Earls Trip

Book 0: Earls Trip

by Jenny Holiday

Genres: Regency Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

Ted Lasso meets Bridgerton for a 19th century spin on The Hangover in USA Today bestselling author Jenny Holiday’s laugh-out-loud bromantic comedy featuring three Regency-era Earls on their annual trip – ride-or-die buddies offering one another unconditional support in everything from Lady problems to family woes.

Even an earl needs his ride-or-dies, and Archibald Fielding-Burton, the Earl of Harcourt, counts himself lucky to have two. The annual trip that Archie takes with his BFFs Simon and Effie holds a sacred spot in their calendars. This year Archie is especially eager to get away until an urgent letter arrives from an old family friend, begging him to help prevent a ruinous scandal. Suddenly the trip has become earls-plus-girls, as Archie’s childhood pals, Clementine and Olive Morgan, are rescued en route to Gretna Green.

This…complicates matters. The fully grown Clementine, while as frank and refreshing as he remembers, is also different to the wild, windswept girl he knew. This Clem is complex and surprising—and adamantly opposed to marriage. Which, for reasons Archie dare not examine too closely, he finds increasingly vexing.

Then Clem makes him an indecent and quite delightful proposal, asking him to show her the pleasures of the marriage bed before she settles into spinsterhood. And what kind of gentleman would he be to refuse a lady?

Release date: April 23, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

What happens on Earls Trip, stays on Earls Trip.

Usually.

In 1821, on the eighth annual Earls Trip, things took a bit of a turn.

When Archibald Fielding-Burton, the Earl of Harcourt, arrived at Number Seven Park Lane to collect his friend, Simon Courteney, the Earl of Marsden, Marsden was waiting in front of his town house.

“Hullo,” Archie said, hopping out of the coach. “Ready?”

“He’s been ready since seven this morning,” said Mr. Janes, Simon’s valet, who was stationed at attention behind his master.

“Of course he has.” Archie shot an affectionate look at Simon, then a placating one at the long-suffering Janes. “Has he also been standing here since seven this morning?” Archie took the valet’s sniff as affirmation. “Poor Janes. Marsden, you ought to wait inside like a properly bred person.”

“Well, remember,” Simon said mildly, “I’m barely a properly bred person.”

Archie chuckled as small muscles in Janes’s jaw visibly tightened. “Mr. Janes, what will you do with yourself for a fortnight without your wayward earl and his wretched wardrobe to wrangle?”

“I look fine,” Simon said, and a muscle in Janes’s jaw twitched.

Strictly speaking, it was true. There was nothing wrong with Simon’s current ensemble or any other in his wardrobe. It was more that he tended toward the bland in all matters material, be they sartorial, culinary, or bodily. He always had. Today he was wearing a pair of buff breeches and a brown coat cut in a style that had been the height of fashion five Seasons ago when he’d ascended the earldom, and his hair . . . Well, his hair was best not discussed. Archie himself was no dandy, but he tried to keep up appearances.

As Janes supervised the loading of a small trunk into the coach, Archie picked up a valise resting on the bottom step of Simon’s house—and nearly tore his arm off. “Oof. What’s in here? Bricks?”

“Books.” Simon climbed into the coach.

“Ah, yes.” Archie was flooded with affection for his friend. Simon was so very much himself. He used to try to smuggle books out of the Winchester College library on term breaks. He was still doing it, apparently.

“Where’s Effie?” Simon asked when Archie joined him inside. “I’d’ve thought you’d have collected him first, as his house is between mine and yours. Now you’ll have to backtrack.”

Simon disliked inefficiency, but perhaps not as much as he appreciated a logical argument, so Archie made one: “Yes, but unlike you, he won’t be ready. He may not even remember that we’re to make the trip at all. Either way, he almost certainly won’t have done his packing. I’d rather go out of my way and have some company for the extraction process, since it’s likely to be laborious.”

“A fair point.” Simon heaved an enormous sigh and slumped back against the squabs.

Archie examined his friend, cataloging the darker-than-usual circles under his eyes and the paler-than-usual cast of his skin. “All right, then?”

“Yes, yes, but I am sorely in need of respite. I’ve been run off my feet of late. I’ve been—” He cut himself off. “It is of no mind.”

Archie smiled. He understood perfectly what Simon meant, because he understood Simon perfectly. The uneasy earl tended to reside in the caverns of his mind and had to be wrenched out of them periodically by his friends, which was a process he both abhorred and relished. It was as if something inside him knew he needed the respite he’d referenced, but something else inside him resisted. He was a man at war with himself. He always had been, and it had only gotten worse since he’d unexpectedly inherited the earldom.

Janes popped his head into the coach and closed his fingers around a stack of newspapers resting on Simon’s lap. “Shall I take these, my lord?”

Simon’s hands flew to the opposite edge of the papers, and a polite tug-of-war ensued.

“It’s no use, Mr. Janes,” Archie said. “He shall have to be weaned slowly from them, like a man from the poppy.”

“Thank you, Janes. That will, uh, be all,” Simon said in the voice he used when he was trying to project authority in the domestic sphere, over the staff who would always think of him as the painfully shy, seldom-seen third son of their late lord. Archie had told Simon a hundred times to use his Parliament voice at home, but somehow Simon didn’t, or couldn’t, and he ended up sounding like a boy playing at manhood.

Janes shot a dismayed look at Archie.

“Worry not, Mr. Janes. I shall keep his lordship in line at the posting inns, and once in Cumbria, we shall be completely alone.” Archie couldn’t wait. Town made him jumpy and irritable. His lungs were crying out for fresh air, his trigger finger was itching for a good hunt, and, not to put too fine a point on it, his soul was in need of a prolonged dose of exposure to his best mates.

Speaking of. One down; time to collect Effie. He rapped on the ceiling, and the coach rumbled off.

“Shall we wager on how long it will take to wrest Effie from his papers?” Archie asked a while later, as they turned onto Berkeley Square. “Or his paints. Or merely the dark depths of his imaginings?” He chuckled. “Surely there will be some manner of wresting required, is my point, and shall we lay a wager on it?”

“I’d have to be bound for Bedlam to take that wager.” Simon bent his head to join Archie in peering out the window at Number Twenty. “God’s teeth! Who’s died?”

“I don’t know!” Archie exclaimed, alarmed. The steps of the town house were strewn with straw and the door bedecked with the black ribbons of mourning.

“You don’t think . . . ?” Simon’s voice reflected the horror that had taken root in Archie’s gut.

“No,” Archie said, though he was all too aware that wishing something weren’t true had no bearing on whether it actually was. “We’d have heard if the earl died,” Archie said to himself as much as to Simon. Effie would have come to them straight away.

It occurred to Archie, though, that someday, the old earl was going to die, and his son, Edward Astley, Viscount Featherfinch, would inherit the earldom. It also occurred to Archie that no one, least of all Effie himself, was prepared for that day. As they approached the door, Archie, trying to regain some equilibrium, said, “I wager it takes us seventy minutes to extract him.”

“Considering that he planned this year’s trip,” Simon said, “I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say three-quarters of an hour.”

“We shall see. Loser sits backward on the journey.”

“If there’s even going to be a journey,” Simon said as the straw crunched beneath their feet. “Someone has clearly died, and we can’t go without Effie.”

“Indeed.” Well, they could. But they wouldn’t. “Then we’re here to pay our respects, I suppose. Still, I maintain he would have told us if something terribly dire had happened.” Although Effie did tend to live in his head. Not in the same manner Simon did. Simon lived inside his Parliamentary arguments; Effie lived inside his daydreams. Whereas Simon could usually be counted on to remember to do things like eat and bathe—he saw them as necessary annoyances—often Effie could not.

Archie’s knock was answered by a footman he did not recognize. The man was not wearing a mourning armband and greeted them as if nothing were amiss.

“We’re here for Featherfinch,” Simon said.

“I’m afraid the viscount is not at home to visitors at the moment.”

“He’s at home to us.” Archie started for the stairs. “He’s expecting us.” Or, rather, he should be.

“I beg your pardon!” the footman called after them.

The housekeeper appeared, no doubt drawn by the commotion. Archie paused in his ascent. “Ah. Mrs. Moyer. We’re here to collect Featherfinch for our trip.”

“Your trip?” she echoed blankly before recovering herself and curtsying to them. “My lords.” That caused the footman to stand straighter.

“Our trip to Cumbria?” Archie tried, though he knew full well what had happened here. Effie hadn’t told any of the household staff, never mind any of his family, about his travel plans.

Mrs. Moyer wrinkled her brow and said, predictably, “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about such a trip, my lord.”

“The trip we take every year the second fortnight in September?” Honestly. Was Effie’s dreaminess like the plague, capable of infecting the rest of the household?

At least Archie was going to win the wager.

“Mrs. Moyer, a good morning to you.” Simon, able to sense Archie’s rising frustration, spoke soothingly to the housekeeper. “May I ask who has passed?”

Mrs. Moyer tilted her head to one side, as if she were searching for words but coming up short. “Perhaps you ought to ask Lord Featherfinch about that.”

“Are the earl and countess well?” Simon pressed.

“Oh yes, quite. They’re at Highworth,” she said, naming the family’s Cornish estate.

“Let’s go.” Archie mounted the stairs and made for Effie’s room, trusting Simon would follow and reflecting on what a poor job the staff was doing keeping people from Effie if they had, in fact, been instructed that he was not at home to visitors.

“Featherfinch!” Simon called as Archie knocked.

Archie, not waiting for a response, pushed open the door. “Unless someone very important has died, you had better be at the ready, or I shall—”

Edward Astley, Viscount Featherfinch and heir to the Earl of Stonely, was not at the ready.

He was also not dressed.

He was seated at his desk, naked as the day he was born, his long hair wild and tangled. “I told you,” he said without turning from where he was madly scribbling with an overlong quill, “I don’t want anything to eat.”

When he received no answer, he turned. An expression of annoyance quickly gave way to one of astonishment as his dark eyebrows climbed his forehead. Next up in the parade of mental attitudes was delight. “Hello! Wait until you lot hear my newest sonnet. It’s only half done, but I am so very pleased with it.”

He started to stand, and Archie turned away, as did Simon. “For God’s sake, cover yourself, man.”

“Oh, yes.” Some rustling and muttering followed. “All right.”

Simon turned to find Effie wearing a dressing gown. Made of pale-pink silk and trimmed with lace at the elbows, it was entirely too small for the towering Effie. The hem came to his knees, and his upper arms strained against the confines of the sleeves. His dark hair hanging loose around his shoulders, together with the pallor of his face against the pink, added an almost otherworldly note to his otherwise comical appearance.

“What in God’s name are you wearing?” Simon asked.

Effie looked down at himself as if he did not know the answer to that question. “Oh. Yes. I had a most unfortunate encounter with some hogweed about a fortnight ago.” He winced. “I developed the most spectacular rash, mostly on my arse. You should have seen it.”

“I thank Heaven I did not,” Simon said drily. “I want to ask how your arse came into contact with hogweed, yet I don’t.”

“Better not to know,” Archie agreed.

“I was painting deep in the woods at Highworth, and it was unreasonably hot,” Effie began, apparently intent on relating the fate of his arse. “And I was very much alone.” He cocked his head. “A silver lining: I have now learned how to identify hogweed, and I shan’t be making that mistake again. As to my present attire, when I got back to the house, I was in terrible pain. The only place I could find a modicum of comfort was the bath, but one cannot live in the bath, though I made a good run at it. Sarah lent me this bloody wonderful thing, and when my rash had healed and I was preparing to head back to Town, I nicked it. You’ve never felt anything so wonderful as silk against your bare skin.”

“Won’t Sarah miss it?” Simon asked, focusing on an inconsequential logistical detail, as was his habit.

“I sincerely doubt it. She has dozens more where this came from.”

It was true. Effie’s sister was very likely responsible for a good portion of her modiste’s annual revenue.

“I tell you, it is a magical garment. I attribute my success with this poem”—Effie gestured with an ink-stained hand at his desk, which was covered with parchment—“to the comfort and freedom it has afforded me.” He tilted his head. “Well, I attribute my success to this garment and to having outfitted the house for mourning.”

“Yes, who died?” Archie inquired.

“Sally,” Effie said quietly.

On the one hand, this was a great relief, for Sally was—had been—Effie’s parrot. On the other, she had been a beloved companion of many years, and to the sensitive Effie, full mourning protocol would not seem unreasonable.

“Oh no, I’m terribly sorry,” Simon said.

“As am I,” Archie said. “Sally was a good bird.”

That was a lie. Sally had never shut up, and she’d never had a kind word to say about anyone. Archie wasn’t going to miss her at all.

“It’s all right,” Effie said stoically. “She was very old, and her death was quick. She was standing on her perch one day last week, squawking happily between bites of beetroot, which was her favorite treat, when she was suddenly transported by some sort of fit. She fell to the ground, spasmed, and went still.” He lowered his voice. “We were in the music room. You should have seen the picture she made against the Axminster carpet. Her vibrant green and yellow feathers, lifeless, against the pinks and reds of the carpet. An almost obscene riot of color, and yet . . . Death comes for us all, does it not? Even the most beautiful among us?” He shook his head. “You really should have seen it.”

Archie could see it. He could see it because Effie could see it. That was Effie’s gift, seeing beauty, or noticing it, when others didn’t. Even when, perhaps especially when, that beauty was overlain by something less pretty.

“I had the house outfitted for mourning, and I came in here and thought about what a good death she’d had. I thought about those colors, and about the black ribbons outside. And I wrote this.” He gestured back to the desk. “I don’t like to boast, but I’m terribly pleased with it.” Effie’s poems, as much as he seemed drawn to creating them, generally caused him a great deal of pain, so this was an unusual sentiment.

“Capital.” Simon pulled out his pocket watch, no doubt concerned about the wager. “Perhaps you can read it to us in the coach.”

“The coach?” Effie echoed blankly.

“We’re going to Cumbria?” Simon prompted.

Effie looked startled, then delighted. “Oh! Is that today?”

“It is indeed,” Archie said, taking in the clothing-strewn bedchamber. When not naked—or wearing his sister’s dressing gown—Effie was a clotheshorse. He was quite the opposite of Simon in that way. Yet nearly all his clothing was black. Archie had once wondered aloud why a person who always wore the same color needed so many different items of clothing in that color. He had received in return an impassioned lecture on cut, seasonality, and fashion. Shot silk, for example, was better suited for a ballroom than, say, sarsenet, as it reflected the light in a way that was both pleasing and mysterious.

What Archie did not see among all the clothing was a trunk or bag of any sort. Indeed, the disarray in the room seemed of the general variety, not the sort that might result from packing for a trip. Archie tamped down a smile; he was going to win the wager.

“Oh good! Sit down!” Effie cried, carelessly shoving a pile of garments and papers off his bed. “Shall I call for tea while I pack? Or perhaps something stronger?”

“No,” Simon said brusquely. “We’re in a hurry. Make haste.”

“On the contrary,” Archie said soothingly to Effie, who had begun imposing a sort of order on the chaos. He glanced at the ormolu clock on Effie’s mantel—and smiled to see the ornate gilded timepiece bedecked with dried roses. “Take your time. You wouldn’t want to forget anything, and I, for one, could do with a nip of brandy.”

Despite his efforts to stall, Archie lost the wager. Effie packed with uncharacteristic expeditiousness, and the three friends climbed into the coach thirty minutes later. Archie took the rear-facing seat, accepting Simon’s triumphant jeer with good humor.

Archie didn’t mind losing. He enjoyed gambling. And riding and boxing and all manner of gentlemanly pursuits. He loved to be active, and he loved to compete. But he had never been overly concerned with winning. This indifference used to drive his father to distraction. But for Archie, the appeal of any pursuit was the experience of it rather than the outcome. Hunting, arguably the greatest of his passions, was about the actual hunt, not the kill. The clean air scouring his nostrils, the focus that always came with physical exertion, the strategy developed among friends with whom he was sharing the day.

Well, no, in the case of hunting, it was also about the outcome: dinner never tasted so good as when one shot it oneself.

But the larger point stood: Archie enjoyed games and contests, but he was not elementally competitive. So he was quite happy for Simon to win their wager, though he played his role and scowled and grumbled over the loss. Truth be told, he was pleased Simon had won, because it meant they’d gotten underway sooner rather than later. There was nothing like an Earls Trip. These two weeks in September were his favorite of the year.

“We wagered on how long it would take to extract you, you know,” Simon said to Effie.

“Did you? Who won?”

“I did,” Simon said with an air of what looked from the outside like haughtiness but Effie and Archie knew was merely Simon’s innate seriousness. He had an earnest nature that was often tinged with worry. Most people didn’t realize that.

“Well, good,” Effie declared. “Archie wins entirely too much. Always has. Remember that archery competition in fifth form?”

Simon snorted. “As if I could forget it. I thought I’d starve to death waiting for it to be over.”

“And then the rain began,” Effie remarked wryly.

The boys were referring to the annual archery contest at school. Perhaps Archie needed to revise his previous thought that he wasn’t naturally competitive. He wasn’t naturally competitive with his friends. But put him in an archery contest where everyone had been eliminated but him and his fifteen-year-old arch-nemesis, the bully Nigel Nettlefell, and he would shoot arrow after arrow into the night, in the middle of a rainstorm, until his arms shook. He would do it again today, had he the chance, purely for the satisfaction of beating that miserable little toad.

“I think,” Archie said, “that I win exactly the right amount. Which is to say frequently.” His friends jeered good-naturedly, and he doubled down. “I do attempt to lose every now and again, mind you, to keep from smothering your spirits.” The pair of them made various noises of disgust. “It must be very trying to always be coming up short around me, so I try to keep myself humble,” he added with an air of exaggerated martyrdom.

Simon sniffed and opened one of his newspapers, which caused Effie to pull out a leatherbound journal. Effie looked like a raven, dark and regal, and Simon like a dunnock, unassuming and brown. Archie tamped down a smile. His air of martyrdom had been just that—an air. In truth, Archie loved his friends in spite of their quirks—because of their quirks—with a depth of feeling that was perhaps unseemly for a grown man. But he didn’t care overmuch about seemliness. A man needed friends in this world, and he had the best of them.

Mind you, he didn’t go around saying any of that. Some sentiments did not lend themselves to earnest declarations.

He allowed Effie and Simon to get lost in their individual pursuits as the cobblestones of Mayfair gave way to the dirt road out of Town. The toast would happen later. He reached for his valise, intending to extract his beads to pass the time, but was greeted by the unwelcome sight of a ragged counterpane. “Bollocks.”

Curious how something could be so familiar yet so unwelcome. Familiar because the bed covering used to be his. He knew the soft silk of the front and the scratchy linen of the back. His fingers used to trace the elaborate pattern of stitching that was meant to keep the wool batting the thing was stuffed with in place while Mother read to him at night. The batting was long since gone, and the silk had faded from its original blue to a drab gray.

Unwelcome because they would have to double back now. At least Mother was in London.

Still, what a stroke of bad luck. “Damn it all to hell.”

“Whatever’s the matter, Archie?” Effie asked, peering over the edge of his journal.

He held up the coverlet.

“What in the devil is that?”

“It’s my mother’s . . .” How to explain? The boys knew about his mother, but the day-to-day details, the grind that was the care-taking endeavor, was not something with which he burdened them. It was not something he knew how to explain. He would try, though. “This is what remains of the counterpane from my bed when I was a boy. When I was seven, we got a dog named Baron. He was my father’s dog—he was a birder—but much to Father’s annoyance, Baron attached himself to me.”

“Your father, the earl, named his dog Baron?” Simon asked.

“He did indeed.”

Simon snorted, and Effie said, “Of course he did.”

“Well, at least we knew Baron would never live up to Father’s standards,” Archie said. He’d been aiming for a breezy delivery but to his dismay, the declaration had come out sounding more bothered than he would have liked. “When I was away at school, Baron would drag this counterpane around. He missed me, and I suppose it smelled like me. Mother was always taking it from him and putting it back in my bedchamber. It became somewhat of a jest between us.” And, he supposed, a jest between Mother and Baron when Archie was at school. He smiled, thinking about how each time he’d come home, there would be another tear or stain on the coverlet. Mother would pretend to be irritated and threaten to replace the counterpane, which she always said wasn’t suited for the man Archie was becoming. But she never did.

“Somehow, as her mind has . . . become clouded, Mother has become fixated on the bloody thing.” Archie paused. “I am understating the matter. I am not sure Mother and Miss Brown can weather the fortnight ahead without this rag. Mother has grown inordinately attached to it. It brings her comfort. Calms her when she has episodes.” It was to her as his string of beads was to him. Miss Brown, Mother’s companion, had given them to him—she had initially given them to Mother, having fashioned them after some ancient Greek contraption she’d read about. They were akin to the rosaries of the Catholics, though they carried no religious meaning: they were intended merely to occupy the hands and soothe the mind. They hadn’t worked with Mother, but they had worked on him. They gave him something to do with his hands, focused his mind. The difference was he could do without the beads if he had to.

“How did it get in your bag?” Simon asked.

“I’ve no idea. Probably Mother put it there herself. No one else in the household would have. Even the staff in Town know how important the blasted thing is.”

“Even if the dowager has become reliant on the counterpane and has taken ownership of it, perhaps some part of her mind still connects it with you,” Simon said. “If she knew you were setting off on a journey, perhaps she thought you ought to take it.”

Archie paused. It would be easy enough to agree with that assessment, but these were the people to whom he did not lie. “That would be a sound theory if Mother knew who I was.”

“Oh, Archie,” Effie said. “Is she that much worse, then?”

“Yes,” Archie said tersely. “She no longer recognizes me at all.” There had been days, as recently as six months ago, where he would join her in her breakfast room, and she would say, “Good morning, Archibald dearest,” as if nothing were amiss. Those days had become fewer and farther between until there were none left. He thought of it like watching a boat disappear over the horizon: it would bob in the waves and come in and out of view before it was well and truly gone. And even then, you kept staring, long after you knew it was futile.

“I’m so sorry,” Effie said with real dismay in his tone.

“Likewise,” Simon said. “What a bloody terrible business.”

“It’s all right.” It made it easier, in a way, to love her, than had been the case in recent years, when he’d still been trying to hold her to the standards to which he thought a mother ought to adhere. He hadn’t understood then that her behavior wasn’t personal.

Though he did wonder if one could reasonably love someone who had lost her mind. Was there any of her left to love? What happened when one’s mother walked the earth in corporeal form yet existed only as a memory?

Goodness. This was too much philosophy for Archie, who had never been a scholar. What happened was that it felt bloody awful. He knew that much.

“Well, we shall just have to turn back, then,” Effie said.

“I’m afraid we will, though I do recognize how absurd it is to do so over a tattered piece of fabric.” Archie sighed. “It will add two hours to our trip.”

“Yes,” Simon said, “but think how quickly Effie got ready. It all comes out in the wash.”

“Thank you,” Archie said quietly. “And I’m sorry.”

The boys waved away his apologies, and soon enough they were headed back the way they’d come.

“Would you like to come in?” Archie said when they came to a stop in front of the house on Hanover Square. He didn’t want them to, but he felt he ought to ask.

“Yes,” Effie said vehemently. “It’s long past time I paid my respects to your mother.”

“She’s unlikely to recognize you.” Archie and Simon and Effie didn’t interact with each other’s families overmuch, mostly because their families were, frankly, tommyrot. But not Mother; she was the exception. Or she had been.

“All the better,” Simon said as he climbed out of the coach. “That way she won’t remember the time we showed up for dinner at this very house utterly foxed.”

Effie groaned and held his head. “We were so jug-bitten. If she does remember me, I shall make my apologies again for that appalling lapse.”

Archie winced at the memory. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen her so angry.” Father yes, but not Mother. She had been angry on account of the fact that she’d also had other guests at the table. It had struck Archie as a fair sort of anger. Mother had only ever gotten angry at Archie over behaviors, things he could control. She never scorned him for the way he was.

“And I should enjoy seeing Miss Brown,” Simon said. When Archie looked at him, perplexed, for he couldn’t remember Simon and Miss Brown ever meeting, Simon added, a touch defensively, “You probably have not noticed that Miss Brown is very well read.”

Apparently, he had not. He had been too busy noticing that Miss Brown was his and Mother’s savior, their angel of mercy. “All right, here we go.”

The house was, as he’d feared, in a minor uproar. Archie’s letting himself in attracted a harried footman. “My lord.” He skidded to a halt in front of them. “We did not expect to see you back so soon.”

“Angus.” Archie held out the counterpane. “I didn’t expect to be back, but I realized this had sneaked its way into my things.”

Angus’s shoulders visibly relaxed. “Very good. I’ll summon Miss Brown.”

“No need. I’ll say hello—and goodbye again—to Mother. Featherfinch and Marsden would like to greet her. I assume she and Miss Brown are in the music room?”

“They are, my lord.”

Miss Brown would be trying to engage Mother in some singing. Strangely, although Mother had forgotten so many people and events, she remembered the words to every song she’d ever learned.

All seemed calm when they entered to find Mother and Miss Brown sitting side by side at the pianoforte. Miss Brown turned at the sound of their arrival, and Archie held up the counterpane. Miss Brown had a similar reaction to Angus, sighing in obvious relief and shooting Archie a grateful smile. She laid her hand on Mother’s arm. “Look who is here, my lady, and what he has brought.”

Mother turned. If Archie was harboring hope that there might be a flicker of recognition in her eyes, he was, as ever, disappointed. He pasted on a smile and forged ahead, as he always did. “Hello, Mother. This made its way into my bag, and I thought you would want it.”

He approached slowly, holding out the counterpane, which she took from him easily. “And I’ve brought Lords Featherfinch and Marsden. You remember? My friends Edward—Effie—and Simon from school?”

Of course she did not remember. He wasn’t even sure why he kept trying, except he didn’t know how to conduct himself around her other than the way he always had. To accept the shortcomings of her mind as she always had those of his.

The boys murmured gentle greetings, but they seemed to agitate Mother. “Are you friends of Charles’s?” she asked, naming Archie’s late father. “Mother insi