Page 20 of And Then There Was the One
Papa and Sebastian proceeded to fall into a lengthy conversation in which they compared colleges (King’s versus St. John’s) and reminisced about May Balls and afternoons spent punting on the Cam. Georgie and Abigail exchanged weary looks and dedicated themselves to their cocktails.
“Did you never think to attend, then, Georgie, old bean?” Sebastian asked sometime later, drawing Georgie out of her thoughts with a start.
“What?” she asked blankly, staring at him.
“Or Miss Abigail, of course,” he added with a polite nod at her sister. “Attend one of the women’s colleges, I mean,” he clarified, seeing that she was still regarding him with confusion. “Girton, perhaps. Or Newnham.”
“No,” Georgie said shortly. “I couldn’t possibly leave Papa and Abigail.”
“And I was never all that good at schoolwork,” Abigail said, not looking remotely bothered by this. “It was all right at ourboarding school, but a Cambridge education would be wasted on me.”
“However,” Georgie said quickly, spotting an opportunity, “Abigail may still leave the village—she’s been invited to spend the summer with our aunt in London.” Perhaps the presence of a handsome man from the capital would make the prospect seem more appealing to her sister.
Abigail’s face darkened like a sudden storm cloud. “Nothing’s been decided yet,” she said shortly. “You’re not the only person who has responsibilities here, you know. I’m on the fete planning committee, and I wouldn’t like to abandon them—the other ladies don’t have quite the flair for the dramatic that I do, and I really think the quality of our fetes would suffer if I were to leave.”
Georgie set down her glass. “Aunt Georgiana has already said that you’re welcome to stay with her,” she said with a frown. “There’s no reason you should be dillydallying about letting her know if you’re coming.”
“If you’re so eager for one of us to spend the summer with her,” Abigail said, a definite edge creeping into her voice, “then why don’tyougo to visit instead?”
“Because I’m needed here,” Georgie said, which she thought should have been obvious. Did Abigail not realize who kept the house running? Who ensured that Mrs. Fawcett was paid on time? That local boys from the village were hired each spring and summer to help with the landscaping around the ever-more-overgrown Radcliffe Hall? The surrounding farmland had been sold off decades earlier, so at least she didn’t have to worry about tenant farmers, although the income wouldhave been welcome. Did Abigail not notice the number of villagers who sought her out, asking her advice on matters ranging from the keeping of bees to the timing of their milk deliveries to the changes to the bus schedule to Cheltenham? And what of the three—three!—murders that Georgie had solved in the past year?
Abigail seemed unmoved by this explanation. “Of course you are,” she said coolly, and then turned to their father and determinedly commenced a surprisingly detailed discussion of the mechanics of bell-ringing inThe Nine Tailors, the latest novel by Dorothy Sayers, which both had evidently read for Miss Halifax’s murder mystery book club at the library. (Georgie harbored a dark suspicion that, under other circumstances, both Papa and Abigail would be Murder Tourists.)
Sebastian turned to Georgie. “Didn’t mean to strike a nerve,” he said, sipping his drink with apparent satisfaction.
Georgie sighed. “It was my fault—it’s a bit of a sore subject between us. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“It can be like that sometimes,” he said contemplatively, popping the maraschino cherry from his drink into his mouth. “With siblings, I mean.”
Just then, Mrs. Fawcett poked her head in to announce dinner, and in the rush of draining the dregs of their cocktails and moving to the door, Georgie let her conversation with Sebastian drop. But she couldn’t help thinking, as they walked to the dining room, that when he spoke of siblings, there had been a slightly bitter edge to his voice.
But what on earth, she wondered, could a man like this have to be bitter about?
The next morning dawned as a perfect example of an English summer day—in other words, it was wet and chilly.
Georgie cast a gloomy look out the window as she dressed in a serviceable brown wool jumper and, after a moment’s thought, a pair of tweed trousers that she usually wore only when working in the garden, or on one of her long countryside rambles to collect plant specimens; something about Sebastian’s London polish made her want to appear as grubby as possible, out of some innate contrarian streak that she was usually more successful at repressing. She knew that she was not a great beauty like Abigail, and this fact had never bothered her one whit. For someone who spent a considerable amount of her time outdoors and in less-than-clean surroundings, clothing had always seemed like something of an afterthought, though she was conscious of her family’s position within the village and tried to present an at least somewhat respectable figure.
However, she had never felt so acutely conscious of her own aesthetic appeal—or lack thereof—as she did with Sebastian. Her mind kept returning to the moment the day before when he had called her pretty—whatever could he have meant by it? Was he mocking her? For all his flaws, he didn’t seem unkind, so somehow, she didn’t think so. But that meant that he must have merely been being polite, she decided.
Because surely he hadn’tmeantit.
Shaking her head at these absurd thoughts, she finished dressing and prepared to head downstairs. Egg, who had a keenear for the sound of raindrops on a roof and precisely nothing else, cracked an eye open, thumped her tail politely by way of saying farewell, and immediately went back to sleep on her cushion. Clearly Georgie would not have any canine company on today’s adventures.
Down in the kitchen, Mrs. Fawcett was stirring a pot of porridge and humming what Georgie thought was a Noël Coward song; Georgie fetched a bowl from the cabinet and helped herself to a large portion of porridge, shamelessly spooning a generous helping of honey on top. Georgie kept hives in a corner of the kitchen garden and sold honey at the Saturday market in the village, as well as in a few of the shops on the high street.
“You’ll rot all your teeth,” Mrs. Fawcett scolded as usual, and as usual, Georgie replied with a cheerful, “And it will have been worth it.”
She carried her bowl upstairs into the dining room—which always seemed particularly absurd in terms of its scale at breakfast time—to find Sebastian attacking a bowl of porridge with great gusto while regaling Papa with the tale of that year’s Oxford-Cambridge boat race.
“… important that the Oxford crew was heavier than the Cambridge crew, on average,” Sebastian was saying as Georgie entered the room, brandishing his spoon for dramatic effect, “and by the time they passed Craven Cottage, I thought Oxford was beginning to look tired, and I turned to old Tuppy and said—far sooner than I should have, I grant you—‘I think Cambridge is going to win this,’ and, by Jove, I was right!”
“An unusual experience for you, no doubt,” Georgie said as she took her seat, and both men turned, startled, evidently not having noticed her entrance amidst Sebastian’s thrilling tale of oar-based drama.
“Morning, Georgie,” Sebastian said cheerfully, scooping up another heaping spoonful of porridge. “I say, have you tried your lovely housekeeper’s porridge? It’s remarkable; I told her, the best porridge I ever tasted was at the most delightful inn in Scotland, directly next door to the mill that produced the oats, and I was under the impression that there was simply something about the Scottish character that lent itself to oat-based goods, but your Mrs. Fawcett should consider donning a kilt and joining that fair nation, because this might be even better.”
Georgie, as so often seemed to be the case when Sebastian was speaking, found herself somewhat at a loss for words, and latched onto one detail the way a drowning man might cling to a life raft. “I do not believe women wear kilts.”
He frowned. “You’re correct, dash it—though I must say that you would look remarkably fetching in one.”
