buns (which she promised to have on offer the following week), Jane watched as Penvale fished a pencil stub and a small notebook out of his jacket pocket. He scribbled something hastily in the notebook.
“What are you writing?” she asked curiously.
“A note to myself to stop by the bakery next week for one of those buns,” he said, pocketing the notebook. Jane looked at him for a long moment and he coughed, seeming almost embarrassed. “If she’s going to the trouble of making them, the least I can do is stop by to purchase a few.”
“You could send someone on staff to do it,” Jane said.
“I could, I suppose,” he agreed, offering her his arm once more.
