Diplomatic immunity

1. The tutor

April, 1882

“Le théâtre?” George Forsyte said. “Je ne vais pas au théâtre. I was made to recite plays at school and I had my fill of that. I am out of words to say about the theatre. I would be out of words if I were speaking English, my dear tormentor. I have memorised this long list of words about curtains and lights and which are the best seats and whether actors and actresses wear paint or if maquillage is the same word and here I am with nothing at all witty to say.”

“It is not as if you ever do,” said his tutor, Monsieur Renard. He was lounging in a chair in George’s sitting room, a glass of sherry in hand. One would think he was not paying attention, but one would be wrong.

“Now, if two prize-fighters were to walk out onto this hypothetical Parisian stage, then I’d know what to say about it. I could narrate the fight to a blind old man sitting at my side who wished to know if the fight were as exciting as the bouts of his youth.”

“So you say,” his tutor said, with a gesture that indicated, very clearly, that George was welcome to try.

George grinned with half his mouth. It was time to take control of this conversation. “Let us begin at the beginning, then, when the curtain rises, with our two prize-fighters standing mid-stage. Their knuckles are bare and they are wearing regulation tight trousers. They have identical enormous waxed moustaches. I cannot tell them apart, other than that one of them has a tattoo on his left biceps.”

Renard opened his mouth, as if to ask the usual questions or push him to say more, but then closed it again without saying anything. He stroked his greying reddish whiskers then leaned back, waiting for George to do whatever it was George would do.

What George did was smile to himself, and say, “The tattoo is of a lion, for your satisfaction.”

“Improbable,” said Renard.

“An English lion.”

“Absurd.”

George held imaginary opera glasses to his eyes. “I see it now. The other fighter also has a tattoo, and I shall identify it to satisfy your curiosity, my honoured professor. It is a unicorn.”

“C’est en faire trop. Over-egging the pudding, as you English say.”

George brushed this away.

“Time is called by someone backstage and they square up against each other. They swing at each other in a most decorous manner, at mid-stage under electric light. Did I mention this Parisian theatre is electrified? My apologies. Everything should be electrified, I am told. These boxers are so polite, prancing about on the stage, dodging and feinting, that the audience thinks it all arranged, like a ballet. Neither man lands any blows at all, and the audience is becoming restless and unhappy. We are all quite disappointed by the show. No blood is a disappointment at a prize fight. The crowd is there to see teeth fly.”

“The old man by your side cannot see,” Renard said, impatiently, and George heard the insult ready to be launched. As always, it drove him to rise to the challenge.

“He can hear for himself that no blows have landed. It is all too genteel. The umpire is angry. The crowd is angry. This may go all night with no end to it. They shall drum the fighters out of town at this rate.”

“How tedious.”

“Wait! The lion has landed a stinger to the unicorn’s chin.” George shot out his right fist and pulled it back.

“Are they animals or men?”

“The unicorn is a Frenchman, of course. He retaliates with a blow to the gut and the fellow with the lion falls against the ropes and looks as if he’s about to vomit. He comes up to scratch, however.”

“Fine salon conversation you offer.”

“You requested it. Our British champion dances and ducks and lands a punch! An upper-cut, then the left, then the right. He repeats the dose, and our Frenchman is now bleeding from his eye.” George punched as he spoke: upper-cut, left, right, and again.

“Here is the blood we have awaited.”

George was carried away with his story now, and narrating without thinking that he was speaking another language. He danced and threw punches at the air.

“It is a flurry of blows now, and the audience in the theatre, genteel as they are, all smell blood and their passions are aroused. If you are close enough to the stage where the ring is you can hear the feet on the boards, hear fists striking flesh, hear the Frenchman grunting as he’s hit, and as his face is pummelled. Then he goes over like a felled tree, and the sponge comes up! The lion is victorious.”

George slumped and wiped sweat from his face. There was silence for a moment in the sitting room. George watched Renard and waited for his verdict.

“You have been reading something other than the newspapers I have been bringing you.” Renard drank more of George’s very good sherry, and crossed his knees.

“The sporting papers and a boxing primer. I had to read that with a dictionary beside me.” Then in English George said, “My accent with the boxing slang—”

His tutor said a word that he would not say in polite English drawing rooms, and George laughed. His tutor then said, “You are still holding your mouth like an Englishman.”

George wriggled his jaw about. This was difficult. He would start out doing the right things, then he would slide back into the public school drawl and stop speaking through his nose. “I think no one will want to hear me talk about prize-fighting anyway,” he said, in French again. “Horses, perhaps. And yes, the theatre. I am going to a musical tea next week, hosted by my sister. Lucie shall play, along with my most lovely cousin Irene. I know little about music, but I do know that the two women are most wonderfully skilled.”

“Her Christian name?” said his tutor, sitting up straight in his chair. “Stop. You may with family, but you must not with the daughter of a diplomat with whom you are not an intimate. When speaking of her to me you may never.”

“But—”

“You must learn to say one in private and another in public. And you must not use the familiar pronoun. This is like the gender of words. English does not have it, but you must learn it or suffer for it. Now again. Say that again, but properly, you imbecile.”

George drew in a deep breath, and tried again, more carefully. “My cousin Irene, who is most skilled, shall play the piano at this event of my sister. She has earned her medal at the Paris Conservatoire. Mademoiselle Béranger, whom I met at a dinner in honour of the engagement of my cousin, shall play the violin. She also earned her medal, and plays most wonderfully. I am not a connoisseur of the music, but I am aware enough to appreciate their skill and enjoy their performance.”

“Now you sound like a first-year pupil, reciting lessons from a book. Say it like a natural man speaking to a friend.”

“Damn your eyes,” George said. “My lovely cousin Irene earned her medal in piano at the Conservatoire in Paris. She is a marvellous musician, a most sensitive interpreter of Chopin and Schubert. I am not the connoisseur of music, but I know enough to hear her talent when she plays, and she is good. I met Mademoiselle Béranger at a dinner in honour of Irene’s engagement to my cousin. Mademoiselle Béranger was—bon sang, comment dit-on bridesmaid?”

“Demoiselle d’honneur, you half-wit. This speaks for itself.”

“Mais bien sûr.”

George gave himself a moment to think by pouring more sherry for Renard. He picked up his own glass and wet his lips. Thirsty work, speaking in a language other than his own. He drank more water than sherry during these lessons, so he could keep his wits about him, for he had learned to his cost that Renard would push him harder if he thought he was not doing his best.

He put all of himself into these sessions when Renard was here, and he spent his evenings reading what Renard had set him to read. He hadn’t worked like this since he’d been at school, but he had never complained. Lucie had only said pleasant things about his progress with her native language, and he would endure far worse to earn praise from her.

The daylight faded, and George’s man Nash came in silently to light the gas-lamps. George’s collar began to wilt. Renard made him converse on the topic of the crash of l’Union Générale, touching up his financial vocabulary.

At the end of two hours of sweat, Renard stood and drained his glass.

George did the same. “Thank you as always,” he said.

“You progress,” said Renard. “Soon I shall stop despairing of you.”

“High praise,” George said. “Thursday?”

“Thursday.”

He saw Renard to the door himself, then came back into the sitting room to find Nash tidying up.

“Going well, sir?” Nash said.

“Well enough that we shall move to Paris soon. Then you shall need tutoring as well, so you can find your own lovely French girl.”

Nash cocked his head, silently, and George gave him a cheerful grin.

But Paris was not in his plans. The lovely girl was not his yet, however much he might know himself to be hers. He had yet to ask Lucie if she would marry him, and he had a fence to jump before he could do that honourably. He had to know what her father required of him and if he came up to scratch. It was long past time for George Forsyte, sworn bachelor, to speak to Monsieur Béranger about his daughter.

---

2. The Béranger salon

Wednesday night was the usual salon night for the Bérangers, and George was attending as usual. Lucie’s mother lived in Paris most of the time, visiting London only rarely for particularly grand official events. Lucie had told him this was why she played hostess for her father, and had since she had left the Conservatoire. Lucie enjoyed London, enjoyed the relative freedom of being away from most of her family, and enjoyed learning yet another language. She also enjoyed the relative stability of this posting, because it gave her a chance to get to know the English. London, she had once confided to him, felt safer to her than Paris did.

George was reminded at times that Lucie had seen a Prussian invasion and a revolution when she was a child. Her father had come out of it with a successful career, but other men hadn’t. His own tutor had fled Paris in 1871. He had stayed after the general amnesty for Communards only because he’d married an Englishwoman while in London. So Lucie was here, and her mother was not, for reasons George had never probed too deeply. Lucie would tell him more when she wished.

Tonight Lucie and Irene were to play a much-anticipated duet, and there was rumoured to be a poem someone wanted to recite. George wondered if he would enjoy it or not. The poem, that was. He would enjoy the music, because it would give him an excuse to stand quietly and watch Lucie. In this pastime he was exactly like his cousin Soames, and the two of them would stand shoulder to shoulder at times, watching Lucie and Irene play duets.

The rooms on the first storey of the Béranger home were devoted to the salon on these evenings. They were pleasant rooms, conservatively furnished, lit with beeswax candles supplemented by gaslight. A few servants circulated with wine and other refreshments. The guests talked; this was why they were in attendance. The English would have gossipped among each other, George thought, but the Béranger guests had other things to discuss. They talked about the performances, the news of the day, politics, art, and whatever was of interest.

George mixed with the guests. The regular attendees knew him well by now, and he’d begun to be able to hold his own with them in conversation. They were, he knew, being indulgent with him and not speaking rapidly or using too much slang, but still, he was doing so much better than he’d done last summer that they had stopped commenting on it. He would have to say as much to Renard, who would probably tell him not to get above himself. No, penser en français: ne te monte pas la tête. If he said ‘get above himself’ in French would it be funny? He should try it.

He was on familiar territory, at least, as they were discussing the collapse of l’Union Générale again. This was all over Renard’s newspapers as well as the London financial papers; he’d discussed it with Soames and Parkes several times, because it had affected the markets. Here he could talk as if he knew what he was about, because he did know what he was about and he had invested in learning the vocabulary. He dared open his mouth a little more than he had last time, and he found they were not laughing at what he said. To the contrary, they seemed to find his opinion worth listening to.

He felt buoyed by this. A year ago he wouldn’t have dared say anything even in English about a banking crash.

There was a whist game going on in a side room. George knew better than to go near it. As he walked past the doorway into the main room, he heard a change in the note of conversation, and smiled to himself. He knew that sudden hush and the murmur of male voices. Irene and Soames had arrived, and the men were taking a look at the heathen goddess. Lucie advanced towards them to do her duty as hostess, and George drifted near so that he might be a familiar face for Soames. He gave a warm handshake and a smile to his cousin, who was looking somewhat unfamiliar with a new moustache on his face. Then he was graced with Irene’s ever-delightful greeting, and then Lucie was off with the pair of them, introducing them round.

George stood by the piano, because he knew they’d make their way back there soon enough. He let himself drift into his own happy thoughts as he watched Lucie perform introductions. She was gracious and sparkling as she did it. Would she want to have a salon if she married him? Would that be a thing he could do? Would she marry him? He’d known he wanted to marry her almost immediately, the very first week he’d met her, but did she want the same? Would her father approve? Her father knew he was courting. The whole room knew he was courting. It would be rather wonderful to be married to her. It really was past time he spoke to her father and set things in motion.

But he knew that. He had to stump up and do it.

He knew he was smiling like a fool as the little group came over to the piano, but he couldn’t be bothered to stop. Lucie took her violin out of its case and began doing the things she did with it to get ready to play. Irene played a single note. Lucie played the note back at her, and nodded.

“It is always a pleasure to perform on your Pleyel,” Irene said, to M Béranger. “Chopin’s instrument.”

“You must perform him for us some evening,” he replied. “An evening devoted to him.”

“It would be beyond pleasure to do so.”

Lucie said, “Tonight, however, we play some quite new Fauré: his sonata for violin and piano. The Andante only, lest we outstay our welcome.”

“Ah, never,” said one of the more musical salon regulars, M Tessier, a somewhat older man who came with his literary wife sometimes. George knew them all now. Irene was introduced to him, and charmed him smoothly by asking him if he would enjoy some Saint-Saëns on a future evening, and he charmed her right back. George caught Soames’s eye and received a wry smile from him.

Someone else asked what they were performing, and Lucie announced it again more generally, and Irene sat to the piano. Lucie raised her violin.

George circled the room and came to rest where he could watch the musicians’ faces. Soames was turning pages for the two women. The expression on Soames’s face was interesting: his brows were furrowed, and he looked almost angry, but he was clearly not angry. He was concentrating deeply, George suspected. George recognised the piece; he’d heard Lucie and Irene play it several times before, rehearsing. Ah, that was Soames’s problem: he always said that he didn’t understand Fauré at all. Soames’s mistake was, in George’s opinion, trying to understand the music in the first place. It went on round one and the job was to relax and get along with it, whatever it was. For example, this music was easy to get on with because two lovely women were playing it; it wasn’t great thundering military music; it didn’t require him to sing. It was even pretty at moments. George knew himself to be shallow about music and he was at peace with this.

M Béranger appeared at his elbow quietly. “May I have a word with you, mon cher ami, George?”

“Certainly, sir. I have been wishing to have a word with you as well.” He had, and now was the moment. He was ready to do it.

Béranger beckoned him to the side of the room, where they were out of the way of the people interested in listening to the music. He tucked his arm into George’s, which made him slightly uneasy, and said, “We have very much enjoyed your company these last months at the salon. My daughter’s face is brighter when you are in attendance.”

They both looked across the room at the piano, where Lucie was playing the violin, and making that charming little bowing motion with her shoulders she sometimes did when the music moved her, the one she kept trying to eliminate from her playing. George found his own face brightening. He turned back to Lucie’s father.

“Monsieur, I have been wanting to speak—”

“Ah, but George, mon ami, I have a question for you first!” M Béranger released him and stepped back.

George raised his eyebrow. He was now experienced enough with business negotiations to hear the start of one. He said merely, “Oh?”

“Indulge me, please, by answering a few questions about London neighbourhoods. I know you are informed about them! I hear that your cousin at the piano, that most beautiful woman who was at the Conservatoire with my daughter, lives in South Kensington. Tell me, is that a desirable neighbourhood?”

George blinked and smoothly changed his mode from suitor into collector of house property. “Quite. It’s not Mayfair, but it’s perfect for someone like Cousin Irene.”

“Why is this?”

George blinked again, for surely Béranger knew this. “South Kensington—not Kensington, mind—is full of established professionals and educated sorts, rising men. It’s close to Albert Hall, the Museum, and the Park. Good houses, pretty architecture. The crescent my cousins are on is particularly lovely.”

“A good house for a young couple?”

George now knew what M Béranger was about. He said, “Topping. Just right for a man with Cousin Soames’s income, newly married, perhaps with a new family.”

“Ah, now you have stepped close to my question. The friend I have in mind wishes to be half of such a young couple, and I would see him settled in a neighbourhood such as that. What sort of situation must he be in before he considers it?”

George’s eyebrow twitched again. “Looking for the bien biens, eh? Rack rents in South Kensington are about a hundred to a hundred and fifty, depending on where. I’d recommend nine hundred to a thousand a year to start, with enough capital saved to decorate and furnish. The amount needed there depends on taste. My cousin launched out. Ah, mon cousin a dépensé sans compter.”

“A thousand a year? That seems like a reasonable expectation,” M Béranger said. “For my friend.”

How unfortunate a wretch was he that he knew the answer to the pound, and knew exactly how short his own income was of this mark.

“Je vous comprends,” George said, switching to French to match Béranger again. “A professional should reach such an income easily.”

“It is a certainty. And one would certainly hope that he would have a good sum to settle on his wife. I am told that her family is requesting enough that she have two hundred a year, so that she might be well provided for. Ah, they reach the conclusion.”

George joined in the general applause. He couldn’t recall hearing a single note after M Béranger started speaking to him.

M Béranger rested a hand on his shoulder. “It is good we have had this talk, George. Please do continue to make my daughter smile, and also bring your lovely cousin to play as often as possible. But I shall deliver that invitation myself now.”

And with that Béranger was off, on his way to say pleasant and almost certainly sincere things to Irene, for the Fauré had sent the room into intense raptures. The salon-goers George knew to be especially interested in music and French composers were at the piano in animated conversation with the two performers. George smiled wryly to himself. The fox had out-foxed him and out-negotiated him in about as much time as it had taken him to realise what was happening.

Something to aspire to.

Two hundred a year. What was that, six thousand? Damnation. But if he kept working, he’d reach it with enough of a cushion. Soames’s investments had a way of progressing steadily, but it wouldn’t be overnight. On the other hand, the man had as good as told him he knew he was courting, and given him his blessing to continue. Had he won or lost this negotiation? There was no such thing, Parkes had told him once. Both sides had to feel satisfied or the man would never do business with you again, and who wanted that?

George blew out a long breath.

He made his way nearer to Lucie, who was packing away her violin. He watched her shuffle sheet music into order and tuck it away, while making animated conversation with her guests. Next came a poetry recitation; Lucie introduced the fellow who was to do it, then found her way to a quiet corner. George arrived at her side with a glass of wine in his hand for her.

“It was lovely as always,” he said, in English, quietly.

“Thank you, George,” she said, and accepted the glass.

“Lucie, do you have a moment?”

She looked round the room and pressed her lips together. “Tonight is quite difficult.”

“I understand.”

Lucie touched his arm very briefly. “I must go and speak with the Ambassador’s wife now; she seems to be leaving. Stay for supper afterwards. Soames and Irene will as well.”

“Right you are.”

George watched her make her way through her father’s salon on light footsteps, pausing now and then to accept thanks for the performance earlier. She truly did own his heart, and he needed to sit with her and simply hold her hand. Nothing to do but listen to this poem and work out how much of it he understood and if he could hear it as poetry or not. Cracking difficult, he expected.

He found his way over to Soames, who he hoped would be more baffled by French poetry than he, and stood with him while the fellow read his poem. It was part of La Légende des Siècles by Victor Hugo. Hugo had turned eighty earlier in the year, and the salon’s more homesick members had been honouring the man by reading from his work at least once a month. This poem was historical, as far as George could make out, and not particularly interesting. He could not hear what made it poetry, not well enough to feel he had it understood. He could appreciate good old Willy Shakers when spoken, and he’d memorised more Lewis Carroll than he wanted to admit simply so he could recite it at Lucie and make her laugh, but apparently he was not ready for France’s most fêted writer.

The reading came to an end, and there was spirited applause and then a buzz of conversation rising again.

George scouted round the room and spotted a fellow he’d been introduced to last time, a newcomer to London who’d wanted to talk Richmond Park riding and seemed to be in need of a house. Best not waste this opportunity to talk about one of his favourite pastimes while getting on with that work. George ambled on over to do his own sort of negotiation; it would pass the time before supper.

George had recently become a regular at the suppers that followed M Béranger’s salon, another sign that his courtship was advancing without a word spoken about it. There were only eight people in attendance that evening, an intimate group, and the conversation was warm and casual in consequence. The meal was light, and Béranger’s wine good as always.

This evening he was lucky enough to take Lucie in, or perhaps Lucie had decided to arrange it that way to please both of them. It was a pleasure to touch her, however formally, and hold her chair, and have an excuse to lean towards her and talk to her and no one else. They were seated in the French fashion, with the host and hostess seated facing each other at the middle of the table, not at the ends. This gave George a very good view of M Béranger talking to his dinner partner, Irene.

“Your father is enjoying trying to flirt with Irene,” George said, quietly.

Lucie looked across the table at her father. George saw the fond look on her face. She answered him equally quietly. “I don’t believe it is flirting, precisely. He is exerting himself to be especially charming, because he wishes her to perform again. This is how he practises his art.”

George picked at his food. He still couldn’t talk to her in private. How was he supposed to open his heart to her like this? He sighed and drank some wine. It was a very good dry burgundy, a Chambertin unless he missed his guess.

Lucie said, still quietly, “I am reminded: Did you have a pleasant negotiation with my father?”

“Negotiation? How the devil did you know that? You were playing!”

Lucie smiled at him. “I have watched him at work too often to miss it.”

“He stole a march on me. Didn’t know we were boxing and he’d already knocked me out of time.” George mimed his head snapping back, and Lucie laughed.

George remembered one of the things he had wanted to ask. “Do you know what you’re playing at my sister’s tea? She said something about you and Irene and one of her fourpenny foreigners.”

“Yes! We’ll be playing Mozart, a piano trio. It should be pleasant.”

“I should like you to meet my parents,” George said, and flushed as he said it.

“It would be lovely to meet them,” Lucie said. “It would be—I get ahead of myself.”

George looked down at his plate. He too hoped, but he also was getting ahead of himself.

Lucie’s father spoke up for a moment, with a voice intended for Lucie. “Our piano is a wonderful instrument indeed, Madame Forsyte, but I fear my dearest daughter’s violin is not its equal. It is the instrument we gave her when she went away to the Conservatoire, and she has outgrown it—out-learned it and out-paced it.”

Irene said, “You must then find her a better one. Chanot is here in London, as is Hill. I’m told they make fine violins.”

“You would suggest English luthiers to me? Chanot is French, at least.”

Irene laughed, and Béranger began talking of Pleyel and Érard.

“Is he trying to charm you?” George said, to Lucie, again very quietly.

“Perhaps. He is also right. My instrument is only adequate. I wonder if he is planning something.”

She did have a fond look on her face as she said this, and this made George feel better disposed towards M Béranger than he had earlier in the evening. Settlements were about protecting one’s daughter, after all.

---

3. Francie’s musical tea

On a Saturday shortly afterwards, Irene and Soames were conveyed in a hansom cab from their home in South Kensington to their uncle Roger’s in Prince’s Gardens nearby, just south of the Park. They had been invited to one of Cousin Francie’s musical teas, and Irene would be performing. Under her arm was the sheet music for a Mozart chamber piece for piano, violin, and cello. She’d rehearsed it earlier in the week with Lucie and a Bohemian cellist Francie had been sponsoring, and again that morning. Soames had not heard it yet, and she was looking forward to his reaction.

They were on time, and Roger’s butler ushered them up to the drawing room with other guests who’d arrived with them. The space had been rearranged to accommodate musicians and the piano at one end of the room, with seats for guests and tables for tea things at the other.

“It looks different like this,” she murmured to Soames.

“The room is nearly the whole storey,” he said. “They hold balls here too.”

Irene squeezed his arm. So much money! A mansion with room for a ball and a musical tea with the Forsytes and all their connections attending.

Francie was well-known for these musical teas. Irene had performed once before, and Francie had been delighted. She’d confessed to Irene that she wanted to know Irene and all her musical friends, so both Lucie and Miss Whitford had been invited to the tea to perform. Francie’s taste in music was not Irene’s, but Irene did appreciate that Francie cared about musicians, and could recognise skill when she heard it. She had therefore welcomed Francie’s overtures with open arms. So had Lucie, but for the additional reason that she wished to know George’s family better. Or so she’d confided to Irene.

Lucie was playing, so of course George had promised he would be there. He still kept a room in the familial mansion, so attending could be a simple matter of dressing properly and walking downstairs. And indeed he did so, to the surprise of the Forsytes in the room. He came over to greet Irene and shake Soames’s hand, and seemed to be on his best behaviour.

Irene watched him with some amusement as he made his way through the guests, behaving as if he were the host, politely welcoming them all. He was, as always, especially charming to his aunt Emily, Soames’s mother, who he always claimed was his favourite aunt. George was, however, being studiously cool and polite to a degree that itself invited comment. He greeted Mlle Béranger with calm distance, and immediately moved on to greet Miss Whitford. He was too distant to be believably George; her cousin was many things, but frosty was not among them. Or so Irene thought. She suspected she knew George’s heart better than some of the cousins who’d known him all his life.

Francie got them started with one of her popular songs and then a performance of the lively “Kensington Coil”, which brightened the faces of the aunts, who had heard it many times. Even Aunt Ann applauded the work of “our dear Francie.” Irene went with Soames to pay their respects to Aunt Ann, and subject themselves to her kind yet unsparing analysis of whether they were happy or not. Apparently she was satisfied with what she saw, for she drew Irene down for a kiss and whispered that Soames looked as content as she’d ever seen him. And was there any news of—? No? Such a pity.

Irene did not want to discuss this topic with Aunt Ann, not today. She escaped and made her way over to Winifred for a much less demanding and intrusive greeting. Winifred looked well, just beginning to be in an interesting condition with her second child. Irene knew, though most of the room did not yet know; the two sisters by marriage had become quite close. She had been asking Winifred to tell her what it was like, carrying a child, nursing one, and Winifred had been open with her. Now the two of them watched George introducing Lucie to his mother and leaned their heads together to comment quietly.

“She’s a little slip of a thing, but she has a way with her,” Winifred said. “Most spirited. Is what they say—?”

“What are they saying?”

“Well, about George. He’s here, for one thing. I would never have credited it if I weren’t looking at him myself. Goodness me.”

Irene watched George from under her eyelashes. He hadn’t kept up the pretence of indifference for longer than five minutes. He was in fact utterly failing if he wanted to keep his feelings hidden, for he was watching Lucie with a smile on his face that was entirely transparent. He was happy to listen to her, happy to watch her, happy merely to be in her presence. Well, there was nothing to be done about that.

“I am looking at him as well. He certainly seems pleased with something.”

Winifred said, “And it is most obvious what, or rather who. Mrs Roger seems to have noticed it. I do wonder what Uncle Roger will think.”

“Whatever he thinks, we shall hear it relayed at a shout.”

Winifred laughed, then kissed her cheek and moved on to greet a cousin’s wife Irene knew less well. Irene herself went over to stand with Rosalyn Whitford and learn how things were going with her. Another musician played, and then a third. Rosalyn went up to the piano to take her turn with some drawing-room safe Chopin.

Irene looked briefly round the room for Soames, and found him standing discreetly to the side of the crowd, set apart, where he could observe and listen quietly without being noticed. She caught his eye and smiled at him, and was rewarded by his downcast gaze and a smile in return. Irene found her way through the crowd at the tea to his side. She wound her arm through his. “Is all well?”

“I cannot say I enjoyed the piece that fellow with the cello played.”

“It was his own composition,” Irene said, with a little smile that made Soames’s lips twitch under his clipped moustache, exactly as she had wished. He did look good with the moustache; it balanced his chin somewhat. “We shall be playing a Mozart trio that you will enjoy more, I think.”

“Oh?”

“Most importantly, Lucie is being introduced to the Rogers, and Francie is making much of her.”

“Good,” Soames said. “When do you play?”

“Next, I think.”

“Oh,” he said. His face said everything Irene needed to hear from him, as did his little squeeze of her arm in his. He would say almost nothing to her while they were here, and ask his questions about the piece later, when they were at home. She wanted to kiss him, as always, because of that smile, but could not. She settled for touching his hand and returning his smile with her own warm look.

Irene slipped away from him and went to Lucie, who stood near the piano with her bow and rosin in hand. She greeted Irene with a kiss on the cheek and then tucked the rosin away in her violin case.

“I do not need it; I merely pass the time fussing with it,” Lucie said, in French. “J’ai le trac.”

“This is nothing you have not done before a thousand times,” Irene said, with her hand on Lucie’s. “We have prepared, and we all three know the piece well.”

“But here! In the house of his family! With his mother and his father listening!”

Irene looked round the drawing room, seeking out specific faces. “I am not certain of his father. Ah, no, there is Uncle Roger, by the mantelpiece. You will play beautifully. You have done the work.”

“As will you, my dearest friend. Ah, I shall relax and simply do my best. The music deserves the attention today. Mozart is charming. Always a pleasure.”

“And our cellist is a most skilled musician.”

Francie approached the two women and asked if they were ready. Irene stepped up to the piano—another Broadwood, of course—and adjusted the bench to her liking. The cellist appeared from the balcony, smelling of caporals, a very Parisian scent for her. She did not like cigarettes, and was glad Soames did not smoke as a habit, but this scent took her back to her time in Paris, and that was a sweet feeling.

The man smiled at Francie and settled into his chair, cello and bow in hand, Mozart on the stand before him. Lucie was playing without consulting her part. Irene had a score on the piano stand that she did not truly need, but Francie was set to turn pages.

Francie cleared her throat, then called the drawing room to attention. She said, “This next piece is Mozart’s piano trio in E major, the first movement. Our performers are Mrs Soames Forsyte, Mademoiselle Lucie Béranger, and Monsieur Vilém Slavík.”

The three of them had got on well in rehearsals. The cellist Slavík had a lovely delicate touch with Mozart. Irene had enjoyed playing with him, and of course playing with Lucie had become comfortable; they were now easily able to find communion with each other and with the music. She suspected Soames would be able to find his way into this piece, and was looking forward to his comments in private afterwards. He usually found it easier to grasp the more intimate pieces, and chamber works were nearer to his understanding than the full orchestral ones.

She looked about the room during a slower moment and was amused to note their three loyal admirers standing together: Soames, George, and dear Uncle Jolyon. She reminded herself to give Uncle Jolyon a kiss afterwards, and ask him what he thought of the Mozart, and if he would wish to join them for Neumann’s Nibelungen Ring performance next month. She did hope he would.

There was polite applause when the Mozart was done, loudest from their three admirers. It was not the thrill of concert performance, but it was something, and Irene knew it was well above the level of the usual drawing room playing. The cellist knew this as well, and said so to the two women, in French, which he spoke rather better than English. They returned the compliment, and then there were pleasant exchanges with other listeners. Francie announced the next piece. Irene’s part in the tea was now done, and she gratefully retired into the audience to give Uncle Jolyon that kiss and be rewarded with his delighted smile. She then sat to drink tea and eat a bit of tea cake as her own reward, with Soames, George, Lucie, and Uncle Jolyon sitting with her. Some cousin was playing Mendelssohn in the background while they made quiet conversation.

“What do you think of the audience of Forsytes, Cousin Irene?” said George.

“They listened most politely,” she said, with some irony.

“Chamber music is a bit rarefied,” said Uncle Jolyon.

“I enjoyed that piece,” said Soames. “The instruments were conversing with one another.” And that was as Irene had expected; his ear had advanced over the last months.

“It helps that you enjoy Mozart,” she said to him.

“He’s champagne,” Soames said, looking down.

Lucie said, “Very good! I like this idea of Mozart. Champagne. This was the drier variety.”

“I like champagne in all its forms,” said George, and he smiled at Lucie, who smiled back at him.

“But George, it is a joke about chamber music being dry, you understand.”

George covered his face with a hand. “I didn’t notice. I simply enjoyed it without thinking about it.”

“Mozart is easy to enjoy,” said Uncle Jolyon. He raised one formidable white eyebrow at her and tipped his head in the direction of George and Lucie. They were now looking at each other and not at anything else in the room. Irene smiled, held Uncle Jolyon’s gaze, and touched a raised forefinger to her lips.

“Later,” she said to him, very quietly.

When the Mendelssohn was over, Irene stood and drew her uncle over to the side.

Uncle Jolyon spoke first. “Am I much mistaken, or is George sweet on your violinist friend?”

“We are not making a fuss. His father—”

“Roger will have a fantod. It does explain why the boy suddenly settled down. Well, he’s a better man than his older brother. Sweet-tempered, and a good judge of wine. And of women.” At that Uncle Jolyon gave her a fond look. “Roger is all bark and no bite.”

“Mrs Roger will be delighted by it, I suspect.”

“You women always are.”

“Uncle Roger will come round when she persuades him.”

“Bah! Of course he will. Every man wants his boys settled down. But how are you? I’ve not seen you for a little while.”

“Soames has a client in Cheshire who invited us to stay. It was a pleasant visit; they are a lovely family. We had a refreshing time away from London.”

Uncle Jolyon studied her for a moment, then gave her a genuine smile. “I’m glad you’re happy. He’s climbing, I take it.”

“He seems pleased with business, and tells me he has had to turn clients away because he does not have enough clerks just at present. He is both training and hiring them. But tell me, Uncle Jolyon, how is dear June?”

“Complaining about school and how they won’t let her study what she wants. She has strong opinions, that one. No trouble working when she wants to, but if she doesn’t want to! Well, I get letters. From the school as well as from her.”

Irene laughed. “June will be a force of nature when full-grown.”

“For good or for ill.” Uncle Jolyon sighed. “About as unlike her father as possible.”

“I have never met him,” Irene said quietly, for he seemed sad about it. She had of course been told the story, several times over, each retelling coloured by the personality of the tale-teller. It would be hard on her uncle to be cut off from his son, or so she surmised.

“No, I suppose not. Well, he’s an amiable chap, too tolerant if you ask me. June’s still angry with him. Picked it up from her mother.”

“Poor girl. It must be hard to have lost both parents.”

“Don’t feel too sorry for her. June knows what she wants. She’s a Forsyte through and through.” He seemed to be grumbling in a perfunctory way, as if knowing he was complaining about the sun rising in the morning.

Irene laughed, and went up on her toes to kiss Uncle Jolyon’s cheek above his moustaches. She was very fond of him and June both. She then turned her attention to George and Lucie, who had stopped gazing at each other and were now talking with Soames about something.

“You’re matchmaking,” Uncle Jolyon said, with mock accusation in his voice.

“Nonsense,” Irene said. “They’ve done that themselves. What I am doing is looking at my husband and thinking fond thoughts about him. Oh! I do not wish to forget this. Shall you attend the Nibelungen Ring with us next month? I would be so happy if you would. I have been playing Liszt’s Wagner transcriptions, and they are so intense and grand I long to hear the whole of it.”

He sighed. “Can I resist an invitation from you? No. I shall hear Wagner with you, and find out what it’s all about.”

“Lovely. I shall ask Soames to arrange it, and we shall have a marvellous time.” Irene squeezed his arm. She most definitely had a favourite uncle.

“Here comes Roger,” Uncle Jolyon said. “Ready to huff and puff.”

Uncle Roger had made his way over to where his son sat, and was being introduced to Lucie. Very likely introduced a second time, for surely the two had met at her wedding? But perhaps Uncle Roger did not remember. The champagne had been both good and plentiful at the wedding breakfast, and Uncle Roger had been much celebrated for his part in the toast to her as the bride. Irene excused herself to Uncle Jolyon and went to Uncle Roger now, for she believed in rewarding kind-hearted behaviour from Soames’s family.

“How d’ye do,” Uncle Roger was saying to Lucie.

“I am very pleased to meet you, Mr Forsyte,” said Lucie, most politely.

“You’re very handy with that violin,” he said to her. “Francie tells me you are a friend of Mrs Soames from some Conservatory.”

“The Conservatoire de Paris, yes,” Lucie said. “I studied violin there.”

“Ah, here she is. A pleasure as always to see you, Mrs Soames.”

“And you too, Uncle Roger. I’m very happy to see that Cousin George has introduced you to Mademoiselle Béranger. She is a most wonderful friend.”

Roger cocked an eyebrow at Lucie. “I saw you at the Soameses’ wedding, didn’t I.”

“Mademoiselle Béranger was a bridesmaid, Uncle.”

“You don’t say,” Roger said. He took a second look at Lucie. “Oh. That’s right. Well, if my daughter has you in her clutches to play at her teas, I’ll be seeing more of you, I’m sure. Don’t let Francie bully you.”

George said, “Miss Béranger, allow me to introduce you to my brother Thomas.”

Irene watched with some amusement as George got himself and Lucie away from his father as rapidly as possible. She turned back to her Uncle Roger and gave him her most soothing smile.

“Hmm,” said Roger. “She’s a pretty thing. What’s she doing in London?”

“Her father is a diplomat in the embassy here,” Irene said.

“That was a cross round her neck, wasn’t it.”

“It was, yes.” Irene had seen it round Lucie’s neck so often she’d stopped noticing it, but it came to her now what Uncle Roger would see when he looked at it.

Roger smoothed down a whisker and cast a bilious look at the piano where somebody was playing. “Never known that boy to like music.”

And with that, Uncle Roger was off. Irene watched him arrow his way across the room to Francie, no doubt to quiz her on what she knew about Lucie. She would have to ask Soames which way he thought Roger would jump. They would have quite a lot to discuss this evening.

Irene immediately made her way to Lucie, and took her away from George, under the pretext of needing to arrange their next rehearsal. Lucie knew this for a pretext, but took her arm and followed her lead away. The two women stood in a far corner, where they would not disturb the pianist, and compared notes.

“I have met his family now. They are pleasant enough. His mother stared at my cross.”

“His father noticed it, too.”

Lucie made a thoughtful sound, and Irene could see her considering them all. “George says he shouts and then calms down about everything. It seems strange.”

“He is a Forsyte brother,” Irene replied. “Each brother swears that the others are hopeless eccentrics and he is the only sensible one.”

“Yes, I see this. But I also see why George worries.”

“Uncle Jolyon told me just now that Uncle Roger is all bark and no bite.”

Lucie smiled. “Chien qui aboie ne mord pas. Perhaps he will bark at us, then lick our hands and be happy.”

Irene slipped her arm through Lucie’s. “Much ado about nothing. He will never understand what your Conservatoire prize means, but he will understand that his son is happy. Let us go and speak further with my uncle Jolyon, who will understand both.” And indeed, Uncle Jolyon was properly appreciative, and Lucie was delighted by him.

That evening, Irene and Soames discussed the Mozart over dinner, as well as Uncle Jolyon’s acceptance of their invitation to the performances of the Ring operas. Soames looked askance at German opera, but had enjoyed the Wagner transcriptions she’d played for him, so he was cautiously looking forward to this. He had been awkward in their first months of opera-going with Uncle Jolyon, but had relaxed and stopped bracing himself for whatever he had been fearing. The two of them got on well now.

After dinner, they sat near the fire in the drawing room, in chairs drawn close enough to let them touch if they wished. Soames slowly drank his nightly whisky and soda; Irene held a Victor Hugo novel that she intended to read, but had not yet been able to bring herself to start. Irene mentioned Roger’s reaction to Lucie. Soames replied that he thought Roger would come round eventually, but would need to rumble first, as well as reassure himself that George meant it and would stick to it. Irene privately worried about the religion; she did not mention this to Soames as she suspected he would not understand it.

When they retired to bed, they lay awake and discussed in quiet voices another topic that had been on her mind, the question of children. Irene knew Soames longed for children but had remained silent, waiting for her to decide that she was ready. She had decided she was, and told him so. If he was ready, she was willing.

He was ready, he said. And conversation ceased.

---

4. Dance at Roger’s

Balls were now most likely to spontaneously erupt at George’s father’s home and at the home of the Nicholases in Ladbroke Grove, for those were the two of the Forsyte brothers with unmarried daughters remaining. Shortly after the musical tea, Mrs Roger’s latest ball came off, attended by the younger Forsyte generation, filled out with a full selection of Francie’s lovers and all the suitable young persons of their acquaintance. Lucie was invited, as an eligible young lady now firmly in the family’s grasp and established as desirable for their young men to know.

Fortunate indeed, if your name was George Forsyte.

George had not attended a single one of these balls before, having established a habit of being at his club playing billiards with Dartie instead, but he shocked his mother by announcing his intention to attend and drink all of her champagne cup. He then pronounced that he would take a dance card for himself and ask ladies to sign his card for the privilege of a rare dance with him.

Eustace glowered at George, for he was in that state of youth where every public jest offended his foppish, over-elegant soul, and breaches of form were not to be countenanced. George grinned at his younger brother and left him dangling in uncertainty about whether he meant it or not, like a sentence with an unfinished clause.

But on the evening of, he appeared dressed properly and sober, having sent flowers to Lucie that afternoon for her to wear in her hair if she wished. He indeed took a dance card, which made Francie laugh. Francie had always had a wicked streak, and he’d loved making her laugh when they were children. He flaunted his dance card about and announced that if the ladies wanted a dance with him, they needs must sign for the privilege, this occasion only, future dances not guaranteed.

The room that had been arranged for the musical tea was now cleared for dancing, with the carpet rolled up and taken away for the evening. Little tables lit by candles were set at the sides where chaperones might sit, and by the piano were music stands for a handful of musicians. The gaslight was lowered to a level conducive to courting, and the champagne cup was plentiful.

George knew how to dance perfectly well, having been sent to the same academy all the young Forsytes had been sent to, to learn all the dances a young gentleman was required to know. He hadn’t danced a single step since those lessons and had once fully intended never to dance a single step again for the rest of his life. But here he was, negotiating with Francie’s friends and six or so other Forsyte acquaintances, solemnly informing them that yes he meant it, if they wanted to dance with him they would need to sign his dance card.

He went to Lucie first, of course, and arranged for her to sign his card for two waltzes. They then conspired to mark the dance before the second waltz as taken by a mysterious illegible partner, so that they might have a moment together.

While he stood to the side, smirking at the consternation round him, Cousin Irene found him and accosted him, if one could call a light touch on the arm from that woman being accosted. She was smiling, and George could not help but respond. There was a freedom in flirting with a gorgeous woman whose heart they both knew belonged to her husband; she was so playful. And they both enjoyed discomfiting Soames by giving him unexpected moments of pleasure. She knew in turn that his heart belonged to Lucie, and quietly carried messages for them. The result was a surprising friendship. George had not previously known that he could have a woman as a friend. He’d thought friendship reserved for men in one’s club, with whom one played billiards and drank.

But here she was, his unlikely friend, the wife of a second unlikely friend, resting her hand on his arm.

“I’m told you have a dance card,” Irene said, her eyes sparkling.

“I do.” He produced it from his pocket.

“Pray, let me see it. Ah, excellent. I have claimed a dance.”

“I’m surprised you have any open dances on your card, dear cousin.”

“I reserved a dance for you.”

“I blush!”

“There, my name is written. Perhaps you will write yours on mine, so that I might say my card is filled out.”

George scribbled his name against the only open spot, a lancers after the first waltz he had reserved for Lucie. “There. I look forward to it, dear cousin.”

“And I too. Pray you behave.”

“I never do what I ought,” George said.

But he behaved, and found that it was not so objectionable to dance with a succession of girls in pretty frocks and anticipate what it would be like to touch Lucie later on in the evening. Now that his heart was in pleasant shackles, he could ignore all attempts by his mother to match-make and simply enjoy whatever was going on, all the flirtations and drama and young men passing over the wall-flowers with whom he’d dance later.

After two dances he was glad he’d reserved the spot before his first dance with Lucie for a cool drink, marked on his card with the initials “ACD”. He wanted a slow walk round the paddock with a blanket on him, that’s what he wanted. He was in bad condition. He needed to walk more. Ride more. Get out into the country and jump more. He’d given it up to save money and he regretted it greatly now. Did Lucie ride? How had he never asked? Perhaps he could teach her. That would be perfection.

He took a slow perambulation round the room to find himself more champagne cup and let his lather subside. While serving himself he encountered his younger brother Eustace, dressed in the extreme of the fashion with a perfect buttonhole. He was squiring round a most aesthetic young woman who also happened to have a tidy inheritance coming her way, perfect for a life of elegant leisure if Eustace did not wish to find any sort of profession with which to occupy himself. George saluted the pair of them and asked his brother how he found the races this week, and if he’d won anything or if he’d lost it all at baccarat first. Eustace spluttered at him, and George wandered away while Eustace tried to explain to his companion that he didn’t gamble at all, never had, no, he was not that sort at all.

The next dance was his first waltz with Lucie.

Waltzing was not what he had remembered. What he had remembered as waltzing was an awkward and embarrassing closeness to a girl whom he had not known well, who was dancing with him because she’d been assigned to him. He’d danced because he’d been compelled, because his mother had wanted all her children able to meet the right people and then marry properly. He’d stepped on the girl’s feet and she’d stepped on his, and gradually they’d learned not to. They’d practised the steps until they’d been second nature, then practised them more until they’d both had some semblance of grace. He’d studiously avoided meeting her eyes, and she his.

He’d hated it. He’d rather have been riding.

This waltzing! This waltzing was different. This was riding a horse he knew well to the hunt, feeling it spring over hedges at the least touch of his heels, responding to every shift of his body. Riding was the best comparison he had for this union of minds and bodies he was feeling now, and he felt a fool for it, but there it was. He was looking into Lucie’s eyes, and she was guiding him and he was guiding her and together they were jumping fences and spinning round them or some dashed thing, only instead of smelling horse and leather he was breathing in her perfume. She was wearing the flowers he’d sent and his heart ached in a sweet way to see them in her hair. He was touching Lucie’s waist and hand as gently as possible, gazing into her eyes, and becoming completely lost in how close she was.

The room was full of people circling just as they were. Did they feel this way too? What a rum thought! This was why balls existed. It hadn’t struck him until this very moment, and now it was a facer, another pure facer, to realise that everything he’d believed about himself was wrong.

Then it was over, and they were standing still, looking into each other’s eyes, and he had to take his hand from her waist and that was not what he wanted. He offered Lucie his arm and escorted her to the side of the room where his aunt Emily was sitting.

“May I fetch you two lovely ladies some champagne cup?” he asked, because he was expected to.

“Please do, George,” his aunt said, and Lucie nodded.

He came back with glasses for the two of them and sat beside them, still tingling and dizzy. He thought he might swoon and need smelling salts if his heart continued to ache like this. At least Aunt Emily was sympathetic to his courtship, and was a safe shelter for them.

“Are you two enjoying yourselves?” she asked, with the reassuring smile of an indulgent aunt.

Lucie answered. “Yes, indeed, Madame Forsyte, it is a lovely ball. I have danced every dance except I cannot dance the quadrilles.”

“No?”

“I have never learned them! I had a music master but not a dancing master, so I am imperfectly taught. I learned only some dances.”

“Would that I had never learned them!” George said. “Though I am about to dance one with my fair cousin Irene, and if I cannot dance with you, Irene will console me.”

Emily set down her glass. “You always make me laugh, George.”

“This is why you love me, Aunt.”

“I can’t deny it, George. Now, dance. I’ll console dear Lucie while Irene consoles you.”

George went to find Irene, who was in turn on her way to find him. They made their way to the dance floor and were scooped up by three other couples looking for a fourth. The lancers, in George’s opinion, was one of the most absurd dances known to man, but at least it offered magnificent opportunity for conversation.

“Remind me how this goes,” he said to Irene.

“You seem to remember perfectly well.”

“I wish I didn’t. It’s just walking forward and back and then spinning round.”

“I see quite through you. You are enjoying yourself.”

George grinned happily at her. “Did I see you waltzing with Soames just now?”

“You did.”

George arched a brow. “Isn’t that bad form?”

“He told me it is, and then he told me he would forever regret it if he did not waltz with me at least once every ball we attend, so we have waltzed. I insisted he dance with others to atone for it, preferably girls who would otherwise not be dancing.”

“Poor devil.” George was of course doing the same, simply to be contrary.

“He seems to think it is not a punishment. He will never admit it, but he enjoys dancing. Did I see you waltzing with Lucie just now?”

“You did, and I fear you will again.”

“The room is already abuzz. You must take care to waltz with others, Cousin George.”

“The very thought makes me miserable. I have avoided this fate diligently for years, and now look at me! I am going to sulk.”

“You are not. You are the least sulky man I know.”

“If I did not know how fond you are of Soames, I would suspect you of flirting, but I know better. Thank you, cousin. I do in fact have other young ladies on my dance card for other waltzes. And if anyone throws you over, please give the dance to me.”

“I shall,” said Irene solemnly, “but only if Soames does not want it.”

George smiled at Irene. She was an impish wit in secret, he knew, and he loved watching her tease Soames. George owed a debt to Soames he felt he would never repay, if only because Soames would never allow him. The man would be an utter ass if he even tried. Well, he would be an ass if George tried repaying it in any straightforward way. Soames could be lured into eating and drinking well every now and then, and enjoying life without holding himself back the way he always did. George had resolved to do his best to lure him into it enough to relieve his own conscience about how much Soames had done for him, seemingly on a whim.

After Irene, it was back to ordinary girls and ordinary dances, and what had become an expected state of lather. He was most definitely going to start riding regularly again. He could spare the money now.

It was now the moment for that time-honoured tradition of private balls: the quiet walk in the conservatory for an almost-private talk. Lucie disappeared into it first, and George followed, with just enough of a delay that only people watching for it noticed, which is to say, very likely every single one of the aunts.

George found Lucie near the back of the conservatory, in amongst the spring flowers. He caught her eye and grinned.

“You dance like an Englishman,” Lucie said. She ducked behind the flowers in the conservatory, and George followed her, eager to touch her again after that waltz earlier, to say more gallant words. He found her considering a cluster of azaleas in bloom with a solemn face.

“What does that mean? I haven’t danced in five years at least,” he said, and was relieved by how easily that came out of his mouth. “I am only here to dance with you.”

“Your cousins are indeed shocked by the sight of you, and they are amused by your dance card.”

“Which you have signed your name to.” George produced his dance card with a flourish.

“I indeed did. And I see many other names there now as well!”

“Would that I could have given every dance to you.”

Lucie stopped behind the furthest azalea and gazed at him. They had not been able to talk alone for a fortnight, and George had decided that not talking alone was unbearable. He slid the dance card back into his coat pocket and advanced to her.

“Lucie.”

“Yes?”

“I should like, that is, I want to say—Lucie.” George switched to English because he simply couldn’t manage it properly in French. “This is all backwards and upside-down. Lucie.”

“George.”

He loved the way she said his name, with a soft G and an extra syllable in it that made it sound so much more interesting than it was normally. “Lucie, I am completely gone on you.” He touched her gloved hand. She did not draw it away from his, but blushed and looked down.

“Do you mind?”

“No,” she said. “I think I am gone on you too, as you say. Je suis folle de toi.”

“Would you marry me if I asked?” He said this in English.

“That is a strange question,” she said. “You should ask.”

George closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “Veux-tu m’épouser?”

“Oui.” And that was so softly said, so sweetly said, that George had to look into Lucie’s eyes to be sure she’d said it. She had.

George looked round the conservatory rapidly. They were alone, at least for the moment. He gathered her gloved hands in his, and stepped close. He leaned forward and there—she rose to meet him—a first kiss! Too fleeting, a moment and it was over, and they were both looking round themselves, blushing. He wanted a second kiss.

“A thousand damnations, I cannot kiss you properly,” he said. Then, more seriously, “Lucie, I cannot give you a ring.”

“No?”

“Your father—he has not given me permission. I had a most odd conversation with him.”

“I thought your negotiation—”

George chose his words carefully, because he wanted to be sure Lucie understood him. “I had found the courage to ask his permission. But he did not permit me to begin to speak. He asked me many questions about the price of houses, and it became clear he was telling me exactly how much income I had to have first, and what I had to settle on you, without saying it.”

Lucie squeezed his hands, then released them. Woe was he. “You are doing well in business, you say.”

“Yes, but not nearly as well as your father says I must. I need far more capital to settle on you than I have. He wants a thousand a year and six thousand settled.”

“So much?”

“So I’m told.”

“I would be content with less.”

“Your father does not seem to agree.”

“Oh.” Lucie looked thoughtful and not all that happy. Was she unhappy with him?

George bit his lip. “Lucie, I am sorry I am not yet able to meet his standards. It shall not take long—”

Lucie said, “Do not fret, mon chéri. He has priced me, and priced me high. He wants to marry me off well.”

It wasn’t him. It was her father. George wanted a cigar to chew but didn’t have one, so he bit the fingertip of his glove instead. This was a caution. He was on the correct path, he knew. Her father’s demand was at the very highest end of what Soames had guessed, but it was within his reach. If he worked harder, he would meet it sooner. What he need do now was make certain she knew he was hers.

“We shall be quiet then, until I can tell him I have met his standards,” George said. He held his hand over his heart because he could not kiss her again. Call him melodramatic; he did not care. He needed her to know.

“I am yours,” he said. “Silent and true.”

Lucie mirrored him. “And I yours.”

He looked deep into her eyes. What he saw there made him feel things he had not ever imagined feeling. Nothing ever happened to him? What nonsense! Everything had happened to him.

“Je t’aime,” George said.

Dear God, words he’d never imagined saying, not that way, not those words, not ever. He said them again. And then she said them to him, and here he was weak at the knees, as if he’d taken a hard punch and was groggy.

Out in the ballroom, George could hear the little band begin to play something in waltz time. Their time to talk was over.

“This waltz is mine,” George said.

“Ah, no. Your dance card says it is mine.”

“True! We belong to each other.”

“Let us dance it together, therefore.”

George offered her his arm, and they walked out of the conservatory to join the waltz, already begun. If anybody watched them, he did not care; if anybody wondered at them, he did not care; he had finally understood why they taught every boy how to waltz, and why every man ought to want to waltz.

---

5. The valuation

Days later, George and Parkes were in Earl’s Court, inspecting a house property George had found that was potentially worth snatching up, renovating, and selling again. They were going over it together closely, noting what would need to be done if Parkes decided to buy. George watched Parkes carefully every time they did this. George himself evaluated location and overall architecture smoothly, with the benefit of years of watching his father in action, but Parkes knew things about water tanks, drains, and the soundness of wooden beams. George needed to learn them.

Houses were always so strange in this state, half-abandoned by their financially wrecked owners, horses with saddles on but no rider atop, waiting to have their reins taken in hand again.

George looked at the walls stripped bare, the paper clinging still to the plaster here and there. It was ghostly, a shell of a house, like a jockey’s silks with no colours at all. Wrong way to think about it. He was looking at it without all the gewgaws in the way, all the fancy tack and blankets. He could look at the gee itself, at the rooms and passages, the sightlines. George looked, and thought about conformation. The bones of the building looked good with nothing distracting him.

“We should hire a decorator,” George said, suddenly. “Make up the houses before selling them. Let the punter imagine himself sitting in an au courant drawing room.”

“I don’t employ decorators,” Parkes said.

“Something to consider,” George said. “Paint the walls, hang some copies of paintings, haul in some hired furniture. Like a stage set.”

Parkes grunted. “Show the house as they might live in it. That’s capital thinking.”

Parkes reached up and stroked the ends of his moustache. He was quite good-looking, in George’s estimation, and it was no mystery why he had all those women willing to share his attention part-time. He also charmed men somehow. George learned about prospects differently from how Parkes did, by lunching with them and gossiping. Parkes had some kind of magnetism that worked on men and women both that was pleasurable to watch, if mystifying.

George said, “Been thinking about how to do better selling the things.”

“We’re doing quite well, I think. You’ve helped expand what I’ve been able to consider exactly as I’d hoped. One of our bets hasn’t paid off yet, which is unfortunate but not yet a problem. Other than that, I’ve done well following your nose.”

Parkes wasn’t looking at him, and George wasn’t sure if he was doubting or simply distracted by the state of the back stairs.

“I keep my eyes and ears open,” he said, and tried to see whatever it was Parkes was staring at in the back stairs. They looked perfectly normal to him. They were stairs, going up, narrower than the main stairs, which were quite narrow to begin with, but quite sound. He looked at Parkes, and said, “What about the stairs?”

“A creak in one or two steps, but they’re otherwise sound. Listen as we walk up.”

George tuned his ears and listened, and heard the creaks. A better sort of tenant would want the back steps silent, and that was why Parkes was listening as they climbed. He nodded to himself. A small lesson learned.

“I heard some gossip,” Parkes said, as they emerged into the garret.

George held his finger under his nose but sneezed anyway. It was dusty up here. It was also bare and unpleasant. That could be remedied easily. He said, “Gossip? Do tell.”

“I heard three versions of what happened at a private ball this weekend. Our own dear Irene was mentioned in two of them, as having introduced her bridesmaid to the family—a French girl if you please, daughter of a diplomat living in London. In one version, this French girl is quite respectable.”

George tipped his head back, as if considering this news afresh. “I believe we both met this young lady at an excellent dinner when Cousin Soames was first engaged. A most interesting filly, if I recall correctly. What are the other versions?”

“In the second, she is an artistic sort, a violinist. Quite irregular.” Parkes frowned at the garret. “I have nothing here, other than the cracked window pane and a general need of being made suitable for respectable servants. Let’s go down the main stairs.”

George went down the steps to the third storey, listening for creaks. None. As they emerged from the stairs onto the hall with the spare bedrooms and sewing room or whatnot, he said, “Can’t be having artistic sorts among the Forsytes. Cousin Irene only passes because all the uncles are distracted by how she looks in evening dress.”

Parkes snorted. “The third version is quite shocking, in that it is whispered that a young Forsyte cousin is romantically linked with her, and was seen dancing with her. This was even more surprising in that this particular young man is a sworn bachelor who has never before attended his parents’ balls.”

“I am thoroughly shocked. She must be extraordinary, to have tempted a Forsyte bachelor.”

Romantically linked, forsooth. No one had overheard them, then, or seen their one kiss. He’d thought it was written all over their faces when they danced that second waltz, but perhaps not.

The walls here had been stripped more thoroughly than most, and the plaster was quite bare. There was nothing to see here of interest. Parkes indicated as much, and they moved down to the second storey, with the main bedroom, the bath, and where a W.C. should be. There was one, and the waste worked. Better than many unoccupied properties. Parkes made a satisfied face. George thought about how the grooms he’d known were always interested in what the other end of the horse was doing. Oats went in; dung came out; what came of that was important business, for horses and houses both.

The bedroom was large, with windows upon the street. George stood in its centre. What would it be like to be decorating a house like this, thinking to live in it after a wedding? It wasn’t grand enough for Béranger, but it was a good space. It occurred to him that other men would think the same.

Parkes stood next to him, hands on hips. “I looked into this story of the Forsyte bachelor, but no one would say anything. My dear school friend Forsyte was quite stonily silent about it, which told me more than all three tales put together.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. A silent Forsyte says far more than an openly voluble Forsyte does. He never does seem to learn this, but I think it is in his nature.”

“He should be careful not to play at cards.”

Parkes laughed outright.

George stopped and pointed out three places in the wall where someone or something had dented the plaster, which had taken some doing. This house was solid construction. Parkes smoothed his moustache and then shrugged. It was easily repaired.

They made their way down to the drawing room on the first storey and walked about inside it, looking round themselves.

George said, “Well, she needs her tail combed out, but her conformation thus far says she can run.”

Parkes said, “Let’s go and look at what matters.”

“The drains,” said George.

“The drains.”

They went all the way down into the kitchen, considered it briefly, then went further back to look at the belly of the house, its digestion. George carried a candle so Parkes could see well enough to contemplate the pipes. Parkes rapped on the soil pipe that led out of the house and into the drains. George had learned how to identify this specific pipe, and was watching and listening to how Parkes evaluated its health, and how much investment the house would need to bring it up to scratch.

Parkes shrugged. “Not quite flowing freely. Will need a look, perhaps some work, but not out of the ordinary.”

George tried his own knuckles on the soil pipe, ear close to it, brow furrowed. Listening to things was not his strong suit, but he would develop it. He could perhaps hear what Parkes meant. His opinion had not changed, and he decided to say so.

“I’d take a flutter on this one. I like her odds. She’s got sound wind”—here George touched the pipes. “No pedigree at all, but that merely improves our odds.”

“A flutter, eh?” said Parkes. “You’re confident, then.”

“Yes,” George said, simply.

“It’s not misplaced. You’ve got a keen eye.”

Parkes said this as if it were of no moment, but George knew Parkes was pleased with the results of their collaboration thus far.

“I should like to take that flutter with my own money,” said George. “Venture shares.”

Parkes turned a valve, listened to water flow, then closed it. “As a regular thing?”

“Yes. I’d like to win some real purses here. Commissions have given me a good start, and I jolly well appreciate them, but I’d like to start building capital.” He had six thousand to make and put away safely, after all.

“An understandable, even laudable goal. Quite Forsyte of you.”

“Blood will tell.”

Parkes grunted. He put his hands on his hips and stared at the coal chute. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it, to George’s eye, though perhaps it was how dark it was in the basement. “Speaking of which, I had the oddest visit at my office the other day.”

“You’ve had a thrilling week.”

“Most,” Parkes said. “A fellow named Roger Forsyte called on me. Quite curious about my business. Very interested in what his son was up to and whether he worked or merely lunched.”

“Merely? Lunching is serious business.”

Parkes made that snorting sound of his, then led them back to the kitchen. “He seemed to have a favourable opinion of his son’s overall ability but not of his industry, and to be suspicious of my involvement.”

George wanted to say something cutting, but found it difficult. This was a sign of concern and interest, and who was he to scoff at it? Then he considered what Parkes had said his father was suspicious about.

“Your involvement? Did he use that word?”

Parkes said, “He used different words at different times. Involvement first, then money later, when he’d quite warmed to me.”

“Ah, I feel better now. You did talk to my father, and not to another man claiming to be he.”

“I told him you’d been recommended to me, and had done quite well working on commission finding prospects for me. He spluttered at this news.”

It was now George’s turn to snort. “He never paid me a commission, you see. Free labour from your sons is to be assumed. He was once outraged by Cousin Soames refusing to give him advice about a legal problem gratis.”

Parkes laughed. “Forsyte would never give his services gratis.”

George was well aware that that specific Forsyte in fact would do so for a friend, while continuing to be an utter stuffed owl about everything else. George was in a small circle of fortunates, very likely because he made Irene laugh. He needed no pecuniary excuse to continue doing so: Irene laughing was gorgeous, Lucie laughed when Irene laughed, and Lucie laughing was something else entirely.

He said merely, “He certainly deserves to price his services as he does.”

“Indeed.” Parkes stroked his moustache gently. “Still feel like the flutter on this one?”

George made a thoughtful sound. “Yes. I think the odds are longer than they should be—she’s priced wrong. The location and the house itself are worth more than this.”

“I agree. This is a good first house for venture shares. It’s been a good collaboration. We should do more, and get your accounts rising for whatever it is you’re planning. My own accounts have done well from it, and I should like to continue the arrangement.” Parkes said all this quite coolly, while he looked at the steps up from the kitchen to the back entrance.

George’s chest felt strange. He’d been praised by someone he respected, and he felt it. It was good, and he felt good, and if this continued a moment longer he would find himself saying something earnest. “Right then. I suppose we get my cousin Soames to draw things up?”

“As always.” Parkes turned and rubbed his chin. “I want another look at the entry hall.”

“First impressions?”

“First impressions. I’m thinking about your decorator idea.”

“Men have no imagination. Let’s not require them to have it, but supply it for them.”

The two men went up the kitchen steps to the entry to consider it anew.

---

6. The Hotch Potch

Young Jolyon sat in the Hotch Potch smoking room, reading the evening papers, smoking a cigarette, in his usual leather armchair at a table under a gas lamp turned high enough for reading. It was a comfortable spot. His chair smelled of well-kept leather and tobacco smoke. The club was an exclusive one, and it came with its masculine comforts. The hush round him, the quiet voices of waiters who walked on felt-soled boots, the silence of members who didn’t pry into one’s life: all was a peaceful relief to a man with two small children and a profession that was anything but steady.

The Hotch Potch was an indulgence, but he had not given it up when he had given up the rest of his life as a gentleman of leisure. Jolyon examined his soul more than most men, and it had never told him why he kept this one piece of his former life. Whatever the reason, he remained a member of the club, and frequented it of an evening to read the papers, speak with acquaintances, and absorb a single brandy while he did so. He did see his cousin George at the club now and then, and they nodded amiably to each other, but they had not spoken often before the rupture, and continued the habit of not speaking after.

Tonight indeed he saw his cousin wander past, looking much as usual, well turned out and pleased with himself. George nodded to him, and Jolyon nodded back, then turned the page of his newspaper. To his surprise, this time George paused, caught his eye, and came over to his little table. Jolyon looked up over the top of his newspaper, cautious.

“Forgive the intrusion,” George said. “Wanted to let you know that Aunt Ann asks after you now and then. If there’s anything you should like me to tell her, I should be happy to pass it on discreetly.”

The newspaper crackled in Jolyon’s hands and he gave George a sceptical look. George spread his hands and quirked a smile. “She asked again today at tea. Not sure how many years the old girl has left in her.”

“I see,” Jolyon said, and set his newspaper down at last. “You may tell our aunt that all four of us are well, and I am quite settled down and making a decent living at insurance. I am touched that she thinks of me, and I am happy to hear she is well.”

“I shall do so.” George gave him a slight bow, and turned to go.

On impulse, Jolyon said, “George, tell me—do you ever see June?” He knew there was a note in his voice that he hadn’t intended, but there it was. He missed June, and his father’s insistence on taking custody of her had been a hard blow.

George turned. “Ah. May I?” George indicated a chair, and Jolyon nodded. George sat, and leaned forward into the light of the gas lamp. Jolyon saw an uncharacteristically serious and thoughtful expression on George’s face. He waited for George to decide to speak.

George finally straightened and smiled, and Jolyon thought it was perhaps a fond smile. “I do see June. She is red-haired and fierce and opinionated and laughs at my jokes. She likes to remind me that the two of us were essential in the weddings of our cousins Winifred and Soames.”

Jolyon froze with his cigarette halfway to his lips, then recovered. He inhaled and blew out slowly. “Soames has married, then, and June carried the bride’s train? I can believe that. What I can’t believe is that you were involved.”

“Ah, but I was a groomsman. Cousin Soames and I are great friends now. Your face has become quite entertaining.”

“Forgive me, but Cousin Soames is not the most amiable of men.”

“But he is. He married a perfectly wonderful woman, and love has exposed the man who was hiding behind the sulk.”

Jolyon considered his burning cigarette. His cousin Soames had never seemed the sort of man to have anything at all worthwhile behind his sulk. But love was a strange thing, and perhaps its wild touch had revealed something long hidden.

George leaned back. “What’s more, June has an intense passion for Mrs Soames. I see her at their home often.”

“Ah, poor little June,” murmured Jolyon. She would be the age for passions like that. Whatever it was June felt, it would be felt most intensely, as hot as the flames of her red hair and her temper. He had never been quite sure how June came to be his daughter, but she most certainly was. There was the stamp of the Forsyte in her face and chin that was unmistakable.

George went on. “Strange things have happened since your departure, Cousin Jo. Irene—that is, Mrs Soames—has brought that exotic and wild influence of art back into the family, and magic is in the air. Your father adores her just as much as June does, for she plays Schubert and Beethoven upon the piano.” George made a gesture with his fingers. “She plays for him often, I believe.”

“My, my,” Jolyon murmured. His heart had quivered when George mentioned his father. He was left to deduce from the lack of news to the contrary that the old man was well. In fact, George had gone out of his way to tell him that his father was happy. Would he ever see either his father or June again? Well, he had made his choice, and his father had made his, and there they were stuck.

Aloud, he said, “I am glad to hear all of this, however much I am surprised by it.”

George said, “I can’t say that the family has changed at heart. Property is still its religion and apostates beware! But it has been at its best of late. It has united in moments of surprising generosity. Cousins have married. Children have been born. Gossip is exchanged. Time passes.”

Jolyon said, “So it does. I don’t miss the aunts’ gossip.”

“There is the difference between us.”

“I should have said it was the horse racing.”

“Alas. The turf has seen less of me recently.”

“Ah, yes. I have not seen Dartie in the club of late.”

“I play billiards with him now and then, but at the Iseeum, not here.”

Jolyon gazed at his cousin through his cigarette smoke. The idea of George not betting on horses was extraordinary. But then, he himself had gone through a period of gambling at university, only ending when his inability to pay his debts of honour had come to the attention of his father. He’d reformed in shame immediately, and never repeated the error. Perhaps even George had grown up.

George’s grin had not lost its rakish tilt, however, as he said, “Well, Cousin Jo, thank you for your news. Aunt Ann will be tickled.” He rose from his chair, and was gone.

Jolyon sat alone, bemused, and stubbed out his cigarette. At least his father had company in his life, and he’d always enjoyed music. The rest of the family did not seem to be moving entirely in the same direction they’d been when he’d seen them last, but was that truly surprising? The billiard balls had been struck by new hands holding the cue.

Young Jolyon lit a second cigarette, an indulgence he saved for these club nights, and smoked it while he read the papers he could not afford to take at home.

---

7. The uncle

May 1882

George took up riding again, as he’d sworn to himself, and established a relationship with a stable in Richmond Park that would hire him a lively gee with good manners and a liking for a brisk canter now and then. He was happy to exercise himself this way on early mornings. Early morning was a time that had not previously existed in George’s life, and it was a surprise to him to find it enjoyable now to be out at that hour, in the fresh spring air, getting himself back into training. It was wonderful to smell horses and leather and engage in that conversation between man and mount, in the language he’d spent so much of his youth learning to speak.

The gossip about George and that French girl did rage round the family from the evening of the ball at Roger’s onward. It was freely discussed in the drawing room at Timothy’s on the Bayswater Road, turned inside out and examined in all ways. The gossip reached George’s parents and was the subject of hot debate over their dinner table, with the parents and the younger Rogers still at home taking sides about whether George ought to be allowed to have feelings for a French girl.

George got all this news from Nash one morning while being shaved, it having reached his valet via his father’s coachman, during a visit from his mother in which she had not brought up the subject to George even for a moment. His father had also not breathed a word. His parents were, it seemed, playing coy. He’d stuck a pawn out in the middle of the board and they were jolly well ignoring it.

“Well, it’s pleasant not to be shouted at, at least.” He watched Nash whisk up shaving soap in the mug.

“Indeed, sir.” Nash began applying soap with the brush.

“It’s salon night,” George said, through the foam.

“Yes, sir.”

“Lucie’s uncle will be there, she says. The good coat, if it’s back.”

“I would certainly hold my jaw still while being shaved if I were you, sir.”

“Infernal cheek,” George muttered, with his jaw motionless. Nash had taken the razor in hand, and George held still. No nicks wanted for tonight. He was clean-shaven against the current fashion, with side whiskers, so Nash had quite a lot of face to scrape smooth.

“The good coat is back. You had left billiard chalk in its right outside pocket.”

George grunted. He’d been distracted, was all he could say. Or not say, if he wished his throat intact. He closed his eyes and let himself think. He wanted to ask about his riding breeches next, though surely it would insult Nash if he did so.

Nash reached his upper lip. He said, quite as if shaving a man’s lip were not difficult in the least, “You are lunching with Mr Winters, the current owner of the Earl’s Court property. You are meeting him at that chop-house off Cornhill you enjoy.”

George made a noise to indicate assent. His first venture shares deal. He’d do a little chaffering and put the man into a good mood, then bring signed papers back to Parkes’s office. If all went well, that was. He felt confident about the task of putting the man in good humour; it would be his first time taking charge of getting the papers themselves signed, and that made him a little nervous.

Nash wiped his face clean. Glossy-smooth and perfect, as his face was every morning now that he was a town gentleman instead of a country gentleman. A country idler. A country dabbler at farming. Dabbler at riding as much as possible while farming as little as possible. Whatever the hell he’d been doing in ’80 when he hadn’t been desperately playing the jester to keep the wife of the neighbouring landowner flirting with him. When she had inevitably broken his heart, he’d moved back to London and sworn himself to bachelorhood. He couldn’t remember what excuse he’d given his father, he’d been in such a state. He’d taken rooms, engaged a valet to keep his things more or less in order, and flung himself into uselessness.

Nash was now busy dressing a man who was not quite useless any more. It was pure luck that Nash could also keep his daily engagements in hand. George could improvise quite well if someone fed him his cues, and Nash had a knack. He’d received a rise for that.

George dressed for City business and a bit of walking, which is what his day usually treated him to. He had a measuring tape in one pocket, and a folded-up map of the west of London in the other. Notebook, pencil, pocketbook, coins, bric-a-brac. So much nonsense he carried now-a-days so he could take his own lunars of houses, as his father put it.

Nash handed him his watch, a thing of no particular distinction, with nothing at all on its chain. George threaded it into his waistcoat, wound it twenty turns, checked its time, and dropped it into a pocket.

He said, “I must call at Bayswater Road in the mid-afternoon, then round for tea with that fellow who wants to rid himself of some properties in the Kensington Potteries. I won’t be dealing with him unless something surprising happens, but I want to keep his kettle warm.”

“Do we have his card, sir?”

“Yes, from last week. Something German-sounding.”

Nash went out into George’s little study and found the card in the box where George kept them, and brought it back.

“Thank you, yes, this is the chap. I’ll take a note when I return if he says anything worth remembering.”

“Very good, sir.”

Nash had taught him that trick. Whoever Nash had worked for before George had been dashed good at this sort of thing. Nash wouldn’t talk about it, and George wouldn’t presume to ask.

He went off to his day of work happily. The morning was spent on a walk through some streets looking at addresses listed as for sale, to see if he thought any of them worth further investigation. He scribbled in the little notebook he carried in his pocket; one deserved a second look. Then he got onto the Underground and endured the smoke and heat all the way into the City to meet that chap Winters for lunch.

Winters was in his thirties, with a moustache that did not distinguish itself, under a head of receding hair. He was delighted to meet Mr Forsyte again, he said, and wiped perspiration from his brow with his handkerchief. George stole a trick from M Béranger and tucked his arm into Winters’ and escorted him to their cubicle, where they could eat their chops, prime chump, with floury potatoes. The smell of other men’s meals whetted George’s own appetite, already keen from regular exercise. Lunching might be serious business, but it was also enjoyable.

Winters was affable enough for a man who’d nearly ruined himself on investments in house property in Earl’s Court. After one glass of port, he was confessing the existence of creditors to George, who was all sympathies. After a second, he was explaining that he was down to one property he needed to be rid of, and if he could this would allow him to satisfy the last demands of his creditors. In George’s opinion, he had his eyes fixed on the winning-post, and not on the jockey coming up past him, so he was willing to part with it for less than it was worth. Or less than George thought it was worth, and Parkes had agreed. After that second glass of port, it was not difficult at all to close the sale. George was a little sorry for the fellow, and did not drive the terms as far as he might have; Winters had to feel he got something out of it too. Parkes’s rule, and a sound one. Parkes always took the long view.

With this prudence in mind, George concluded the sale on better terms than he’d hoped, and on terms that made Winters look relieved. He watched Winters sign, then took the stylographic pen and signed his own name to the papers. Geo Forsyte, then the date. His palms were a little sweaty, but he’d done it: the contract was signed.

He shook hands with a relieved Winters, and parted with him on good terms. The conveyancing started now, and that was a nuisance, but routine. His first venture shares deal! His own money was at stake, and there was a pleasant thrill in his blood as he considered this, the thrill he used to feel betting on horses. Here he could bet that his judgment of property value was better than the next man’s, and that was a surer thing. No crooked grooms nicking tendons or dosing a horse the night before; no jockeys taking money to ease up at a crucial moment. Just his own eyes and ears on a house, considering where it was, what condition it was in, and where the market was going.

George folded the papers neatly into an envelope and slipped them into his pocketbook. He settled the bill with the chop-house; Winters need not encounter an embarrassment here. George left the restaurant and made his way west out of the City on foot. It was a fair spring day, a little windy perhaps, but a good day for a walk. The wind had lifted the stink of coal smoke away for a few hours. George was a Londoner born and bred, but he had learned to hate that smell.

He walked steadily, happy for the exercise. His destination was the Bayswater Road, and his Aunt Ann. He had his news of Young Jolyon for her, and he had not yet been able to find her alone. What he had to share was not for Juley’s or Hester’s ears.

He made good time as he walked. Riding again had put the muscles back into his legs, and he felt them. He wanted to trot and show his paces. His entire body felt alive in a way it hadn’t since that summer of ’80, when he’d come to his crisis. The muscles in his arms had returned as well, slim as he was.

When he reached the home of his Uncle Timothy, he found his Aunt Ann alone in the drawing room. Mrs Small was at the stores, Smither told him; Miss Hester was making her calls for the afternoon. It was an ideal moment for the conversation he’d hoped for.

Aunt Ann received him cheerfully as ever. She might favour Soames as keeper of the family soul, but George knew which nephew was most likely to make her laugh.

George had known this drawing room since childhood. He’d been shown the butterflies under glass and been horrified by them; he had often studied the stiffly posed daguerreotype of his grandfather, the photographs of his uncles and their wedding parties, the family group from ’79 that showed all of the elder generation at once. There had been anti-macassars on the chairs for as long as he could remember, however little his generation used macassar. He had a score of cousins who had the same experience of this room through twenty years and more of near changelessness. It ought to have been a dusty place George hated to visit, but it was not: the drawing room in his Uncle Timothy’s house in the Bayswater Road was instead a place of comfort and welcome, where his aunts accepted his gossip and repaid him in kind; where the family came to remind itself it was a family. Even so cynical a man as he sought out the simple pleasure of sharing gossip in this drawing room.

George waited for Smither to serve him his glass of brown sherry and leave. He conspicuously watched her walk out of the drawing room, knowing his aunt was watching him. He turned back to her and grinned.

“Well, George? You obviously have something to tell me, so out with it!”

“I come bearing news of my cousin Jolyon, Aunt. I chanced to speak with him a few nights ago, and I thought you might wish to hear about it.”

They leaned forward conspiratorially towards each other; she smelt of lavender, an old-fashioned scent that George associated with her. He shared his news, in tones low enough that Smither could not hear it. His aunt would either share it or not; he thought not. She was delighted by the news, as he had suspected she would be, and also pleased to hear his own assessment that Young Jolyon looked well and rather happy. She was tickled to receive Jolyon’s good wishes. She really was quite fond of the fellow, despite her public condemnations of his immorality.

This news ingratiated George with her nicely. He would never admit to any motives but those which were ulterior for this act, so he allowed himself to drink a little more sherry in a state of satisfaction.

Today, however, his aunt had some words for him as well. She rapped him very gently with her folded fan, and said, “What was that you told me, George? About nothing ever happening to you?”

George set his glass down, and spoke in a more ordinary voice. This news was for Smither to hear, if she were listening. “I was mistaken, Aunt. Something did happen. You have no doubt heard all about it.”

“And?”

“Nothing official yet, I’m afraid. I’m waiting for my income to reach the amount her father wishes to see.”

“Very sensible of you, George,” said Aunt Ann, and she rested her fan on his wrist instead of rapping him again. “Now see you do everything properly, mind.”

“I shall, Aunt. I look forward to introducing her to you some day soon.”

She would spread that round, which was why George had told her, and from there it would reach his father, who might or might not approve of his prudent behaviour. There being nothing else he wanted the entire family to know, he shared no more confidences, but did keep his aunt amused with tales of house property and bargains snapped up under the noses of other men. When Mrs Small appeared in the drawing room, little dog in her arms, he fled immediately. Some interrogations were too frightening to be faced.

George went off to his next appointment, the one with the fellow with the German name. He was most definitely not interested in the property that this fellow Brunn had, it being in the middle of the proper slum that was the Kensington Potteries. The fellow owned other properties, however, and was a business connection worth keeping. They had a pleasant-enough chat at the fellow’s office, in which George sounded him gently for his hobby-horses.

Then he went home to his rooms. He first wrote his notes about Brunn before they left his memory. His perambulations had not taken him past Parkes’s office, so next he handed the contract papers over to Nash to send to Parkes by messenger. He was delighted to tell Nash it had all gone well, better than he’d hoped, and he had given a good account of himself.

When it came time to change and go out for the evening, his nerves began to tell. Tonight at the Béranger salon Lucie’s maternal uncle was expected, M Théodore Chassagne. Lucie had told him that her uncle made a point of visiting his eldest niece to see how she was faring so far from her mother. She’d reported this with some fondness, so George was predisposed to approve of him. He was in fact eager to impress him in whatever manner he could find.

At the very least he needed to look his best.

“The good coat?” he said to Nash, who made a little sound at him and showed him where it rested on the clothes horse, ready to be donned once George had changed collar and cuffs. George changed, switched his studs twice before settling on the plain gold ones Nash recommended, and fretted. The good coat went on, and George thought about whether he wanted to afford a second good coat. He decided against it.

On the Béranger doorstep George reminded himself of Renard’s chastisement: don’t use her Christian name in public. Remember that as carefully as he remembered the gender of words. Stay polite. He didn’t know this Oncle Théodore as an intimate yet, and so he must remain formal, and call him M Chassagne.

Blasted French. Renard had told him once that Russian had no ‘the’ and ‘a’ and that must be even worse, so—he was distracting himself. He had to find his courage and make conversation with her uncle in due course.

He entered the home, was announced to the salon, and greeted Lucie with a secret smile. She introduced him to her uncle, and George shook hands with the man. It was a cool hand, removed from his own immediately. M Chassagne was lean, on the tall side, like a good horse for riding to hounds. He had a waxed curled moustache that was beginning to grey. George looked for any family resemblance in the face, and saw it in the blue eyes and the slightly waved hair. Chassagne had a more solemn look than Lucie or M Béranger ever had, however. Or at least he did in this room, meeting these people.

George was not sure what to make of the man yet. He’d need to listen and perhaps tap on his pipes.

The entertainment this evening was Madame Tessier reading Victor Hugo, yet another reading in honour of his eightieth birthday. George found his mind wandering during the reading, which went on longer than it ought to have, at least if Madame Tessier had been paying attention to the ordinary bounds of courtesy. However, it was Hugo, and the salon was inclined to indulge her because of this, for they were all feeling sentimental. After the reading there was little appetite for more formal recitation or performance, and the salon fragmented into smaller groups discussing whatever it was they were interested in.

George circulated. He found his way to the round and comfortable Madame Tessier and thanked her for the reading. She seemed rather uncertain about how it had been received, so he put her at ease by asking why she had chosen that story, and if she recommended that he read Hugo in translation or in the original. He knew that was a long hop, but it would settle her right down to have something to smash to the boundary. Indeed it did, and she was all smiles a few minutes later, and telling the visiting M Chassagne what an amiable man M Forsyte was, quite cosmopolitan for an Englishman. Chassagne asked George how he came to attend the salon, and George decided to tell a simpler variety of the truth: that he had met Mlle Béranger and her father when she was a demoiselle d’honneur at his cousin’s wedding, and he a groomsman, and he had enjoyed one salon and the conversation so much he had resolved to attend a second if M Béranger would have him. Here he was now, a regular.

That had been reasonably navigated, and the musical man M Tessier pounced upon the excuse to talk about George’s cousin and his lovely wife, the pianist who’d played Fauré some weeks ago with Lucie. Ah, yes, Irene, always remembered wherever she went. George exchanged a smile with Madame Tessier, and said, “He ought to compliment the violinist as well,” and she laughed.

M Tessier gestured widely, and said, “They were both marvellous, and I wish to hear them again, as Mademoiselle Béranger promised. When does she play next? You will know, Monsieur Forsyte.”

“Not next week, I think,” George said. “She is learning a new Brahms violin sonata just now.”

M Chassagne looked at George with his intent blue eyes, then across the room at his niece. He said, with a little smile under his moustache, “I am delighted my niece continues to play well and to entertain you all. She is most talented.”

Another pair of guests appeared, most eager to greet M Chassagne, and the little group dissolved into the greater swirl of conversation. George cheerfully talked with everyone he knew. He looked over at Lucie now and then. She stayed near her uncle’s side all evening. She seemed entirely happy to be talking with him, and the affection appeared mutual. George felt a little swell of warmth in his chest to see her joy. This was what love was, he supposed. She was happy, so he was happy. It seemed a good bargain to get twice as much happiness as a man might usually get.

Supper after the salon was attended by the usual intimates of the Bérangers. George escorted in Madame Tessier, who had been invited because of her recitation. Lucie was escorted in by her uncle. It was not a large table, but it was a talkative one, as these suppers always were, at least when George had been in attendance. Tonight was no exception, for M Chassagne had news from Paris: gossip, political news, the latest about the crash of l’Union Générale, and—most interestingly—wine news. George drank cold Chablis and listened to him talk, and watched him in a pool of candlelight, quietly judging the wine he was served. He swirled it in his glass and held it up to the candles on the table, and tasted it in that peculiar way George had seen men taste wine when they knew what they were about.

Chassagne was one of those men. He seemed to approve of Béranger’s wine overall, but not enthusiastically. He was a wine merchant of some kind, George knew, in London for business. As he listened, he heard Chassagne mention American growers, and George realised that he was there to arrange the purchase of rootstock for grapevines. George sat forward, for this was of great interest.

At a reasonable pause, he spoke. “Sir, please, do say more if you are willing. I am aware of the great devastation, of course, and of the possibilities of American rootstock, and the many questions we all have about what this shall do to the flavour of the grape.”

M Chassagne smiled upon George. “You fancy yourself a connoisseur?”

“Ah, sir, not at your level, but if I am going to drink the grape, I prefer to drink the delicious variety. I mourn the death of the great vineyards. I had occasion to serve a dear friend the 1865 Château Lafite last autumn, and it is a tragedy to think that its like will not be with us again.” George had got his eye in, and had forgotten he was speaking French.

“Spoken with true feeling. But perhaps the harvests may be better with the new roots?”

George grinned. “We must wait and drink in hope of that happy possibility.”

Chassagne smiled back at him. “We shall hope indeed. A handful more years, I think. Too many of the vineyards hesitate to act. But tell me, do you prefer the Bordeaux wines, M Forsyte?”

“That particular vintage suits an Englishman’s palate, and was a perfect companion for partridge at a meal in that friend’s honour. I enjoy the drier wines, particularly drier champagnes. The Burgundies are something I am always willing to taste. And Lucie most definitely prefers the Chambertin, which of course is dry.”

“I see,” said M Chassagne. He reached deliberately for his water glass, not his wine glass, and drank from it.

The silk of Lucie’s dress rustled, and George looked over at her. She was looking at her father, and she seemed worried somehow. Béranger had a smile on his face, amused and indulgent, as far as George could tell. He seemed relaxed, so whatever it was Lucie had reacted to was not alarming. Perhaps he’d said something that everyone knew about her, and had been awkwardly belabouring the obvious. Perhaps he’d botched his grammar. George drank more Chablis.

Chassagne set his water glass down. “Dry champagne,” he said. “You are a thought ahead of the general taste, but I think its popularity rises.”

“Sweet wines have a place, but the dry makes for contrast,” said George.

“Aha,” said Chassagne, and pounced upon this thought to commence a vivacious discussion of suiting wines to dishes from a novel perspective that George was quite taken by.

The rest of the supper was quiet on Lucie’s part, though her uncle was garrulous enough with George, each having found a worthy partner in this ever-important topic of conversation. George went home pleased with the evening and his performance with the language and with Lucie’s uncle. He’d done reasonably well, he thought, and kept up with everything, and understood the reading as it went. He would have good things to report to Renard, who would have to work to find something to mock him for this time. He crowed to Nash first, for the practice.

---

8. Dinner with the Soameses

George was often invited to the home of his cousin and friend Soames, now that Soames was married, to dine, sit in comfort by a fire with something to drink, and have a chat about City matters, the market in house property, and whatever came to mind. Similarly, Lucie was often invited to the home of her dear friend Irene, now that Irene was married, to learn new music together, to dine, and to talk with her of an evening. If the Soameses were to invite their friends over on the same evening for dinner, music, and conversation, well, who was to remark upon it?

Thus it was that George and Lucie both dined with the Soameses a few nights after Lucie’s uncle’s visit, while Lucie’s escort—a Béranger footman named Louis—dined below with the Pelham Crescent staff.

Dinner at the Soameses was not grand but the courses were good and the wines well-chosen. Soames had a palate that he made no fuss about, and their cook was skilled. Or so George thought, and he had faith in his own palate. The asparagus was excellent, in a light lemon Dutch sauce. The spring chicken was perfectly roasted and seasoned with rosemary and salt. The meal concluded with Spanish olives. It was all quite surprising, really: not rich or extravagant, but restrained and subtle. The wines suited the dishes. It was eaten in good company, and this was the greatest pleasure of all for George.

Soames chose to round it off with brandy instead of port, and the men drank it while sitting with the ladies, still in conversation. Said conversation was warm and lively, for the four of them got on well with each other. Irene and Lucie were quite close now thanks to playing together frequently, and George had learned that Soames had a dry wit that could be coaxed out of hiding when he wasn’t on his back foot. A comfortable Soames was an interesting Soames, who could talk knowledgeably about paintings and art, and have a good conversation with George about anything except sport.

George realised he hadn’t tried to discuss sport. He knew Soames was not a racing man, but did he enjoy cricket?

“I was wondering,” he said, “if you’d gone in for any sport. You must have, at school.”

“I could not play cricket at all. I rowed a little,” Soames said. “And I learned to punt, which I liked very much. I love fishing on the Thames, just sitting in a boat and catching something now and then while I look for birds.” He had an odd look on his face when he said that, as if he were saying something he felt he ought not to say. Damned man, refusing himself any pleasure at all and wearing a hairshirt instead.

“Do any of you ride? Would you like to?” George asked.

“Ah!” Irene said. “I rode often as a girl. I should love to again.”

Soames cast his gaze down at his glass as he answered. “I learned when I was at school. There was an outbreak of scarlet fever at Marlborough, and they sent us all home for a fortnight. Parkes’s family invited me to stay so I did, and Parkes taught me to ride. Or their groom did, with Parkes chaffing me along.”

Lucie looked nearly as excited as Irene. “I had a pony as a child and rode it often, though I don’t remember it well. I should not mind trying again.”

George rubbed his hands together with glee. Richmond Park, a couple of nice sedate hacks for the timid riders, and his dream afternoon would be reality. “I shall arrange it all,” he said. “A sunny morning, a hamper with lunch, and we shall have you all enjoying the finest of pastimes.”

Soames made a little noise, and Irene shushed him and shook her head. It was settled.

After dinner, their hosts left George and Lucie to their own devices. All four were in the drawing room, and thus the proprieties were observed. George and Lucie were on a remarkably comfortable sofa. Irene was playing something; George didn’t know what. Soames was sitting next to her, turning music pages. George knew that he and Lucie were being indulged: chaperoned decorously, but given every opportunity to talk all they needed to, without fretting about being overheard or loomed over. Unless it was by Irene’s tortoiseshell-and-white kitten, who sat on the arm of the sofa watching them through half-closed eyes.

He looked at Lucie and grinned at her mischievously, and she responded in kind and slipped her slim hand into his. He kissed her knuckles, her fingertips, and then turned her hand over and kissed her palm and the inside of her wrist.

“I have a gift for you,” he said. “You were reading Alice in Wonderland, you said. Here is the next book.”

He slipped a copy of Through the Looking-Glass out of his pocket and offered it to her. He’d tied a ribbon round it, but made no more fuss.

He said, “You will enjoy it, I hope. There is a chess match, and a story about Humpty Dumpty.”

Lucie accepted the book from him and opened it. She leafed through, and there was a smile on her face that widened as she read. There were illustrations in it, quite absurd ones, and she would know their style from the first book. She stopped and her smile became brilliant.

“Oh! This is where the poem about the walrus and the carpenter is from. I remember you and Irene reciting it!”

“We were eating oysters, yes,” George said, pleased to hear she remembered it.

“A year ago now.”

“Have we known each other that long?”

“We have, mon chéri. It feels like I have known you all my life, but it has been only a year.” She craned up and kissed his cheek. It was not a kiss on his lips, but it made his heart thrill just as much to receive it.

“I love it when you say mon chéri to me,” he said, and that was as fatuous as the smile on his face. Ah, well.

“You are most thoughtful,” she said to him. “It pains me that I must tell you something now, while I have the chance to.”

Something pained her? George took her hands. “What must you tell me? Lucie?”

“My uncle. He noticed something at dinner. You made a tiny mistake and he ought to have asked about it or been upset about it, but he did not react, and this is suspicious.”

George’s brows came together. He thought he’d done well, damn it all. “What did I do wrong?”

“You used my Christian name and you knew which wines I prefer. The Christian name, this is perhaps excusable from an Englishman. Knowing and saying what I prefer so easily, this says that you are intimate with the family. And everyone in the room knows you, and treats you as an expected guest, and did not remark on this.”

George’s stomach turned over. Damn. Double damn himself. Renard had warned him and he’d—but surely it had not been so bad? “Why did this alarm him?”

“It means you are a suitor.”

George bit his lip. “But I am a suitor.”

“Even a suitor would not speak so, if he were French. That you do so in such a relaxed way tells him you are almost family. My father has accepted you as my suitor, and expects the match. My uncle ought to have asked! He ought to have exclaimed over it! But he did not. Because my uncle did not comment, he thinks it is something to keep watch on, without alarming us. He was so cool and correct with me after that dinner, and it was unlike him. I am certain he will tell my mother, but what he will say I cannot guess.”

“Je ne comprends pas.”

“My mother and father—you know they are not on good terms. She does not live with us in London, and so I must play hostess. My grandmother thinks she married below herself. I am not sure why, but I am sure that it is about the politics of the last revolution. This is one reason why I am in London. I do not wish to understand the politics of my parents, yes?”

“I still don’t understand. Your father obviously knows about me!”

“My mother will have an opinion about whom I marry, I think, and she might not wish to let my father make this decision on his own.”

George was taken aback. He kissed her fingertips and thought out what this meant. It was not a pleasant thought. “I have made trouble for him. I’m sorry I put my foot in it.”

“You could not have known.” Lucie’s voice was kind, but George knew he didn’t deserve it. He’d gone home and crowed to Nash, such a fool was he.

“I’d been enjoying talking about wine with him. But—” George thought over that conversation again. “He drank water when I said that, didn’t he.”

“He did.” Lucie considered this. “That was not about the wine, I think.”

“I wonder.” George contemplated Béranger living in London without his wife, on purpose, and Lucie’s uncle bringing intelligence home, like some kind of spy. “It must be devilishly awkward to have one’s parents at odds with each other.”

“Your parents are not, then.”

George switched to English, thinking about his parents. “No, not that I have noticed. I think my father flattened my mother when they were married and she hasn’t popped back up to full roundness since. But they get on.”

Lucie laughed at him. “You say such funny things when you speak English. You are charming in French, and you begin to be witty, but in English!”

There, she was laughing, and he felt less sick. “Some day I’ll be as fluent in French as you are in English.”

“We shall practise together, then.”

“I’ll make jokes in English, you’ll tell me what they would be in French, and then we’ll swap.”

“I shall try to tell them as well as you do. You have a way of saying a thing as if by accident when I know that it is your wit inventing as you go.”

Lucie looked at him with something that had to be admiration on her face, and George’s heart felt as if it were expanding in his chest. He kissed her hands again. Lucie was especially pretty when she was happy like this. Her eyes sparkled and everything about her was alive and eager. She was a wisp of a thing, but all pent-up energy, like a racehorse kept in a stable for too long. She was wearing a blue evening dress, a colour that matched her eyes, and a little gold cross glinted at her throat. She was smiling with him now, seemingly over her worry about whatever her uncle had reacted to, and George felt giddy, as he had the first night he’d met her. Possibilities had opened up before him when he’d heard her laugh that first time, and seen that smile.

George took a careful look to the side at the piano. Their hosts were entirely occupied with whatever it was Irene was playing; only the kitten was watching them, and it was sitting like the Sphinx, half-asleep. It wasn’t quite privacy, but it was enough for a kiss, and he took his chances with it. They leaned into each other and their lips touched for their second kiss, and then for their third. It was like a Sauternes whipped into cream on his lips to kiss her. So he kissed her again. He touched his forehead to Lucie’s afterwards and sighed. Damn, he was far gone.

“I wish we could tell everyone,” he whispered.

“We shall remain silent and true until we can.”

“We shall.”

The piano piece came to an end, and George suspected their opportunity for kissing had as well. His chest ached. What a pass he had come to!

After that he did have the pleasure of listening to Lucie and Irene practising their Brahms sonata together. He sat next to Soames, a glass of cognac in hand, and was united with him in watching a loved musician play: Soames watched the pianist, he the violinist. Soames was lost in some kind of contemplative haze that George didn’t understand. It was pretty, yes! He admitted that. And the two pretty musicians seemed to be conversing with each other, or singing to each other. It was a deuced lot more enjoyable to George than the Fauré was. He said so to Soames during one of the pauses when the two players conferred over the score.

Soames nodded. “I have difficulty with Brahms, but I can find my way into this. It helps to listen to them practise. They play it in paragraphs of a sort.”

“I don’t think about it, I confess. I let it float me away. You should try it.”

Soames opened his mouth, looked at George, then closed it again. After a moment he muttered, “You’re just like Parkes. I’ve no idea how to do that.”

George nudged him gently. “You should stop thinking and indulge your feelings now and then.”

“Now you sound like Irene.”

“And this is how you know I am correct.”

Soames snorted very quietly, and George saw him smile. “Point to you.”

“Let us look at our beautiful women, drink our cognac, and listen to whatever it is they choose to play.”

George and Soames shared a look of perfect understanding and agreement, and turned back to watch the women consult each other. Perhaps that contemplative haze was simply love, because Soames had a secret smile on his face as he watched his wife, and George knew the same smile had been on his own face since Lucie had agreed to be his.

Irene’s kitten leapt onto Soames’s lap. Soames flinched, as if he had no idea what to do about kittens. He stroked it, cautiously. George watched, amused, as the kitten clambered up onto Soames’s shoulder. Soames made a half-hearted attempt to shoo it away, then gave up. George could hear it purring.

“She spoils this thing,” Soames muttered.

The musicians began playing again, the same thing they had played before. Lucie stopped them part way in, and said something to Irene George could not make out. She seemed unhappy, and frowned at her violin as she adjusted something. They repeated the paragraph, or sentence, or whatever it was Soames had said. George could not hear the difference between what had been played the first time and the second. He looked at Soames, who shrugged very carefully, so as not to disturb the kitten, which had fallen asleep. Lucie and Irene seemed satisfied by their second attempt, for they continued on.

Soames said, very quietly, “They have spent their lives learning to hear something we do not.”

George wondered what it was like to have cared about something that long, or to have known from childhood what it was one wanted to do. Horses were the only thing he’d ever come close to thinking about that much, and he’d given up betting on them. He’d never really loved betting for itself. Riding and jumping—that was another thing. Taking up riding again had been good for him. It felt pleasant to be doing something he was master of, for once.

He’d teach Lucie. He sat watching her play, lost in a pleasant daydream of riding in Richmond Park with her, stopping every so often to sit on the grass, drink wine, and kiss.

---

9. The summons

June, 1882

Four weeks later, Lucie received the morning post from her father’s secretary. There were three letters for her: one from her younger sister who was at school in Lyons, one from a cousin, and one—by the handwriting on the envelope—from her mother. She took a paper-knife and sliced open the envelope. Her mother’s stationery slid out, a very pale green, scented with neroli. She unfolded the sheets inside. There it was, in her mother’s difficult handwriting, what she had been expecting.

Her mother wished her to return to Paris for a long visit, to indulge her maternal affections and learn how Lucie’s life had been developing. She further noted, without any ceremony, that Lucie’s acquaintance M de Marigny had asked after her; he would be invited to dinner while she was there so she could allow him to pay his respects. Lucie knew what that meant. She would be reminded what a suitable suitor looked like. Her mother went on to write that she was certain Lucie would take no action of which her mother would not approve; her mother’s permission was of course required, as was that of her confessor.

Her mother wished her return. She was invited to return for various social occasions, and to talk to her mother about her future. Invited, as if given a choice.

Lucie closed her eyes and counted to twenty in as many languages as she could. She tried to remember anything of Russian, but failed. Only six. Her father would be disappointed. When she was certain her temper had been chained up, she took out paper and dipped her pen into ink to write her own letters.

Lucie sent brief notes to George and Irene both by the next post. She wrote in English, for the practice, though writing was always easier than speaking because of how much time she had to think about the words. If all went according to plan, she would meet George at Pelham Crescent that afternoon, they would drink English sherry, and Irene would let them talk. Irene knew they were affianced secretly, and would help.

Then there was the response to her mother to write. She wrote her mother that if the weather was good, she would arrive in Paris tomorrow evening; she would send a telegram if delayed. She gave away absolutely nothing else. She held off posting this to be sure she meant it; she wanted to talk to her father first. Her mother was of course incorrect; it was her father’s permission only that mattered.

She then set herself to pack. It was something she was used to doing at short notice, as the daughter of a diplomat. Go here; rush there; visit so-and-so at the back of beyond in the freezing winter and be charming to all and sundry including the unpleasant man from Rome who had kept trying to stare down her dress although she had been only fourteen. She had avoided an international incident and been polite to him. Lucie did wish for her own home, such as Irene had, in the place she wished to live, with the man she loved. Until that time, she knew exactly what to pack, how to do so rapidly, and how to do so lightly enough not to need any servants.

Her father had time for her over the lunch hour. He read her mother’s letter, and then laughed in a way that she knew meant he did not take her mother seriously. She wanted to stamp her foot at him. He could do whatever he wished, and here she was trapped, having to do exactly what her mother demanded.

He shrugged at her and said, “Well? What would you have me do?”

Lucie closed her eyes briefly, then looked at him. “Write to her. Tell her I will not be going to Paris.”

“I can do no such thing.”

“You would leave me at her mercy.”

“You have all the tools you need. Remember to pack your dancing slippers.”

Her father had already turned his attention back to the work upon his desk. Lucie felt another flash of irritation, which she again suppressed; it would not further her interests to show such a thing. She wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but he would be disappointed with her if she asked. He had taught her much, over her childhood. She’d had the usual English, German, mathematics, and music tutors, but there had always been the unusual teachers alongside: the men at his dinner table who were always manoeuvring round each other, never saying what they meant.

His message to Lucie was in fact clear, and so was his affection. She knew this even though he frustrated her.

“I understand perfectly, Papa,” she said to him, with outward calm. “I shall finish packing.” And she left his office.

She was packed, the letter to her mother posted, and the money she would need arranged and ready to be taken with her, when Irene’s reply reached her. She was to call any time she was able; Irene would be there to talk, and of course George was welcome to call at tea. Surely they would both also stay to dinner. Lucie sighed with relief. Her father might think her capable, but she wanted a friend to talk to, and she wanted another kiss from George to carry with her across the Channel.

They had had a month of peaceful spring, a month of pleasant rides together, with George quietly teaching her how to hold her seat on a calm and steady horse. It had been such fun to be in Richmond Park with George and Irene, and sometimes Mr Parkes or even a very cautious Soames. Such fun to share a pleasant secret of pure affection. And now it was exploded, ended with one letter demanding her return.

When she called on Irene in the afternoon at last, it was all she could do not to fling herself into Irene’s arms in front of the servants. Irene saw it in her face and embraced her, and Lucie let herself sink into her friend’s arms gratefully.

Irene drew her into the drawing room and sat her down and took her hands. Lucie clung to them.

“Your note,” Irene said, in French, as was their habit. “Paris again?”

“I am summoned,” Lucie replied. “My mother. She says nothing of it directly, but my uncle will have told her about George, and she will want to make her opinion known. She wishes me to meet an eligible man who is French.”

“Would you appreciate a friend with you? I can travel immediately.”

Lucie kissed Irene’s cheek. “You are a wonderful friend, but it is impossible. You have met my mother. You remember her.”

“I do. She did seem to care for you and to think highly of your talents as a musician.”

“Yes, she does. But this is conditional, I fear. Conditional on my obedience to her wishes.”

At this moment Larkin came in with a carafe and glasses on a tray. It was that English sherry, which Lucie was still uncertain about. George had told her once that the Soameses served good sherry, and if she were to like sherry at all, this would be the sherry to enjoy. The English did strange things with their wines. She tasted it thoughtfully, and set her glass down. Irene was watching her quietly, and Lucie knew she was waiting to hear how she could help.

Lucie said, “My father has told me without telling me that I am on my own in this. He does not oppose me, but he cannot help me. I do have a request of you, ma chère.”

“What do you need?”

“Please forward George’s letters to me hidden inside yours. He cannot write directly, and he will want to.”

“Of course. In return I must ask you to look for the latest—”

Lucie laughed despite everything. “You need not ask. It is the one thing I anticipate about Paris this time. Even my mother will not try to keep me away from the music shops. I shall find new music for us both to play, and send you the very latest piano work I can find.”

Then, because talking about Paris was already a burden, she changed the subject. “But first! You have told me you have taken up the Hammerklavier, but not how you are getting on with it.”

Irene’s own face lit up, and Lucie could see her satisfaction. “I like it less than the Appassionata, and it is more difficult, yet I make my steady way through it. Persistence is earning me progress. I might wish it were easier, but the technique does come eventually.”

“Ah! I envy you. I practise and practise, and I cannot break through. You hear me with the Brahms!”

“I hear you, and I hear something different from what you hear, it seems.”

“What do you hear?”

“You have more than enough technique for that piece. What you lack is the courage to give your emotions to it. You are guarded. You are not putting the feeling into it that Brahms demands.”

Lucie fell silent. Was she guarded? Irene was often correct in her advice, and this advice was given seriously. Lucie knew how to be guarded; her father was always guarded because that was his profession. He had taught her that too. But in the music?

“I will think on this,” she said, slowly.

Irene touched her arm. “If you worry about technique, that is a different problem.”

“I do worry. There are other pieces that I know frighten me.”

“You need to find the piece that maddens you so much you cannot leave it alone until you have made it yours. You told me you’re afraid of Paganini. You must embrace him instead. I challenge you, as you challenged me. Perhaps the 24th Caprice? Brahms took that theme for the piano, and you might tell him he is quite wrong to attempt to claim it.”

“You do not set your ambitions low for me! But this is a wonderful thought.”

Lucie took her friend’s hand again. Irene had managed to make her feel better while inspiring her, as always; this was why they had become friends at the school in Paris. Then her face fell as she thought about Paris again. She usually appreciated her trips home: they were chances to see family, attend weddings, dance with cousins. This would be nothing like that. This would be captivity in her mother’s home in Faubourg Saint-Germain, for as long as her mother demanded, or until she won against her mother’s will.

George arrived at half-past four, straight from business. He was dusty from exploring attics and his cuffs were soiled with ink-stains from letter-writing. He was both anxious that he had been summoned and delighted to see her, and expressed both by taking her hands in his and kissing them.

Irene gently told them both she thought they had a great deal to discuss. She went over to the piano and began to play something soft and pleasant—Mendelssohn, Lucie thought. She was telling them, as always, that they were chaperoned, but also that they might speak without fear of being overheard.

Lucie drew George over to the sofa and they sat together. He immediately kissed her cheek. “What is it?”

“I have received a letter from my Maman—she wishes me back in Paris. I take the train tomorrow morning.”

“So soon? That’s—Must you?”

“I must. She tells me that two days from now they will have a young man to dinner who wishes to renew his acquaintance with me. He is prosperous, has an aristocratic connection, and is a most excellent young man of whom I once thought highly. Her message is most clear.”

George’s face was a study. “Prosperous, you say. Riche.”

“I showed her letter to my father and he laughed, which was most upsetting, then he told me that my mother had to make her opinion known and would do so.”

“Your uncle has spoken to her.”

“Most clearly. She wrote cutting things about my father’s approval not being enough, and needing the approval of my confessor, and—”

“Your confessor? Why—”

“My confessor. You are not of my faith.”

George looked puzzled for a moment, then his face cleared.

“I’ll convert,” George said, with that grin she ordinarily loved seeing. “Your side has grander churches and fancier costumes. Incense and candles and priests popping out of boxes—a much better show.”

“You make such light of it!” she said, and let go of his hands. She turned her back on him for a moment to regain her composure.

“Lucie! It’s merely a joke. I—”

“You do not understand, and it will take too long to explain. I must return home to dine with some tedious English Foreign Office stuffed owls, as you call them, and then I must leave on the earliest train.”

“Lucie!”

“Irene has my address and will send me your letters. If you write in French, my mother will not be suspicious.”

“Explain to me in a letter,” George said. “I’ll make a better joke. I’ll make the right joke, once I understand.”

Lucie sighed. There was so much that he did not understand that she wasn’t sure she understood herself, about the money and the tension between her parents. It needed to be puzzled out. And George most certainly did not understand what the Church meant to her mother.

“I will write,” she said, and that was all she could give him.

“I’m sorry,” George said. He had pulled at his hair and it was standing up all out of order.

Irene had stopped playing. “Cousin George, dear, would you like some sherry?”

George looked at Irene as if he had no idea what she’d asked. “What? I suppose.”

“I’ll return in a moment,” Irene said.

Lucie noted that Irene could have rung for Larkin, but had not. They watched her leave the room.

“Mon très cher,” she said. She fussed with his hair and put it back where it belonged, at least somewhat. “You are my beloved knight on his horse. Yes, I have been reading Looking-Glass, and enjoying the stories. I was unsure at first if you were Humpty Dumpty or the White Knight, and now I have decided.”

George stared at her for a long moment, then he said, “I’m Humpty Dumpty. I have had a great fall.”

“No. You are my gentle White Knight, and you have tumbled from your horse.”

“May your tumbling white knight have a kiss goodbye while we have a chance?”

He sounded uncertain of himself still, and because there was nothing else she could do, she kissed him. She bestowed more than one kiss upon him before Irene returned to the drawing room, and George had regained some of that sparkle in his eye. He did kiss with spice and a little fire on his lips, gently but with a promise of something more once they were allowed it. He had kissed before, she thought, but without care, and now he cared, and all that spice—a little cinnamon on his lips—was hers. He had not meant to offend. He did not understand, as he did not understand how he had stumbled with Oncle Théo.

He did not know what he was apologising for. And she did not know how to explain.

Irene returned to the room, with the sherry carafe and a glass for George, and they sat together talking for a little as ordinary friends before Lucie looked at her watch. They all went down to the front door, and Louis, the Béranger footman who had escorted Lucie on her last visit, appeared from below stairs. She met George’s eyes one last time and then left, turning her back on him decisively without a last word, lest she give away how much she did not want to leave.

The weather over the Channel was storming, and the waters heavy. Lucie was not prone to sea-sickness, but Louis, who was travelling with her again, was. He spent the Channel crossing on deck, hung over the rail. Lucie sat with their bags and read a good way into Verne’s Michel Strogoff. There were other novels at home she was reading, and Lewis Carroll was in her bag, but she had brought one novel of which her mother could not disapprove. She sat on the tossing boat and read about a courier racing across Russia. It was a relief to change to the train and the comfort of smooth speed inward towards Paris. Louis happily slept in the next compartment, recovering from the crossing. On the train, Lucie sat with the novel in her hands, unopened, thinking out what she might say to her mother, what her mother might say to her, what she would say in return. It would do her mother no good whatsoever. Her heart was George’s.

Diplomacy, her father had once told her, was neither a brute contest of wills nor a rapid contest of nerves like a fencing match. In diplomacy, the game was not the pure victory, but the mutual satisfaction. One could not leave one side feeling defeat or it would not be successful diplomacy. Both must feel they had won what mattered. Achieving this, he’d told her, relied upon talking and listening both. It was dancing. And this was why he had told her to pack her dancing slippers.

Her mother did not often listen. With her mother, all exchanges were fencing: a contest of quick wit, step and thrust and parry, a stroke and a point before you knew it. Or so her father had once said to Lucie, with a rueful look and an expressive shrug. This was the only explanation he’d ever given for why he was in London and her mother was not.

Lucie thought about this very carefully. Was this what her stay in Paris was to be? Her mother would certainly fence and try to score points. Her mother did not listen, so diplomacy and a mutually satisfying result would not be possible. Lucie would need to think, and to plan her actions in advance.

For her, it would be the slow contest of wits that was chess, until her mother understood she had no moves left but to release her. Lucie would remain silent and true, as George had promised her, until that moment.

It was in this mood that a cab deposited her and Louis upon her mother’s doorstep in the early evening. Louis carried their bags up, and rang. She went through the door and was greeted by her mother and grandmother with such courteous warmth, just as she had been when she had visited in the autumn for her cousin’s wedding. How was her dear father? How was her music? That lovely young English girl whom she had introduced them to when she had been at the Conservatoire?

Her mother’s house—not home, not her father’s home, merely the house she had been a child in—was as it had always been. The ornaments changed over time. The photographs of family slowly grew in number. When she visited, Lucie always felt the sense of time solidifying round the house like amber congealing round a fly.

So Lucie thought as she sat travel-weary at dinner, drinking her uncle’s good wine, eating her mother’s menu, listening to talk of how the young man she’d known as a girl had a most promising beginning at the bar, and would make a suitable match for someone. Her mother reminded her that they had quite liked each other when young, which they had. They had enjoyed playing with marbles together.

Her grandmother said, very quietly and with cloaked threat, that he was most devout, and this was to be commended in an age of such shocking disregard for the Church. Lucie merely nodded.

Had she been attending Mass? Yes. Had she been seeing her confessor regularly? Yes. This was good, for her father’s bad influence had not affected her.

Lucie did not react, but continued eating her dinner. It was not a grand dinner, but it was pleasantly familiar cookery, comforting after all that English cookery. So her childhood friend was devout, and had a good career at the bar. Of the two, the devout was more important to her grandmother, and more likely to be strictly true.

What else did she have to tell them? her mother asked, and here was a feint, a trap for the unwary. Lucie decided to answer as she had on her last visit.

“I brought my violin as always,” she said. “I have been working most diligently and practising, and I have so much I might play for you all.”

Her mother could not help but express pleasure in this, whether genuine in the moment or not, for the entire family was proud of Lucie’s achievements here, and her mother especially.

“Nothing else?” asked her grandmother.

“I think there is nothing you have not already heard,” Lucie said, quite as if the question were uninteresting. “There is some gossip from the embassy in London, but I think it is of only passing interest.”

“Your uncle had much to say,” said her grandmother, soft-voiced but sharp-eyed.

Lucie deliberately reached for her wine glass. All the wine in the house was courtesy of her uncle, who had taste and access to a wealth of vintages at wholesale prices. They drank well in this home. She had not yet decided what attitude she would take towards her uncle, who had betrayed her so. He and George had had a lively and happy conversation, with George all unaware that their secret had been divined. The two would get on well when she and George married. And that was a pang in her heart, thinking of George, and a marriage that felt so distant.

She set the glass down, and said a pleasant word about her uncle’s wine.

“Oncle Théo tells so many stories,” Lucie said. “He was full of talk about grapes on this visit. Oh! There was much discussion of the collapse of the bank, and great interest in the theories he had about who was to blame.”

She looked at her grandmother, entirely calmly. They would have to do far worse than this to rattle her. They would have to put her en prise to make her talk about George. But she feared this visit would not be short.

---

10. The Connoisseurs

George was in a state from the moment Lucie left London for Paris. She’d turned her back and left the Soameses’ house without a last goodbye, and she’d been upset with him, however much her kisses had softened it. He’d said the wrong thing and now her mother had dragged her back to Paris to meet another man, a better man with more money, and she had not written. Was she waiting for him to write?

On the fourth day, he sat down in his study to write his first love letter, and to write it in French to boot. He wrote three drafts in pencil, feeling more and more like a schoolboy set to write a theme for a lesson. None of it was any good. Renard would mock him for it, not that George would dare show him such wretched prose. He laid his head on his desk and groaned.

Just then Nash came in with whisky and soda, and hovered. “Mr Forsyte?” he said.

“Pay me no mind. I’m merely suffering.”

“Perhaps if you wrote in English first,” said Nash.

George raised his head. “Sly-boots. But a good idea.”

George had a taste of the water of life, found new life flowing in his veins, and wrote a short and heartfelt letter to Lucie in English. He missed her, and he told her so. He had gone riding yesterday morning in Richmond Park with Irene and Parkes, and she hadn’t been there with them to give the sun anything worth shining on. He was still sorry he’d offended with his jest. He hoped that at least Paris had something to keep her amused; music perhaps? She had his heart and he was finding it difficult to get on with his heart so far away from him. He sincerely hoped she would never travel so far abroad with his heart in her pocket again. He adored her. He remained true.

He rewrote it in French as rapidly as possible, trying not to think about how utterly top hat over patent leather boots he was about her.

He blotted the ink, let it dry, then folded up the letter in an envelope left unsealed. The next day he called round at Pelham Crescent to drink sherry with Irene and hand it over to her. She welcomed him with her usual grace, took his arm, and guided him into her drawing room. George breathed in the scent of roses and honey and felt his fretting ease. Irene would set it right. Irene would tell him everything would be fine, and he would believe her.

“I’ve brought a letter,” George said. “Has she—?”

“Not yet, I’m afraid.”

“Is it too soon to write?”

“Not at all. She and I have had a steady correspondence since we were at the Conservatoire together. No one will remark upon it.”

He handed over his envelope. Irene slipped his letter out and made a little sound. “Your writing paper is larger than mine, and it has your address on it. George, I think you had better copy your letter onto my paper.”

George sat at Irene’s little writing desk and copied out his letter on her writing paper, which was a faint dusky rose colour, and scented distantly with the same. He took the opportunity to improve his penmanship, which had been ramshackle last night after all that fretting. It was odd to be so clandestine. It went along with the secret engagement, he supposed.

When he was done, Irene took the single page of his letter from him and nodded. “Your handwriting is not mine, but the paper and ink will not stand out. I’ll seal it with wax inside the envelope.”

“Such intrigue!” said George. “What ho, we spies!”

But this was forced enough that Irene set the letter down so that she might take his hand and kiss his cheek. “It’ll be all right,” she told him. “She’ll write back, and she’ll come back.”

“I feel twelve kinds of fool,” he said to her, plaintively.

“Let yourself miss her, and look forward to her return. Trust her.”

“I do trust her! But they didn’t tell me that love could hurt so.”

Irene made a sympathetic sound at him. “It can, I’m afraid. Some day you will quarrel, and that will be a different kind of hurt.”

“We did quarrel. Just before she left. I made a joke that landed very badly, and she left before I could set it right.”

“Oh, George. It does happen. You will set it right soon.”

“I apologised, but she said I didn’t understand.”

Irene pressed his hand, which she still held. “She will explain it. Indeed, she must. Ask her if you have not already done so.”

George kissed her hand, then released it. He returned to the tea-table, where a glass of sherry waited for him. He sat on the sofa where he had sat with Lucie, and tasted the sherry. Ashes. Love was unbearable, and he was certainly a fool for having let it happen to him. Irene returned to take her usual seat across from the sofa; he watched her seat herself in a crackle of silk, and taste her own sherry, delicately.

“How long do letters take to reach her?” he asked.

“A day at least,” said Irene. “The post in Paris is very quick, but getting there is the trouble.”

“So I must wait.”

“I’ll post our letters this evening. They’ll be on a boat tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Irene. You are an angel, come to succour me. Damn it.”

“Now, George, not in my drawing room.”

“Sorry.” He then made an effort and asked Irene to tell him her news.

“Nothing worth mentioning,” Irene said, and there was a note in her voice that made him look at her closely. She seemed as serene as ever, pleased with herself even, so George let it pass.

The letter was sent off, and days passed, but no answer came. He wrote a second letter, and had an easier time of it. In this one, he tried to tell Lucie that life was going along. Irene’s kitten had caught a rat in the basement and upset the entire Pelham Crescent household, and he had laughed at them until he was sick. He’d resumed jumping hedges now that his legs were strong again. He thought about her twenty times a day at least, and please would she write?

In the middle of the second week, George realised he was moping. Moping was intolerable, so he tried flinging himself into work. He’d been told work could be soothing. It was distracting, at least, and he did need to keep making money and putting it away. Parkes told him to slow down and breathe; he was making decisions hastily. George knew what happened when he did that: he backed the wrong horse and came a cropper. He apologised to Parkes and did his best to settle down.

As he sat in Parkes’s office, writing up his notes from the day’s work, a letter arrived from Soames, inviting him to call at the Connoisseurs for a drink that evening, if he were free, or say when he was free to dine with them if not. George replied saying he’d call that evening, for what else did he have to do? Play billiards with Dartie, or go and look at chorus girls with him, and chorus girls had lost their charm. Dartie himself was still as amusing as ever, but his antics had begun to seem predictable.

He dined at his own club, then walked the short distance to the Connoisseurs. He was shown to the Strangers’ Room at Soames’s club and given a glass of quite good brandy to drink while he waited. The room was warm, and glowed with candlelight aided by gas. The club itself had a certain quiet aesthetic feel that George found pleasant. It was not what he himself wanted from a club, but he understood why Soames might like it. The Hotch Potch could be slightly absurd in its indulgence of the physical pleasures.

He tasted his drink. Not bad. He sighed. Where was Soames? And then his cousin appeared, his own drink carried by a waiter behind him. They shook hands, and sat.

“Well, cousin, I’m here, as requested.” George stared lugubriously into his glass and tossed off rather too much of it.

“Steady on,” said Soames. “I wouldn’t have bought you a drink if I thought you were going to treat it like that.”

“Sorry. I am reverting to past form. I want to drink myself blind,” George said, and set the glass down. He sat up in his chair and tugged his waistcoat straight. “Cousin. Tell me what I may do for you.”

“You can tell me how I can help you with Lucie.”

George picked up the glass again and swirled the brandy round.

Soames continued. “Irene is worried about you.”

George set the glass down again. “She is as wonderful as ever for feeling that way.”

“She says Lucie has not written a response to your letter.”

“Two. I have written two.”

“She also told me you’ve been secretly engaged.”

George sighed and drank some brandy. Now came the lecture. “We are. I confess it.”

“Why? I thought her father approved of you.”

“He told me until I have a thousand a year and six thousand to settle, I am not to bother asking. I am not troubling to ask him, but I couldn’t bear not asking her.”

Soames leaned forward in his chair. “You ought to have come to me straight away, George. I can’t help you if I don’t know.”

That was not quite what George had expected Soames to say. “I wanted to stick it out, carry through your plan. It’s all been going quite well.”

Then Soames shifted in his chair and set his glass down. “George. You said a thousand a year and six thousand settled?”

“Yes.”

Soames frowned. “That’s the very outside of what we discussed. Béranger is overreaching, given what I know of his finances.”

“How do you know?”

“I made enquiries for your sake. Men in the City, gossip, a little bit of asking round. He married money, but is likely in no position to match that sum.”

George said, “That sum makes my nose bleed. I can’t imagine hitting it soon unless I get very lucky indeed.” He paused, for Soames had a look on his face that was deeply thoughtful. “Overreaching, you said.”

Soames nodded. “He’s asking for as much as he dares, to see if you give it to him. I suspect he’ll settle for less.”

“Haggling over Lucie makes me sick.”

“See here,” said Soames, and he touched George’s arm, which meant he had something important to say. George looked up at him, ready to listen. Yes, he was a stuffed owl, but he was also a straight as a die, perhaps the most transparently honest fellow George knew.

Soames said, “It’s for Lucie’s benefit, not his. The French still practise giving a formal dowry to the husband. We send the bride off with linens and a trousseau, which are for the household, not for the husband. The French are—well, I have opinions, but I’ll spare you. He’s asking for the English practice of having money settled on her, and this is for her protection. If you break your neck jumping fences, she won’t be destitute.”

“Or come back to him and live in his house again, but this time with fatherless children.” George made a face.

“Your father would never treat her so, but he doesn’t know that.”

“My father. You say that, but I’m not sure what he’ll do.”

“You should tell him. He and your mother will be delighted.”

“My mother, yes. She wants to see everyone married. My father? He’s still angry with me.”

“About what?”

George shrugged. “Horses. Billiards. Drinking. Smoking. Doing nothing.”

“George, my dear friend.”

George stopped and looked at Soames. That was not the sort of thing that chap said.

“Your father hasn’t had any of that to be upset about in months.”

“He’ll remember it all as if it were yesterday.”

“And then he will become calmer, and think, and realise that you are the only one of his sons following his profession, and be delighted by it. They’re all like that, from Uncle Jolyon down to Uncle Nick.”

“He burns hotter than the rest of them.”

“Not hotter than Uncle Jolyon.”

George paused. “True. Devilish hot, that.” He thought of Young Jolyon, asking after his own daughter, because he knew nothing.

“Uncle Jolyon’s runs deep. Your father’s is shallow. Trust me. I know what I’m about.”

George sighed. Soames had a point and he conceded it. “Right. My father will rave and storm and tell me what a disappointment I am and then he’ll say something cutting about Eustace, most likely. Such a silk-lined dandy, that one.”

Soames’s moustache turned down, which told George his assessment of Eustace. “Tell me though. What can we do? Do you need proof of your prospects? A better position? I know you said her father wanted you to have more income. Would a partnership instead of venture shares make the same argument?”

“That’s an interesting idea,” George said.

“If we have this, you can take it to Béranger. It’s not quite the same as having the settlement he’s demanding, but it’s a concrete step. Then you can bargain him down.”

“But you said it’s for Lucie’s protection.”

“I had less than that for Irene, but I’ve put more in trust since the wedding. You can do the same.”

“You had less?”

“I had tied up some of my capital for some years. The investments have paid off now.” Soames had a certain satisfaction as he said that.

George considered that satisfaction, and further, the possibility of settling more on Lucie as he had more capital available.

“I take your point,” he said, slowly, thinking. “Talk Béranger down, put what I can into trust, then keep putting more in. You want to take care of her too, don’t you.”

Soames nodded. “I’m your lawyer now, but when you marry you’ll want me thinking of her interests as well. Marriage is about property, and both of you own it.”

“Property?” George said, more than a little surprised. “I thought it was about, about, well—”

Soames gave him a look.

“You know what I’m referring to.”

“Children,” Soames said. His gaze was downcast, and he had a tiny smile on his face. He toyed with his brandy glass for a moment, then drank, still with that little smile. Then he said, “But children are about property, because inheritance is a property question.”

“It’s all what you said when I asked you for advice the very first time. It’s a negotiation about property. Our family religion.”

“Our family—oh. Yes. Very good. But let me talk to Parkes. We’ll work out the details. He’d meant to do this later, but it has been in his plan.”

“His plan?”

“He sized you up immediately.”

“Damn you two.”

Soames smirked at him, actually smirked at him, then lifted his brandy glass to him and drank. George drank off his own. He was apparently good at what he did. Who would have guessed?

A few days later, he and Parkes went riding in the late morning. They wandered off their usual track, talking very little. Near noon they stopped at an inn deep in Surrey, well beyond Richmond Park. They handed their horses to a groom to water, and went inside to restore themselves. George ate shepherd’s pie and drank porter. Parkes did the same.

Refreshed, and with second pints of porter, they contemplated each other. It was time to talk about serious things. George didn’t know how to start the conversation, and that surprised him. He wanted to know Parkes was certain of him. How could he dare ask this?

Parkes spoke first.

“Forsyte and I talked,” he said. “I need to tell you that I’d have done this eventually regardless. You know what you’re about. You’re better than I am at spotting bargains, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.”

“Thanks,” said George, quietly.

“Forsyte suggested this partnership because he thought you knew things I didn’t. This is what partnerships are for. It’s no damned charity. I’m here to make money.”

“Right,” said George. “I am too.” He felt off-balance. Soames had been three steps ahead of him from the start. “Thanks for trusting me. Not sure why, but thanks.”

Parkes looked at him oddly. “I trusted Forsyte. I trust him more than I can say. Your cousin has been a steady friend since we were in school. He’s an odd man but he’s reliable and his brain frightens me sometimes. When he said you deserved a look-in, I took him seriously. He was right. He always is.”

“I didn’t think of him as the sort of chap to be a steady friend. I thought of him as a sneering cold fish.” At Parkes’s look, George said, “Can you blame me?”

“Yes,” Parkes said. “But I don’t care about that just now. The question is, do you want the partnership? I do. My name will be first on the board, as I’m bringing in more capital to start, but it’ll be profitable or I’ll be damned.”

George looked at Parkes, and saw that he meant it. “I will be your partner if you’ll have me,” he said. “I’ll do what I do best.”

“And I’ll do what I do best. Right.” Parkes nodded.

He stuck out his hand to George, and they shook hands. This was a binding promise in George’s world, and by Parkes’s face it was in his as well.

“That’s enough said,” said Parkes. He wiped the foam of the porter from his moustache. They stood to settle up; Parkes insisted it was his.

They rode back to the stables more slowly than they’d ridden away from them, side by side. They talked about everything except what they’d just shaken hands over: horses, wine, the excellence of the day, occasions when one or the other of them had been in terrible scrapes.

“You were at Marlborough, then,” George said.

“Yes, same year as your cousin.”

“I remember him as a boy. He would defend Winifred with his fists against all comers, even cousins years older.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Parkes said.

“What was he like at school?”

Parkes was silent, and George could see that he was thinking. Eventually he answered.

“I’ll say one thing. Irene has been good for him. He was curled up round himself like a hedgehog until she came into his life.”

Women! George thought about what they did to a man. Unpredictable things.

George patted his horse on the neck and told him he was a good horse. They’d been riding partners for a few weeks now, and they’d come to trust each other. George shifted his weight in the saddle and the horse responded immediately. They moved with an easy canter down the path, Parkes following behind.

The papers came round a few days later to the office George shared with Parkes. They signed their respective copies, with their clerk to witness, and handed them back to the messenger who’d return them to Forsyte, Bustard, and Forsyte for further handling. Soames promised a clean copy for George to show to whomever he needed to.

It was done. George was a partner. He had his papers. What he did not have was a letter from Lucie. Was she well? Was she upset with him? Was her mother preventing her from writing?

---

11. The letter

July, 1882

A week later Lucie finally managed to get a letter to Irene, along with a great packet of sheet music fresh from Parisian publishers. Folded inside the letter to Irene was a letter to George, in an envelope sealed with three dabs of red wax and pressed very flat. Irene forwarded the envelope intact to George at his club, along with a note explaining how it arrived, and her invitation to call round to share news if he wished. He received this letter when he arrived at the Hotch Potch for lunch. Lunch left his mind immediately.

George carried the letter into the Hotch Potch’s library. The library was mostly empty at this hour, save for a few older members snoozing in deep comfortable armchairs. George found his own armchair in a corner, and looked at the envelope carefully, turning it in his hands. His initials were written on it in Lucie’s hand. The envelope looked untampered with, not that he would know how to recognise such a thing. Perhaps a diplomat’s daughter would. Or was he confusing diplomacy with the arts of a spy? It scarcely mattered. Her letter had arrived. He opened it with his penknife.

My dearest George—

I have been here three weeks and I have not written to you, I know. You are distressed and fretting, I know this too, and I can see you in my mind’s eye. I have been a most dutiful and untroubling daughter. I wrote a note to my father and to two friends in London, with my grandmother most considerately keeping me company as I wrote, and so I am circumspect.

A young man I knew as a child has been to dinner several times. He is suitable. He has apparently started a good career at the bar. This man is chosen to please my father with his income and his education. He was not chosen to please me, for he has not attempted to make me laugh even once. My mother certainly does not know the least thing about what I should like in a suitor. I am cold to him, but he seems not to notice.

I informed my mother I wished to return to London soon, and she has in turn informed me that she thinks London has been a bad influence upon me. I asked her why, and she at last brought up the English boy whom my uncle says certainly must be a suitor. I will be kept here until I understand he is unsuitable. My uncle is aware he has lost my favour and has no influence over me any longer.

I am pinned in place until I find my way forward. This I have written in the night, and I will seal it in the way my father has taught me. Such pains I take, and all for a campaign my mother and grandmother will certainly lose. I am silent and I am true. I remember the azaleas in the conservatory. My heart is yours. Love, Lucie

George glanced round himself. No one was looking his way. He pulled his handkerchief out of his shirtcuff and passed it over his face. It disappeared into his cuff again and what remained on his face was an irrepressible smile. He read the letter again so he could enjoy how it ended again. Then he re-read the middle and found his temper rising. This could not be allowed to stand. He’d turn up and, and… He’d turn up and demonstrate himself suitable.

He immediately rose and went to a writing desk. He took up pen and club stationery to scribble a hasty note to Renard, begging him to come by at his convenience either today or tomorrow; George would make time for him whenever he was free. He would be going to Paris, and he needed advice. He wrote another letter to Parkes with his apologies, but he must travel to Paris on one day’s notice, to put the deed of partnership to work on Lucie’s mother immediately. A third to Irene, begging for the favour of a sudden dinner; he needed Soames’s advice and hers. A fourth to Nash, telling him where he was travelling and when, and asking him to make arrangements.

He did not write to Lucie. His letter would reach her before he did, yes, but he couldn’t trust it would not be read. He would request her address from Irene, and he would call upon her. He would have to hope she would divine his intentions when she saw him.

What else ought he to do? Oh. He had an appointment to keep with a fellow about a Redcliffe house, and he’d damned well keep it. He wasn’t going to come tumbling off his horse for no reason at all here.

George kept the appointment, let the fellow talk while he said about a quarter as much as usual. He took the price, which was good enough and not worth the effort of beating down, and was done with it.

Irene and Soames set a place for him at their table that evening, and he was able to secure both Lucie’s address and the clean copy of the deed of partnership he needed for his errand. He left their home warmed by dinner, a drink, Soames’s dry advice, and Irene’s hand on his arm at the door. He made his way to his own home to find Parkes’s reply waiting for him in his little entry. It was a brief note asking to be kept informed, and saying that he wished George luck.

He also found that Nash had a bag nearly packed, sitting ready in his bedroom, lacking only last-moment items.

“I sent ahead to that hotel you were recommended,” Nash said. “Do you plan to stay longer than a week, sir?”

George stared at the bag, at his little dressing case and shaving kit tucked within. Then he looked up at Nash. The fellow had a professionally blank face, as ever, but he was hovering. “No,” George said. “If I can’t manage it in that time, I’m coming back to make her father do something.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Damn it.”

Nash left his bedroom and came back a few minutes later with a brandy and soda. George accepted it and collapsed into the chair between his bed and the empty grate. He drank.

“She’s true to me,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” Nash was again masked, his clean-shaven face unhidden but also unreadable.

“But her mother won’t let her leave until she gives up. Which she won’t do.”

“A stalemate, then?”

“Until I get there.” George drank more brandy. “I need to look more respectable and suitable than this other fellow. What a thought. Me, respectable. Me, an earnest suitor. What have I come to?”

“The young lady seems entirely worth your labours, sir.”

“She is. Damn it.” George drank more brandy, and thought about rescuing Lucie. He wasn’t much of a knight in shining armour. He was a jester and he knew it. But he’d be damned if he sat here in London and let her face it all on her own.

---

The next day, Renard came shortly after lunch. His appointments were cleared, he said, and he was ready to help George with his plight, whatever it was. His face expressed polite curiosity and doubt. George paced back and forth in his sitting room, waiting for Renard to sit and accept a glass of sherry from Nash.

Renard tasted it, then set it down and leaned forward. “What is it, Forsyte?”

George drew breath. “She’s trapped and she needs me. Her mother won’t let her leave. I’m going to Paris tomorrow to beard the lioness in her den. How the devil do you say that in French? Damn it.”

“Stop,” said Renard, raising a hand. “Stop.”

George fell silent.

Renard went on. “You will say all this to me in French, and I will answer you in French as well. You must keep your head now, if ever you do so.”

George breathed in, out, and tugged at his waistcoat. He didn’t know how to begin in French. The words were gone. Renard stood and came over to him, and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Think. Use your head. Tell me what you propose to do.”

George looked at Renard, at his greying moustache and beard, at his expectant face. What was he proposing to do? And then the words returned. He said, “I’m going to Paris to make my case to Lucie’s family. I’ve got the proof of financial standing that I need to make a showing against the rich suitor her mother is trying to get her to marry. She writes that she’s hating being there and is forced to talk to the fellow constantly. She tries to show complete indifference, and yet they all persist. I want to end it, and be engaged openly, damn it.”

“You are in quite a mess, Forsyte,” said Renard, and upon hearing his tone George came to full attention. Renard never addressed him with anything but an insult. “A secret engagement is not wise.”

“Her father knows we have an understanding.”

“And her mother does not?”

“Her uncle told her mother that he suspects we do and that her father knows about it and—”

“Stop. I do not wish to hear more of this drama. I understand now what I must tell you. You are going to Paris and you will be in the home of the enemy. You must prepare yourself. You understand this, yes?”

“Yes.”

“They will make no concessions to you. The city round you will make no concessions. You think you speak well with me, but I—I make concessions. This I shall cease.”

Renard sat again and drank more deeply of his sherry. It was his turn to draw breath. Then he launched into a discussion of what George would need to know when he called on Lucie’s mother, what he should expect if he were invited to dinner, and a hundred other things, without making concessions, while George took notes as rapidly as he could. He wrote half in English, half in French. He interrogated Renard as best he could, in proper French or Renard would not answer him. What a tangle his mind was! What a blessing Renard was.

The afternoon went by in an exhausting whirl of words. His man Nash served them both tea with sandwiches while Renard continued to drill him. At last Renard consulted his watch, and told George he’d be returning home to his family.

“Renard, old man,” said George, in English, because he could not yet manage deep gratitude in French. “I cannot thank you enough. Yes, I pay you, but it isn’t enough. Damn it all.”

“Ah, you will go to Paris and come back with her,” Renard said. “The question is whether you destroy her relations with her mother or not. And it is on you. Keep your head, and you will manage it. And do not pretend you are more capable than you are. You will be in Paris, and you will not understand half of what they say. Bonne chance, Forsyte. Let us drink wine when you return.”

---

12. The wrong war

George Forsyte arrived in Paris for the second time in his life far more sober than he had been the first time he’d arrived there. The first time he’d been there was at the age of twenty-one with Dartie alongside him. They’d drunk, gambled, smoked, and learned the ways of women alongside each other. He hadn’t seen Paris in daylight, not enough to remember. George thought of this now and shuddered.

He made his way from the Gare du Nord to his hotel on foot, mindful of his resolution to take more exercise, thinking about what an interesting and pretty city it was in daylight, when viewed as a sober man. He wished he’d paid more attention to ordinary things on that last visit. Ah, well. It was the past, and he was a different man today. He was here on a far more serious mission this time.

Renard’s warning was in his ears: the French of a London diplomat’s salon was one thing; Parisian French was another. The French of a family that might or might not be friendly to his application for their daughter’s hand was yet another thing. He took one more piece of advice from Renard: he strove to think in French while he was there. It was maddening to do, to phrase things in his head one way and then stop himself and twist them into another. He’d never before made his unfortunate brain turn somersaults like this, not even when at school writing themes in Latin for a flogging schoolmaster.

His hotel was a hotel recommended to him by someone he’d met at the Béranger salon, as friendly to the English but not too English; that is, a place where he would not be surrounded by tourists and could be assumed to know what he was about. Which he did not, but he had a Baedeker’s discreetly tucked into his pocket, and a map, and Lucie’s address on a card in his pocketbook. To his surprise, he found himself functioning well, and even making small talk and little jests with hotel staff or waiters, exactly as he might at home. They knew he was English, but he was a cosmopolitan French-speaking Englishman, and therefore in a different category from the one he had been in last time he’d been in Paris.

This time he was not here for the fleshpots and the demi-monde. This time he was here to make his case as a suitor for the hand of the woman who’d stolen his heart by laughing at his wit. He was here to prove he had settled down as his father wanted him to, and was now respectable and could provide for her and give her a pleasant house and servants and dresses and whatnot, all the things her father expected. He was a Forsyte, and he’d damned well prove it to them with the papers Soames had drawn up: a partnership with Parkes, signed and sealed.

The first thing he must do was call upon her mother. He did so immediately on his first afternoon, before he could lose his nerve.

He crossed the Seine to the Left Bank, following his map, and made his way to the edge of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, to the home of Madame Béranger. There, he called upon her and was told she was not at home. He left his card with the name of his hotel written upon it with a gracious bow, and was on his way. He made his way back to the streets near his hotel, and found a street café, where he sat at a table with a glass of ordinaire and watched people walk by. He did some unaccustomed deep thinking and self-reflection, which was appropriate for a Forsyte in Paris.

He was a different man from the man he’d thought he was. The George he’d thought he was had sworn off women. He’d declared that if he could help it, nothing would happen to him. He would live and die a bachelor, serene and untouched. His resolution had lasted how long? Less than a year. He’d been at that dinner, and met Lucie, who’d laughed at a joke and made one back at him, then gone and ignored him to play music with her friend. Something had happened to him then and there. He’d been so surprised he’d let it happen: he’d called on her that very week, and then called again when she’d been welcoming.

And now look at him. He was engaged to be married to Lucie. And he was going to convince her family that he was a solid man who deserved their daughter’s hand. Call it reform. Call it whatever you like. George did not care.

He found a restaurant, ate a modest meal with a single glass of wine, and then went for a walk in the Tuileries to gaze upon the ruins of a palace destroyed in the insurrection that Lucie had said was vivid in her memory. Renard had been on the Communard side, and had fled. He tried to imagine what that must have felt like, and what it must have felt like to be a diplomat’s daughter, travelling at all times, with no settled home. He himself knew that he could come home to Prince’s Gardens any time he wished. His father might rumble and roar, but blood was thicker than tea, as he always said to his aunts. Home was a fixed place for him.

When he returned to his hotel he found two notes waiting for him: one from Lucie, and one from Madame Béranger. He read Lucie’s first. She was happy she would see him soon; curious why he was in Paris; curious why he had called upon her mother. She missed him dreadfully; she had not wavered. He was to exercise caution when talking to her mother and grandmother, for they would be watching for mistakes. Her heart was his.

George kissed this note, and tucked it away in his pocketbook.

The note from her mother he read with some trepidation. It was on pale green paper with a scent of some kind of faint citrus. Written on it in a cramped hand was an extremely formal statement of what day Mme Béranger received visitors. There was nothing personal about it, nothing welcoming about it. It was only barely polite, if he understood things properly. Well, it wasn’t as if he’d expected to be hailed as a conquering hero. He had hoped to be treated decently, but if they weren’t to do that, he would simply have to grin and bear it. Grin and jest his way through it.

“Very well,” he said to the note. “Madame Béranger, you need a pen with a wider nib. I shall buy you one as my first Christmas present to you. You shall hate it.”

He wrote on hotel stationery, in his finest handwriting, an exquisitely polite acceptance of her kind invitation, just warm enough to make it clear he had observed her chill. And they said he had wasted his time at Cambridge!

The next day he had little to do but wander about Paris disconsolately, eating good food and scarcely noticing it, drinking good wine and failing to savour it. Tomorrow he would gird his loins, and do whatever bearding was: prove himself a man of means, a sober and solid man who was most certainly good enough to marry the Béranger daughter.

On the day of Madame Béranger’s at-home, George called in the late afternoon, as was appropriate. He was dressed as perfectly as he could manage to be dressed. He was shown to the drawing room, which was dark, done in reds and heavy woods, and full of far more people than he’d expected.

Lucie came forward to greet him.

“It is good to see you well,” said George, politely. He bowed over her hand, but did not kiss it, though he wished to desperately.

Lucie then performed introductions. The chill in the room ought to have been visible like some kind of mist, and icicles ought to have been stabbing down from the arms of every chair, but no, it was all in the clammy handshakes and the barely-sufficient greetings. He was introduced to Madame Béranger; to the grand Madame Chassagne, who would be this family’s Aunt Ann, but only if Aunt Ann had no fond feelings at all for her vast army of nieces and nephews. Then he was introduced to Mlle Léonie Chassagne, Lucie’s youngest aunt; to l’abbé Séverin, a priest there for no reason he could discern; to Oncle Théo’s wife. It was an entire drawing room full of Chassagnes. George now understood the ordeal every new fiancée and fiancé endured when they were dragged by their heels into that drawing room on the Bayswater Road and asked to talk about themselves.

He sat perched on the edge of an uncomfortable chair. He looked round the room, searching for some kind of hint about what this family wanted from him. They looked rather different to the aunts he knew. There were no friendly faces here; some curious faces, perhaps, but no one like an Aunt Emily who wanted everyone to be comfortable and took steps to make it so. Not even an Aunt Juley to break the ice coating everything by saying something simply mortifying.

Lucie’s face betrayed her worry. What was she worried about? About him, and what he might say. She’d been upset he’d treated things lightly, for whatever reason, and that was his cue. He had to hold steady and not joke.

“Do tell us about yourself, Monsieur Forsyte,” Lucie’s mother said, making an iamb of the name. And so it began.

George was ready with something that was not the way he used to answer this question. He was proud of it, however. “I am a collector of house property, like my father before me. I purchase houses from embarrassed owners, repair them, and find new buyers for the improved property. I am a partner in a firm that does this.”

“How interesting,” said Madame Béranger, in a voice that said quite the opposite.

“In a growing city like London, it can be,” George said. He was unsure where to go from here. He’d expected further questions, innumerable questions in fact, from aunts entirely too aware of business matters, actively sizing up his prospects to see if he would do for one of their daughters.

“Tell us about your parents, Monsieur,” Madame Béranger’s sister said. “Your mother, is she well?”

“Ah. Yes. Quite well. My younger brother is just down from Cambridge, and she is proud of him.”

“You have brothers, then?” another woman asked.

“An older brother, a younger sister, and two younger brothers.”

“A pleasant family,” someone said, apparently to someone not George, for there was a whisper of assent.

“And your father?”

“Also quite well and active, still teaching me how to do what he raised me to do.” George felt more than a little confused. He had nothing to do but live by his wits and improvise. He resettled himself in his chair a little more comfortably, and re-crossed his knees.

They next asked him the names of his brothers and sisters, and George gave them, along with a few words about who each of them were, struggling to give them what they wanted. “My eldest brother, Young Roger, is not following my father’s profession.”

That was also a damp squib.

The grandmother spoke. Such a quiet voice she had, so soft. George leaned forward to be certain he heard her. “Were you baptised, M Forsyte?”

George felt a moment of confidence. This, this he could answer.

“I was most certainly baptised, and christened in the Church for a saint of importance to my family. Further, I have served as godfather at the baptism and christening of the son of a dear friend. This was a solemn duty to me, and I was honoured to have been asked.”

He would, he thought, not say the name Publius Valerius unless pressed, nor admit he had invented it.

There was some kind of flutter of relief in the room, most visible in the abbé Séverin. The man said, quietly, “Then it is only the customary undertakings; a small matter.” This was addressed to Lucie’s mother, not to George. Undertakings? Conveyancing? A matter of contracts. This made George breathe a tiny sigh of relief. Contracts he knew what to do about: fling himself into Soames’s awkward arms and beg for help.

“Do you take communion?” the priest said, now addressing George directly.

“Yes, ah, Monsieur l’abbé,” George paused. He had so very nearly said “father”, there, and only been saved by Renard’s drilling. “Though not as often as I should.”

He hadn’t done so since Cambridge, but it was truthful as far as it went. This answer was also a pass, though not quite the answer they wanted from him. At least they knew he wasn’t varnishing what he said to make them happy.

George was not entirely certain why, but his behaviour as a Christian man was under scrutiny. Of all the things to scrutinise in him, this was perhaps the worst. He hadn’t been to church since Soames and Irene’s wedding. Damnation, would he have to start going? He was going to draw the line somewhere.

Nonsense. Purest nonsense. George knew, however he might protest, that he would not draw the line anywhere short of where Lucie needed him to draw it.

Why did they want this from him? Whatever was going on? What did he see round him that wasn’t what he saw in the Bayswater Road? Not absence, but presence? Even as he formed the question, George saw the answer.

There were crosses round necks; there were rosaries in the fingers of one or two of the women. Religious paintings on walls, which the accidentally-educated George could name in theme if pressed. A carved wooden cross upon the wall which looked like a fine piece of work. This was all what his father called Papistry, and made sharp grumpy noises about. George tucked that thought deep into the back of his mind. He would absolutely never use that word or make any kind of joke about it. Come to think of it, he had made a joke rather like that to Lucie, hadn’t he. She’d still been upset when she’d left. He winced internally. Well, he’d made a mull of that.

The questions continued.

Staying solemn and sincere was the hardest thing anyone could ask of him, and here he was doing it, as gracefully as he knew how to do anything at all, for half an hour of intense catechism. Catechism! Such a word! His family; his parish church; his behaviour. He kept an eye on Lucie through all this. He saw no reaction from her that betrayed any mistakes; he was unsure if that meant he had done acceptably or if she had kept perfect control of herself.

The calling hour was over in the early evening. George politely took his leave at the correct time, careful not to overstay his welcome, and eager not to endure another moment of it. His reward was a brief touch of his palm against Lucie’s, the only touch he would get in this unfriendly drawing room, then he was shown to the door by a servant he knew from Béranger’s household in London.

“Is she well?” he asked, very quietly, as Louis helped him with his coat.

“Oui, Monsieur,” Louis said. “She endures. Please call again.”

“Tell her I shall.”

He descended the steps from the Béranger home, with the deed of partnership still folded crisp in its envelope in his pocket. It had been utterly unwanted.

George walked across Paris, making his way out of the Faubourg Saint-Germain towards the Seine, where he could cross and find his way to his hotel. He walked. Paris was beautiful at this hour in July. The light held. The lamps were not lit, and the walls of buildings glowed with low sunlight. Men smoked in doorways, women walked past holding packages. A cab drove past him, horseshoes clopping on cobbled streets. He smelled food cooking, cigarettes, wood smoke, and the ever-present horse dung in the street. It smelled different from London. He was not in his home city.

Did Lucie like it in London? It smelled like coal smoke there. Coal and factories and fog and grime. Paris smelled better.

His thoughts turned to that salon, and the questions they’d asked him. They hadn’t cared two figs for his profession. They’d asked about baptism, and communion. They’d reacted to what he’d said about being godfather to Dartie’s son, and not to anything else. What did that mean? Being a godfather meant promising to raise the boy as a Christian—Oh. Children. What religion would the children be raised in? They would care, wouldn’t they? He’d accidentally said something useful to them. Pure accident. No credit to his wit or his manners.

Undertakings, the priest had said. He hadn’t meant conveyancing. He’d meant something else entirely. It had been something about children. Which church they belonged to, he’d wager.

He found himself at the Pont Royal. He walked over the bridge and here he was at the Tuileries again. He’d been fighting the wrong war, hadn’t he. He’d been fighting an Englishman’s war: a war of income and settlements and property. He had needed to be fighting a Frenchman’s war: a war of religion and devotion and the salvation of his children’s souls. George had no idea if souls existed, and was content to leave arguments about this to other men. Religion was the thing one did when made to at school. He could make all the responses one needed to make in church at any time, eyes closed, one hand tied behind his back, but this was not what was wanted of him now.

Here the Tuileries were: alive in Lucie’s memory as a palace that had stood and now did not. Here they were, evidence of a war that made widows all across France. War was useless: a waste of money; destructive to house property; a disruption to wine-making. Fighting the wrong war was even worse.

Thus the unphilosophical George found himself thinking deeper thoughts than he was comfortable with. He found his way to a café to sit and drink. It was the apéritif hour, and he was served vermouth. Ah yes, his appetite was whetted, and it was whetted after the battle was over and he’d realised he’d been fighting the wrong foe. He was on his back foot, he thought, but his wicket was still secure. He had made no mistakes yet, and he had learned something.

At least he knew what he needed to apologise for now. He felt rather a cad for having made that joke. Did he know why he’d made it? Yes, he did. He would convert if that was what it took. Religion didn’t matter much to him, and Lucie mattered so very much.

His family would hate that. Would it take that? He had no earthly idea.

It came to him that Soames would know, and would explain it all. Relief flooded over him at this thought. He would write to his cousin when he got back to his hotel, and beg him for an answer. Then he’d have to tell Soames how grateful he was for whatever reason Soames had for being kind to him. Making Irene laugh? He would do that until he fell over.

The summer sun set slowly over Paris. George sat and watched the lamps being lit, then made his way to his hotel for some dinner. He wrote a note to Soames asking about marriages between Catholics and Anglicans and what he’d need to know. He went to bed early, and slept the exhausted sleep of a man who’d run himself off his legs.

---

13. The suitable suitor

The next day, a note arrived from Madame Béranger, inviting George to dinner that evening, if he were available to dine. Such polite fictions invitations were: if he were available. They all knew he was available. What else did he have to do in Paris? Nothing at all.

George sent his acceptance immediately. Did the Parisian post operate as well as the London post? He must trust it did. He dressed himself properly for the evening, all armoured in white tie, white waistcoat, and dark dress coat, with a perfect braid down his trousers. Was it the Parisian fashion? What a fascinating question, which at many other times he would be interested in pursuing. Now? He wanted only to turn up on time and with clean cuffs and shirtfront, shaven properly.

He arrived on time. A servant who was not Louis took his cloak and hat. He went into the salon ready for anything, but in hope of one thing in particular: the word with Lucie he had not been able to have yesterday. If he saw her and was given a smile he would be content, but to have his heart truly eased he wanted a brief word. Any word: it didn’t matter if the word were French or English, made-up or real.

George was neither early nor late, and the salon already had several guests in it, conversing casually. The abbé Séverin was there again, which surprised him; did French families keep tame priests the way English country gentry kept pet vicars? Not a joke to make out loud, damn his own fool mind for racing on the way it did. There was Lucie, and his opportunity for a handshake, and an exchange of smiles, and then she turned and introduced him to a fellow named de Marigny, whom she had known well when she was younger, she said.

George shook the man’s hand, said something bland and appropriate, and stood with the little group to listen and assess who this fellow was. M de Marigny. So this was the chap Lucie was supposed to marry instead of him, eh? He was Lucie’s age or a little older and from the finer points of his dress, most definitely prosperous. George did have to admit the fellow was good-looking, elegant, and entirely easy in his manners. He reviewed his own qualifications here and decided that he was not in a position to rate his own good looks, but he could rate his dress and manners as easy and elegant with confidence. He didn’t have to worry about being beaten by the fellow on that. But did Lucie care about that?

What did Lucie care about?

M de Marigny also seemed to have that attitude some men had that everything they said was important and deserving of someone’s attention. Lucie had written that he was at the bar; that explained it. Self-importance was guaranteed to get right up George’s nose and make him sneeze, and within three minutes of listening to de Marigny talk George felt his nose begin to itch. The fellow’s hair was far too perfect. He was a pompous pompadour in a silk waistcoat. George could feel the urge come upon him to mock aloud. He took himself away from the fellow lest the urge overcome him, it was so acute. He made his way over to Lucie’s uncle to make his cool and calm greetings, exactly as if he didn’t know the man had reported them. They’d had such a lovely evening talking food and wine, and the fellow had been a Judas all along.

The time to go into dinner came none too soon. M de Marigny took Lucie’s arm, and George saw her start at his touch. George was given Lucie’s mother’s unmarried sister, whom he’d met yesterday. The rest of the pairings made no sense to him: the precedence seemed wrong. The table seating was as Renard had told him, save for the precedence. Mme Béranger was on one side, at the centre; opposite her was her brother, Oncle Théo. M de Marigny was at Mme Béranger’s right hand, in a place of honour, and then Lucie was at de Marigny’s right hand. This was a violation of protocol for the youngest woman there, if Renard had been correct. His own partner ought to have been in that place. Perhaps he’d misunderstood.

The abbé—seated near to Madame Béranger—opened the meal with a bénédicité. George knew his duty here, and performed it gracefully with the ease born of many school years’ worth of prayers before meals. His head was bowed, and his eyes open just enough to watch for surprising cues. He declined to cross himself: it was a Papist gesture and they would be rightly suspicious if he performed it. He otherwise observed the forms. Or so he hoped. It was all a tightrope walk without a net, over a pit of flames, possibly with lions lurking below as well.

One of those lions was a lioness: the grand Madame Chassagne had her own head raised and eyes open, and she was watching him. George held himself quite still and strove not to blink. They watched each other, and said nothing. The prayer ended without incident.

As the soup was served, George took stock of the table and the attendees. He and his dinner partner—Mlle Léonie Chassagne—were at a corner of the table. He could see Lucie and catch her eye, but ordinary dinner conversation with her would be impossible. That had to have been deliberate. He counted heads. Fourteen people at the table.

He leaned close to his dinner partner and smiled conspiratorially. “You know, I think they invited me only so they had a lucky fourteenth.”

She smiled, as he had hoped. “You speak French well, M Forsyte. I was told you did not.”

“Let that be our little secret. We’ll surprise them. But please do tell me what the order of seating means. It’s quite different from what I might expect.”

“Oh? Please explain.”

“The English put their hosts at opposite ends of the table, and they each take in the guest of greatest importance of the opposite sex. Then it is all mixed by who the hostess thinks will make good conversation with whom. Of course courting couples are never paired up. I swear it is to drive us mad.”

The aunt laughed, with a glint in her eye.

George continued, “So, my dear Mlle Chassagne, I assume they paired us because they think we will make good conversation.”

“Alas, M Forsyte, it is no such thing. We are at the corner with each other because we do not matter. We are most distant from our hosts, who are the centre of all. See Madame Béranger and her brother? They are of importance.”

George let the point of that épée drive itself home. He grinned his most rakish, impish grin. “I will say this for Madame Béranger, that insult is most elegantly delivered. We shall have to turn it upside down and simply enjoy ourselves despite it.” He lifted his wineglass to Mlle Chassagne. “This wine is to be envied, and I suggest we drink our fill of it.”

She lifted her glass back to him. “Let us enjoy it.”

George drank enough of his soup to be polite. It was acceptable—not bad, but not to his taste. Despite his promise to drink his fill of the wine, he rationed himself. It would not do to dull his wits. His dinner partner drank more from her glass than he did, and was soon quite won over.

The relevé arrived and George took the measure of the table. Conversation was scattered all over, not confined to partners at all, no Hoyle’s Rules in force. He’d begun thinking he had to converse to his right, and now in the second course to his left, but there was no such regimentation. Here, they simply took aim and fired conversational volleys at will.

George listened to the volleys boom and echo, and felt his nerve waver. No one was making allowances for him here. There were thirteen people talking over and under and round each other, spluttering, muttering, speaking half-sentences, laughing, spitting quick replies round the table at each other. He couldn’t keep up; he had no hope of being witty at this pace. He felt as he’d felt in those first weeks at the Béranger salon. Renard had warned him, but he had not truly heeded it. He’d need his brain to turn back-somersaults as well as somersaults to survive this.

There was nothing to be done. He ate, he drank, he listened, he bided his time.

The entrée arrived, along with a more substantial wine to enjoy: a Chambertin. George suppressed a smile. He turned to Mlle Chassagne and found her not engaged in conversation at the moment.

He asked, “Tell me, please, what brings you to grace this table with your presence this evening?”

“Ah, M Forsyte, I have little else to do with myself. I am here at the spinsters’ corner, le coin des vieilles filles, where they banish women whom they wish never to marry. It is a peasant superstition, but I would not put it past my sister.”

“That’s damnable,” George said. Then it dawned on him that they’d put him in that corner with her. “Do they do this with men as well? The bachelors’ corner?”

“No. Alas, France is full of widows and the once-affianced who will never marry, ever since the Prussians defeated us. No man who wishes to marry will ever sit alone.”

George raised his eyebrow and studied her face briefly. She was not forty yet, he thought, likely young enough to have been one of those women left waiting after that war. Rule Britannia and the waves indeed. London sat comfortable and untouchable. Well, that was a caution and a half.

Mlle Chassagne was, he felt, a woman who had deserved better, for she had a sharp wit and many pointed things to say about the dinner guests that he found interesting. For one thing, she told him that she hoped her niece married for affection, for she was a vivacious and talented girl who was loved by her maternal aunts and uncles. It was not her fault her father was a man of the current regime, not in the least devout. That was her mother’s fault, for marrying for political advantage and then regretting it.

George’s suspicion was now confirmed. Her mother cared nothing for his prospects, and likely nothing for de Marigny’s either. Property was the Forsytes’ religion; he’d said it himself. The joke was that it was his, too. George touched his pocket where a copy of the deed of partnership rested. He’d had his hands up defending his face, and the blow had come to his gut.

Lucie had seen it coming and tried to warn him.

He moodily ate his entrée, which was better than the soup had been. Silence would not do in a dinner guest, however, and he needed to make a good showing. He turned his attention to the dinner guest to his left, a quite middle-aged woman with pince-nez and a stern look. He smiled at her brilliantly, because this was how one spoke with strangers, and the look melted. He asked if she was enjoying the evening’s wines as much as he was. This was a lucky opening salvo, for she was a connection of Oncle Théo’s wife. She assured him the wine was by far the most enjoyable aspect of a dinner here, and George could assent to that with some irony.

The rôti arrived, along with salade and more of the Chambertin. George noted the conjunction. Funny that dinner could consist of familiar courses shuffled together surprisingly. He caught Lucie’s eye across the table. She was in fact enjoying the Chambertin. She had also caught his eye every time he’d looked to her, and that was enough to make him feel happy despite everything. Then she looked at de Marigny to her side and her expression became indifferent again. The corner of George’s mouth went up.

The table’s rapid conversation swirled round the fellow, who seemed to have opinions about many things. George had not heard Lucie laugh once the entire evening, and that was itself notable.

“Am I wrong, or is that man tedious?” he asked Mlle Chassagne.

She hid her face behind her napkin for a moment. “He at times forgets that conversation requires more than one person.”

“As Lucie says, it’s a duet,” George said absently, watching the fellow. Then he realised he’d made his mistake again. He hastily turned to Mlle Chassagne and said, “Forgive me, it is an English habit to use names so casually.”

“M Forsyte, it took five minutes of your presence in the salon yesterday to make the relationship clear.”

George blushed very red. “I’ve let my guard down,” he muttered.

“One presumes her father knows?”

“He does,” said George. “But he cares only about my income. I think Madame Béranger cares about something different.”

“You are more perceptive than you appear.”

George grimaced. That was another blow slipping past his guard.

Entremets were served—not sweets but vegetables—and then cheese, and then ices. The cheese was a fascinating digression and George made a note of that as well; he would certainly serve it so himself for a change now and then. One did tire of savouries. He was, however, disappointed that what came next was not a withdrawal of the ladies. There would be no port, no chance to stand, smoke, and make conversation with the gentlemen, no chance to listen to what sort of jokes de Marigny told when the ladies were out of the room. Instead the entire table rose and returned to the salon for coffee.

Once again, the centre of attention was de Marigny, who seemed to think it his due as the pompous pompadour. George watched Lucie reply to something the fellow said to her. He could not follow all of the conversation, but he could follow her expression. She looked stiff, as if she were controlling herself.

Lucie had said one thing about this cad, and one thing only in her letter. He hadn’t tried to make her laugh. George grinned. The fool.

“Our English guest is smiling,” said the suitable suitor, in English, with a strong accent, clearly enough that he cut through the conversation in the room. The guests nearest the two of them quieted to listen.

“Indeed I am,” said George, in French, holding his mouth as Renard had instructed him to. “It has been a delightful meal in most curious company. I have at last met the family of Mlle Béranger.”

“And how is it that you met our Lucie?” The fellow used her Christian name, bold as brass.

“Ah. Did not Mlle Béranger tell the story? At the wedding of her dearest friend to my dearest friend. She was a bridesmaid and I was a groomsman, and we were paired with each other. I was told we made a handsome couple. The acquaintance seemed a natural one after that.” There was more than a little spice in his casually correct usage there. Apparently Renard had had the right of it when he’d needled him.

“Comme c’est charmant!” said Mlle Chassagne. At the sound of her voice, a few more guests came near.

“Who said that?” Lucie asked, with the first genuine smile he’d seen on her face all evening. “One of your aunts?”

“Aunt Emily. She was choosing which she liked of the wedding photographs. We were caught looking at each other and not at the photographer. He was upset to have spoiled a plate, but my dearest aunt said it was quite her favourite of the wedding party. Of course, the photograph of the bride and groom gazing at each other was her overall favourite. It’s a wonder the photographic chemicals did not burst into flames from that one.”

Lucie giggled. “C’est bel et bien un mariage d’amour. A love match, as you English say.”

“Le meilleur genre. Much better than a tennis match or, Lord forbid, a cricket match.” George rolled the R in cricket to give it the emphasis it wanted.

Lucie burst into another fit of giggles. Now they had nearly everyone’s attention, even that of l’abbé and the grand Madame.

“What is the amusement?” asked M de Marigny at about the same time Lucie’s grandmother demanded to know the same.

“Il a fait un jeu de mots en anglais sur l’expression ‘love match’,” she explained to M de Marigny. “English is more full of puns than French. It is quite dangerous to speak at times, for the puns lie in wait.”

“Ils se cachent au coin de chaque phrase,” said George.

“How amusing,” said de Marigny. “C’est un bouffon de cour.”

“Better a court jester than a court bore,” said George, in English.

Lucie stifled a laugh, and yes, that was Oncle Théo hiding his face briefly behind his coffee cup. At least two of them knew enough to have heard that pun. There: George had his revenge for being exiled to the corner of the table.

M de Marigny asked, in French once more, “Is your acquaintance based on bon mots, then? You commenced with being paired for your good looks, but now it is jesting?”

“Acquaintance commences many ways, and it continues in many different ways. Ours commenced with a meeting at a celebratory dinner for our friends, but it continued with laughter.” George considered his coffee cup. “Though now that I think about that first dinner, I recall laughter then as well.”

“It was one of the most warm and cheerful occasions in my memory,” Lucie said. “It was a wonderful evening with friends.”

“Have you not had many recently?” George asked, not precisely feigning pained curiosity.

“Pas depuis que j’ai quitté Londres, non. Pas avant ce soir, my dearest George.”

That was a petard, thrown right into the middle of the salon. It exploded, then the salon fell even more silent than before.

Into the silence, George said, in French, using the familiar pronoun, “What, no one has been making you laugh? Do they know nothing about you?”

“It seems not,” said Mlle Chassagne. “We all know our dear Lucie loves to laugh.”

M de Marigny now had his opportunity to be gracious, and he took it. He glanced at Madame Béranger, whose face was a marvel, and said merely, “I apologise for my misapprehension.” What the misapprehension was, he did not say. George knew well enough what he meant, and so did Lucie.

After that, the evening was peaceful and the conversation far less spiced. The sweat on George’s temples cooled, and his nerves calmed. He stood with Lucie, quite happily, and did his best to keep up with the conversation. The guests were all rather more polite to him than they’d been yesterday. He remained as exquisitely polite as he knew how, though perhaps it was not the best form to gaze at Lucie every so often and smile at her.

Before he left, he found a moment for a quiet word with Lucie, in English.

He asked, “Will she let you leave now?”

“She will. She knows what she needs to know about you, and she now also knows that I will frighten off all other suitors in the way I did this evening.”

George grinned at her. This filly was all heart, and the heart was all his, and they had more than enough staying power for the run home in front of them.

“It’s good that one of us is clever,” he said. He held her hand for a long moment at the door, then kissed it.

He made his way back to his hotel on foot again, as he had yesterday, through a cheerful Parisian evening. Was the evening cheerful or was he? It scarcely mattered. His nose was full of the same scents: food, cigarettes, wood smoke, horses. His ears heard the same things. The silhouette of the city against the night sky was the same as before, so different from London’s. But George was happy now, and he whistled as he walked.

---

14. The notaire

July 1882

Lucie left Paris three days after George had been to dinner, escorted by Louis once more. Her mother had accepted the inevitable; her grandmother had not quite managed to be gracious, but had conceded. Relations with her uncle were, however, not yet repaired, and this was her regret. She was happy to board the train to Calais and leave the Chassagne women behind, leave the demands behind, leave the congealing amber of a past she did not want behind. Why did she feel it was a past? This was, it seemed, a political opinion that she held despite herself. She thought about this as she sat on the train north to Calais, with a Victor Hugo novel in hand, unread. She had not dared read him openly in her mother’s house, for he was against the priests, but he was much celebrated in all the rest of France, and was she not with her nation in celebrating him?

She wished she did not have to think about the question this way at all. It was enough to have watched George endure their interrogation. He had come through it with dignity and calm intact, and then he had been magnificent at dinner. They were a couple already, and her mother had seen it. When she arrived home in London, she would tell her father he had been a coward, and tell George he had been perfect, and then she would kiss George. He would smile in that way of his and then make some kind of jest to make his feelings seem less important than they were.

She acted upon the first part of her resolution the moment she arrived home. Her father wanted at first to claim the victory for himself, but she let him know with no little anger that he had done nothing, and that she and George had done all the work of silencing her mother. He had flinched from his duty, and she did not know why, but she thought less of him for it. He did not defend himself, but merely sighed at her and told her things were more complicated than she knew, and ended the conversation by reminding her that his condition upon her marriage remained. She did have his consent to the formal engagement, and he would prevent her mother from making further demands. She slept in her own bed with this satisfaction.

She sent a note to George the morning after she arrived, telling him that she had returned, and had informed her father that they were now formally engaged, as her mother had conceded. She asked that he call whenever he could. As she had expected, George rang her father’s bell at teatime, eager to see her and to claim the right to call her his fiancée openly. They sat in the small family sitting room, with the door open, and held hands decorously. Lucie wished to do more, but was aware of that door, and of the servants. But she was entirely willing to tell George everything she’d been holding inside since Paris.

“You were perfect, my dearest George, perfect. Your manners, your self-possession, the way you followed when I gave you a signal!”

“It’s like a horse with a good rider. You shifted your weight and I knew. My darling Lucie. But—”

“But! Do you understand now?”

“Yes, I do. I know what to apologise for. I am so very sorry.”

“What possessed you?”

George looked quite chastened. “When I told you I’d convert, what I meant was, well, I’d do anything at all. Whatever you needed me to do. Only I had to make a joke about it because I am a court jester. Laugh, Grimaldi! I must laugh.”

Lucie considered this. It fitted into the puzzle of George. He never did stop joking. But who was he behind it?

“What happens if you do not laugh?” Lucie asked. “If how you feel is not a joke?”

This seemed to her to be something that mattered, and thus something to hear from him. She tried not to seem too intent on him and his answer, because he was hesitating and his face was no longer chastened, but shy.

“Then I have to tell you how much I feel for you. How much I’ve changed my habits because of you. And admit how awful it would be if we couldn’t marry.”

“You stuffed owl,” Lucie said, and she saw a flicker of a smile on his face. “We were always going to be able to marry. We might have had to wait, but that is all.”

“When you put it that way, I feel silly. But Lucie! I am no stuffed owl. What you should have called me is a goose.”

“Very well. You are a goose.”

George took both of her hands and kissed her knuckles. He was still solemn and unlike himself, but there was a glow of happiness in him that Lucie was relieved to see. Her thoughts turned to the topic of the money, and of how long it would take to secure it.

“George,” she said, thoughtfully. “Would your father contribute to your part of the settlement?”

She saw him think this out. “Perhaps, if he were appealed to in the right way. He’ll want to give me an advantage in business, so long as he can tell himself he’s making a profit on it as well. He won’t simply give it to me. He’ll need to think me reliable.” George gave her a wry smile. “He’ll be suspicious about that, and about you. I’m still worried he’ll have an outburst about the French. I apologise for him, but he’s grumpy about them for reasons I don’t understand.”

“You said he had accepted Irene.”

“She’s an English girl who studied in France. My mother will be on my side, I think. She wants me to marry.” George cast his eyes heavenward, and then he gave her a little grin.

“Could you describe it to your father as an investment?”

“A loan, with interest, perhaps,” George said. “My father will feel better if he gets something from it.”

“Could you pretend that you don’t want it? And coax him into pursuing you?”

“You’re hatching something, Lucie. That will hook him.” George was now smiling at her outright. “I think we can do this.”

“We have a plan, then.”

“We do.” But George did not celebrate this. Instead he looked away from her, and rubbed the cloth of his trousers where it bent over his knees. His face was uneasy to Lucie’s eye.

“What is it, dearest George?”

“I was unhappy while you were in Paris. You left upset with me, and I hadn’t been able to set it right. I simply—”

“Yes?”

“I want to—I mean to say—dash it. Lucie, I do love you awfully.”

“Mon Dieu, George, que je t’aime.” It came out of her before she could stop herself, in French, and George looked almost overwhelmed. He was silent, and held her hands tight in his.

When he spoke, his voice was almost not his own. “Come here and let the goose kiss you,” he said.

George kissed her, and Lucie forgot about the open door. There was always a smile in him somewhere, but he was not laughing at himself in this moment. Lucie could not help but yield to it, to the depth of emotion in him, and they held each other very close. They had done it. They had conquered her mother. Her father had allowed them. They were openly engaged. Lucie let herself sigh and melt into George’s arms.

---

George brought her to tea at his parents’ home the next day, to announce it to them properly, and to begin to put Lucie’s plan into action. They were shown into his mother’s sitting room, the one for family teas, not the grand room on the first storey for entertaining. The sitting room had French windows opening directly onto a little garden behind the house, which was full of flowers bright in the summer sun. It looked as if it might be lovely to walk in, and Lucie kept stealing glances at it, until she reminded herself why she was there.

George was more stiff and formal than he was ordinarily. He began with re-introductions. “Father, you remember Mademoiselle Lucie Béranger.”

“How d’ye do,” George’s father said, rapidly. He shook Lucie’s hand very briefly.

“And Mother, you remember Lucie as well.”

“Yes, dear, I do. Please do sit down. How do you take your tea?”

Mrs Roger poured for Lucie. She took a cup and said her thanks in her best English. George sat next to her and accepted a cup as well. The tea was very good, as it had also been in Mrs James’s home, and Irene’s. The china was not the same china that she had seen at the musical tea months ago. This was old, by her judgment, and perhaps quite dear to Mrs Roger. It was bone china, apple green with gilding, far more ornate than modern china was.

George’s father was standing, holding his cup on the saucer, watching his son suspiciously.

Into the silence, Lucie said, “This is a wonderfully cheerful room, Mrs Forsyte.”

“Thank you, dear.”

Mrs Roger opened her mouth as if to say more, but was interrupted by a sound from her husband.

“Out with it! Why are you here?” said Roger.

“Father, I wanted to let you know that Lucie and I intend to marry.” George paused, waiting for the explosion he’d told Lucie might happen, but his father was silent. He continued. “We can’t marry yet because I don’t have enough income or capital to settle on her to satisfy her father. But I want you and Mother to know, so we can plan it all properly when the time comes.”

George’s father’s face had reddened somewhat. Lucie glanced at his silent mother: she had begun to beam at George happily.

Roger’s silence ended with an outburst. “Not enough? What does the fellow want?”

George named the sums.

“Fancy money,” said Roger. “Fellow thinks quite highly of his daughter.”

Lucie and George met each other’s eyes for a moment, and George gave her a tiny shrug. He said, “As you would if Francie were marrying.”

“Suppose you have a point there, eh,” said Roger. He looked at Lucie as if surprised to see her there, and made a throat-clearing noise.

“It’s no matter. I’ll have it in another year or so,” said George. “I started working towards it last year and I have a plan. Lucie’s mother tried to get her to pay attention to another suitor, some French aristocrat, who had the money to hand, but she saw him off.” George looked at her; this was her cue.

Lucie spoke up. “Maman will try again, I think, but I am determined that your son is the better man.”

“Hmm,” was all his father said to that, rubbing at his bare chin. Lucie saw him consider her briefly, still suspicious, then turn his attention back to George.

George said, “Takes money to breed money in this business, as you know, Father. I’m a full partner now, but my investment capital is not what Parkes’s is. And I don’t put it all in. I make a range of investments.”

“Not consols,” his father said, and made a sound that was almost a growl.

George gave him a look.

Roger made a different sound, one that was almost a laugh. “Suppose you’re my son after all, unlike that dandy Eustace. That boy had better think twice about asking me to settle his tailor’s bill a second time.”

Lucie saw a smile flash over George’s face then vanish. So far, this discussion was going as she hoped.

He said, “That’s the news, Father, latest edition, and I hope we have your blessing.”

Roger huffed, and there was his growl. “Don’t like long engagements. Don’t like short ones either, but a year is too long.”

George shrugged. “Can’t be helped. It’ll happen as soon as I can manage.”

“That fellow Parkes says you’re working like a dog.” Roger rubbed his bare chin again. “I’ll invest. Let you get married without waiting too long.”

“Invest?” George said, as if the idea were faintly unpleasant to him.

“It’ll be a loan that you can repay, properly. I expect to get interest back on my money, mind.” Roger’s chin was out as he said it, and he sounded irascible.

When George answered, his chin was also out, and there was a note in his voice that was so similar Lucie had to hide her smile. “Wouldn’t accept it on any other terms.” A pause. “How much? Need to know it’s worth my while.”

Roger grinned for an instant, then hid it behind a glower. “It’ll be enough. Whom should I deal with?”

“Soames is acting for me.”

“Good,” Roger said. “First rational thing you’ve said.”

George glanced at Lucie very briefly. Roger loved to complain about Soames, he’d told her once.

Mrs Roger finally spoke up. “Well, that’s settled! I’m so happy for you both. I had quite despaired of George settling down until we heard he had begun calling on you. All Saints is quite close to hand, you know. All of ours were christened there.” Mrs Roger paused, and looked at Lucie again, this time with her gaze resting on the cross at her throat. She said nothing at all about it, however, but told Lucie they were still waiting for their first grandchild.

Lucie asked after the china, curious, and learned it was a wedding present from the Jameses. Mrs Roger was delighted Miss Béranger had asked, for she quite preferred the Worcester style over the modern fashions. What did dear Lucie prefer? May she call her Lucie?

The conversation was warm, Roger having settled down to drink his tea with a son he had decided to gaze over beneficently, in paternal approval. The formality in the room eased somewhat, and little sandwiches were eaten while Lucie told George’s parents about herself in response to their questions.

After tea, George escorted Lucie back to her father’s home. He sat next to her in the cab, her hand resting comfortably on his arm. It was pleasant to be engaged formally, and to be able to touch each other openly. George rested his gloved hand over hers and made a happy sound.

“One pair of parents satisfied,” said Lucie. “And now we will satisfy mine. You will see.”

“They want different things, though.”

“Yes, they do. Soames has it in hand, however, and I believe my parents will be easily satisfied. Trust me.”

“I do trust you.” George leaned over and kissed her cheek.

---

A fortnight later, Lucie, George, and her father received notes from Soames, summoning them to a meeting at his offices. Her family’s lawyer was to arrive from Paris, sent to London by her mother to discuss the terms of the contract. The size of her dot, the dowry her family sent with her to her husband, would be known at last to her.

Her father indulged in a brief outburst of temper, quickly controlled, when he read the letter from Soames inviting him to the discussion.

“I am summoned to an Englishman’s office to discuss my affairs! Could he not find neutral ground for the negotiation? Has he no manners?”

“Father, he is not a diplomat. I think he is as much summoned as we are by Maman’s lawyer.”

“Ah, yes, this notaire, Delaporte. I believe I know the man. Yes. Your grandmother has employed him for decades. He is the sort to summon men to him.” Lucie watched her father deliberately soothe his own feathers down to their unruffled state. That was a skill to learn.

On the day they were to meet, Lucie and George arrived somewhat early at the offices of Forsyte, Bustard, and Forsyte, in the Poultry, hard by the Bank of England. They were shown in by a tall, bearded gentleman named Gradman, who introduced himself as Mr Soames’s clerk. Soames was writing something as they entered, and held up a finger to indicate he’d be a moment. Gradman seated them. The office was comfortable, very quietly furnished in a manner that suggested prosperous solidity, with just enough modernity to signal that its occupant was no stick in the mud.

Soames blotted whatever he’d been writing, closed a book, and shifted to indicate that they had his complete attention. “I am happy you arrived before Monsieur Béranger,” he said. “It affords us an opportunity to talk.”

“What are the open questions?” asked George.

“There are two. First is the matter of the undertakings George wrote to me about.”

“Ah,” said George. “I was wondering when we’d get to those.”

“They are about our children,” Lucie said. “And which faith they will be raised in.”

“I thought as much.”

Soames said, “The notaire wishes the contract to include your promise to raise your children in the Catholic faith.”

George shrugged. “It’s all one to me. My father is another matter.”

Soames said, “This requirement is not binding in English law, so nothing you sign has any meaning, but I would prefer you not to have to sign. In practice, the children follow whichever faith the father follows, or whichever faith the more devout of the two follows.”

“Oh,” said Lucie. “My mother will be upset. My grandmother will be beyond words.”

Soames said, “You will certainly upset someone no matter what you choose. I suggest that you not consider that, but instead consult what you both wish. Talk privately about it.”

Soames, Lucie thought, was at times as discreet as a priest, just as quietly folded up into a silent and safe place for one’s secrets.

“You mentioned two obstacles,” she said.

“The second is not so much an obstacle as a negotiation that has not yet happened. The marriage settlement must be agreed upon, and for reasons I find puzzling, this negotiation involves more parties than merely George’s father and your father.”

Soames went on, seeming to warm to his subject.

“I have been engaged in a contest with your family lawyer about the settlement, all by correspondence until today. I do not want to win, precisely, at least not on the traditional terms. I’m George’s lawyer. Ordinarily I would be presumed to be protecting only his interests. But I am protecting the interests of both of you, at his request.”

Lucie looked at George, who was uncharacteristically serious. He nodded to her.

Soames was speaking in a voice Lucie did not associate with him. It was flatter than usual, extremely calm. “The money is not precisely the problem. George has the full six thousand, but only with the aid of a loan from his father. This makes his father an interested party, who must agree to the terms. The dot will also come in, though we do not know the amount yet. The remaining question is what your father proposes to bring in. He will be expected to contribute something to match what George’s father has contributed.”

Soames and George both looked at Lucie.

Lucie paused. She’d never heard a number from her father. She’d only heard his demands of others second-hand. “I do not know,” she said, because she could not dissemble before Soames. He would see through it, she suspected.

“It will come up in the negotiations, quietly if I have my way, so that there need be no question of revealing his finances to unfriendly parties. The notaire is here to explain what your mother and her family would prefer, which is complete transparency.”

“I am surprised he has travelled,” Lucie said.

“But travel he has.” Soames tilted his head. His office was hushed and little sound of conversation from outside could be heard within, but Lucie could make out the jingling of a bell in the hall.

Soames opened his office door, and a moment later Mr Gradman ushered in her father. The expression on her father’s face was composed but not serene; he was still unhappy about the summons. Whether he was more annoyed with Soames or with the notaire Lucie could not be sure.

“The office of an English lawyer,” he said, shaking Soames’s hand briefly. “And now I am privileged to watch an English marriage settlement negotiation.”

“It is unusual to have the bride present in settlement negotiations,” Soames said, his voice dry.

“George has asked me to translate if necessary,” Lucie told her father.

Soames nodded at her and said, quite matter-of-factly, “I think it quite reasonable for you to be here if only so that you know what is being discussed about your money.”

Her father glanced at her, and she saw surprise on his face, quickly masked.

Before any of them could pursue this line of conversation, the notaire arrived and was shown in by Soames’s clerk Mr Gradman. The notaire greeted her father, who then introduced him round: Maître Delaporte, arriving from Paris for this negotiation. He was a carefully dressed man of about sixty, reserved, slightly stooped, with gold-rimmed glasses. He spoke no English.

Lucie could see that her father was not on easy terms with him. Since he was her grandmother’s notaire, and she would have paid his fare here, it was her grandmother he would be representing. She would listen for this in his words.

George sat down on one of Soames’s client chairs, pulled to the side, beside Lucie. He crossed his knees and casually rested a hand across his mouth. Lucie knew this to be his way of reminding himself to stay silent. This had been Soames’s sole instruction to him, George had told her: answer questions if asked directly by Soames, otherwise keep his mouth closed and let Soames speak for him. He’d then joked that it would be easy, because when Soames started talking law it was all Greek to him, and he’d only studied Latin.

Delaporte opened by cautioning that he could not act officially when outside Paris, but he could arrive at understandings with all the parties, and draw up the proper documents to be ready when they arrived in Paris, which he assumed they would for the wedding. Then he looked down the side of his nose, and said, “Vous, les Anglais, vous cachez de l’argent dans des trusts. We do not do this.”

“The English are more discreet than the French,” said Lucie, to Soames.

Soames looked at her a moment, then said, in French, “Discreet is indeed a better word than hiding would imply. We think a man’s business is his own. We also protect money in trusts from those who would misuse it.”

That was a very polite shot, but a shot in kind nonetheless. What surprised her was that his French was adequate; there were even notes in his vowels that sounded Parisian, one minor stumble with grammar aside. He knew more than she’d realised through all those months she’d conversed with Irene in his presence.

This exchange of compliments was but the first pass. The two legal men then drew their swords and clashed in earnest, fencing over Soames’s broad desk with unblunted épées. There was no gap for her to translate in, and no need for it; they understood each other perfectly. They were cautious at first, Lucie thought, sounding each other out. Delaporte wanted everything written out in the deed, all numbers visible, all mutually shared and read to all of the parties whose money was involved, and their witnesses as well.

Soames found this unacceptable and said so. “The terms of a settlement may be hard-fought between groom and father of the bride, but they are private between them. The idea of a man opening his books to a drawing room full of relatives is astonishing.” There was a note in his voice, creeping through the calm, that expressed a sort of horror at the thought of it.

“The contract must say what both bring, or it is rumour not contract,” said Delaporte, immovably. “Further, we must include the usual clause about what religion the children shall be raised in. They must be raised in the faith of their mother.”

Soames repeated his objection, then returned to the topic of the public nature of the transaction and the sums involved. The quarrelling continued, entirely politely, entirely calmly. Then came a moment when the tone changed, and Soames inclined his head to Delaporte.

Soames said, “You have won your points, Maître. The deed must say what the bride brings, and the clause may stand.”

Delaporte made a gesture that to Lucie’s eye indicated respect for his opponent.

“Let us then discuss these numbers,” he said.

Everyone in the room shifted in their chairs slightly. They had finally come to the money, the reason they were all there arguing.

Delaporte then stated the sum that would be her dot, which to the French in the room would be George’s money; Lucie knew it would come into the settlement. George was very still beside her; he would know current exchange figures as well as she. And then Delaporte said, very clearly, “La dot constituée par Madame Chassagne.”

Her father sat up, then very deliberately resettled himself into his previous languid listening posture. Lucie quivered in her seat to see it. They had heard her value stated: they now knew the number of francs her mother’s family thought she was worth.

Soames said, in that flat, calm lawyer voice he used, “This leaves the next sum we must record, for I now understand that all must be written in the open. What is the amount that Monsieur Béranger proposes to bring?”

Delaporte said, “I am instructed—”

Then her father stood and interrupted him, politely. “Alas, I find I am out of time and must hasten to my next appointment. Please do carry on without me.”

He left the room without seeming to be in haste, but quickly enough that Lucie could not speak before he was gone. The two legal men had carefully blank faces, nearly identical in young Englishman and older Frenchman. They looked at each other and said nothing, and seemed to be completely in agreement with each other in this moment, if in no other. George looked at her with a question on his face and Lucie shook her head. Her father was capable of anything. This might have been either a negotiation manoeuvre or genuinely an appointment.

Soames’s blank expression cracked first. “Perhaps I expressed the question badly and gave offence. My French is not the best.”

Lucie heard a rustle from George beside her as he shifted abruptly in his chair.

“You must write your documents without it,” Delaporte said, and there was some acid disapproval in his voice, though not, Lucie thought, for Soames.

“Very well,” said Soames, impassively.

Delaporte rose to depart, and Soames opened the door to admit a hovering Gradman. Neither Delaporte nor Soames had taken notes during the discussion, but Lucie had no doubt that both men had clear memories of what they had agreed to. They would each write their documents, in different languages and addressing different laws, but somehow exactly the same.

When the door had closed behind Gradman again, Lucie spoke. “Soames, you should know that your French was correct. There was no question of offence or misunderstanding.”

“I thought as much,” said George, “but I was keeping my mouth shut as instructed.”

“Well done,” said Soames, absently. To Lucie he said, “Interesting. Thank you. I shall write the drafts with an empty space, it seems.”

Soames was looking at her, and Lucie could see he’d decided to fold himself round a secret. But what? Why had her father refused to answer? Lucie did not see it.

---

15. The deadlock

George called for her a few days later to join him again at his parents’ home for tea, for his father now had a copy of the agreements drafted by Soames to consider. George told her it had been sent round by messenger earlier in the afternoon, and his father would be sure to have something to say. George was both hopeful and nervous about his father’s reactions.

Irene had described the Forsyte brothers to her. Roger’s older brothers, James and Jolyon, were both quite different. James fretted and was affectionate despite it; Jolyon was philosophical and openly affectionate. Swithin was James’s twin but his opposite in every way. Roger, Irene had said, was enterprising but subject to fits of temper. He was positive in his opinions and judgments. Lucie began to understand why George said his mother had been flattened.

Mrs Roger was there when they arrived, and welcomed them cordially just as she had last time. They sat in the same sitting room as before, with the same lovely garden in view, still unvisited. Mrs Roger poured into the same precious service, the old Worcester wedding present, and then turned to a box she had brought with her to the sitting room.

“Dear Lucie, I wanted to show you this. It has sat quite unused since Thomas, but all of mine wore it.”

She lifted the lid of the box and carefully removed something wrapped in tissue paper. She unwrapped it, and Lucie saw a christening robe, all white lace, simply lovely. She reached out to touch it. It was a fine thing. It was, she thought, the same practice for the Church of England people as it was for those of her faith: this robe might be worn by an infant in a ceremony in either of their churches.

“It is beautiful,” she said, to George’s mother, and received her pleased smile in reward.

Why was it being shown her? Lucie was uncertain what George’s mother might be trying to say. The message that all of her children had been christened at the Protestant church nearby? Or it might be as simple as the message that she wished for grandchildren, which she had already said, and which did not need saying. All mothers wanted grandchildren. Her own did as well.

Lucie had just asked Mrs Roger about the lacework when there was a brief commotion at the sitting room door and Roger himself appeared through it. He ignored all conversation in progress.

“Well, that whelp Soames has sent me the draft,” he informed George. “I suppose you’ve seen this already? I’ll look it over now. Shan’t be signing my name to anything that isn’t right, no matter what Soames thinks.”

He sat by the tea-table and opened the packet.

“Now, Roger, dear,” said Mrs Roger. “Not in my sitting room.”

“Shan’t take all that long,” said Roger, dismissively. He spread the papers over the tea-table and began reading.

Lucie looked for a place to set her teacup, did not see one under all the disarray, and held it a little nervously. Roger leaned over the spread-out papers and picked out one in particular to read. George’s face went blank as he watched his father, which was quite unlike him. Lucie looked to Roger, and immediately saw why. Clouds roiled across the sky of Roger’s face, lowered and went dark, and in the distance thunder rumbled. At last the storm clouds burst and Roger flung the document onto the table before him.

He glared at Lucie. “Young lady, I don’t know what your father is about, but this won’t do. It won’t do at all.”

“You,” he said to George. “Have you taken leave of your senses? Is there anything between your ears at all? You come here with this and think I’ll sign it?”

“Father—”

“My grandchildren are to be promised to Rome in writing and you want me to sign it!”

“Father, Soames says—”

“That whelp can stay out of it! I’ll lend to a business but I won’t endow a convent.” Roger picked up a second document and shook it at George. “And this, this is an insult! What does that fellow put in? We’ll do it properly and he’ll show me what he’s putting in and I’ll show him what I’ll put in. Nothing from him? Nothing from me and you manage your own affairs.” He crumpled up the paper and tossed it onto the tea-table.

George’s face set itself, and she saw it. His jaw hardened and his chin came out. The father’s expression was mirrored on the son, and it was, Lucie thought, not one the son was comfortable with.

George said, “Right then. I’ll manage.”

Roger stood and left the room, leaving the drafts scattered across the tea-table. George picked up his teacup from under a sheet of foolscap and looked inside it, then drank very carefully. His face was quite red, but he said nothing at all.

George’s mother’s face was quite different: it had a faint empty smile upon it. She folded the tissue round the lovely christening robe again, and hid it away. “I’m sure they will come to some arrangement, dear,” she said to Lucie, as if her husband had not shouted and her son were not in the room. “Will you take some more tea?”

“Please,” said Lucie.

She thought George might need another moment to find his composure. She’d never seen him angry, and she wondered what he would do about it. He drank tea; he ate a cucumber sandwich; he did not speak. Francie appeared some minutes later, all vibrant with industry and her own affairs. She talked at them for some time, extracting a promise from Lucie to play at some forthcoming event that Lucie knew nothing at all about. Francie set her cup down, cheerfully kissed her mother, and was gone.

At this juncture, George stood, and spoke his first words since his father had left the room. He said, “I shall escort Lucie back to her father’s home.”

“I’ll ring for the carriage,” said Mrs Roger, still entirely blank and serene.

As Lucie was putting on her hat, she saw Mrs Roger kiss her son and press his hands briefly, coaxing a little smile from him. It came to her that Roger flattened everyone round him, not only his wife, and George had fought it in his own way.

In the carriage, Lucie slipped her arm through his and pressed it, and he rested his gloved hand on hers.

“My father,” George said, then did not continue. The length of a street later, he said, “I’ll do my best. My fault for being useless before I met you.”

He looked away from her out of the carriage window. Lucie pressed his arm again.

“It is odd that my father did not give Soames a number,” she said. “He ended the discussion when Soames asked. But—”

“Yes?”

“You remember when he said that I had outgrown my violin? He has not given me a new one.”

George grunted. “I thought he was hinting I should buy one for you. Except I can’t until the settlements are signed, because I want to be sure of the money.”

“I wonder,” said Lucie. “The dot is from my mother’s family; the terms are theirs.”

“The dot does carry me past the sum for your father’s terms,” said George. “We can refuse a contract with terms we don’t want, however. Indeed we should, no matter the money. Perhaps more politely than my father did.”

“That… that is wise,” Lucie said, slowly. Both parts of it were wise. She was silent for the rest of the drive home, leaning against George and thinking.

---

Lucie was alone with her father in his study for once that evening, for he had no business, and she had no social duties to perform. He smoked one of his odd cigarettes and nursed some cognac; Lucie had her violin in hand. She played Kreutzer études for him, because they soothed him and were good for her.

Eventually she set her instrument and bow down and allowed him to pour her a little cognac. He was in a good mood, then.

“Why did you choose this as your profession?” she asked her father.

“Mmm,” he said. He lit another cigarette for himself and thought. “There was something about it that interested me as a student. I read of Talleyrand working to advance the interests of France herself, over the interests of the men who might be leading her at the moment, and there seemed something noble about it to me. It is not all that grandiose in practice, but I have the skills, and the political agility to prosper. Many men have not.”

“You said they make it a matter of examinations now.”

“They do. And before that it was a matter of being born into the aristocracy.”

“Which we were not.”

Her father gestured with his cigarette. “And yet! Here I am, in London, well-placed, highly enough to believe myself useful. No one shall write me into history books, but I do advance the interests of France, sometimes even meaningfully.”

“Is it satisfying?”

Her father considered her carefully. “Yes. It has cost me something, but yes. I am a patriot.”

Lucie thought about this. The cost was her mother, she suspected. Her brother was in the army, and quite cordial with her father when he was able to visit; her younger sister was indifferent to her father. Why it had cost him her mother, she still did not know, and perhaps would never know.

“George and I met with his parents today,” she said.

“Oh?”

“The lawyer—the one married to my friend—has drawn up the papers and George’s father had them in hand. He was unhappy with what he read.”

“Was he then?” Her father set down his cigarette and took his glass of cognac in hand. He swirled it and watched the brandy spin inside.

Lucie said, “I will not repeat what he said, other than to note that he was what they call colourful. He asked questions about your contribution.”

Her father shifted in his chair. “Well, he may continue to ask. I will certainly not open my books to him. I am a servant of the French Republic, and in no way subject to the demands of an English dealer in house property.”

Lucie said, somewhat sharply, “This is George’s profession.”

“I was referring to his father, but I apologise, my dear. Unless I misjudge him, George does seem to understand nuance, and to read what is unsaid. He would make no such demands.”

“Certainly the question will have occurred to him, even if he knows not to ask.”

“Certainly.” Her father stared into his cognac glass, which he had been toying with for most of an hour instead of drinking. “You understand, I hope, that I will not take less than two hundred a year because that is what you are worth. You must be protected.”

Lucie thought about a conversation she had had with Irene about the settlement. She had asked for advice, and Irene had told her what Soames had settled on her. Soames had said the same thing to Irene that her father had just said, that it was about Irene’s protection. And he too had fought with his father about it, for Irene had brought no money at all. Soames had his own money to settle, however, because he had been working since the moment he left school. Then Soames’s father had shown his love the only way Forsytes did, as Irene put it, by settling his money as well. Irene had not been able to guess if Roger would do the same.

Irene was protected, then, and she thought it entirely reasonable that the men round Lucie would choose to protect her by giving her money they could not touch.

Lucie sighed.

Her father heard this, it seemed, and reached out to touch her shoulder briefly. “Lucie, my dearest daughter, there is no dishonour in a long engagement. If George cannot yet meet the price I have set, you must be patient. He is a diligent young man and devoted to you, is he not?”

“Yes, Papa,” Lucie said. “He is. And I believe I quite understand the situation.”

“I am certain you do, my daughter.” Her father was gazing somewhere off beyond the walls of the room.

Lucie opened the case for her violin and set instrument and bow inside. Her skills had indeed outgrown it. Her father’s gaze shifted to her, and she saw the fondness in the way his eyes crinkled, and a little wistfulness.

---

Irene called upon her the next day, which was Lucie’s at-home day, and by her face Lucie saw that she had news to share.

“What is it?” she said. “Please tell me at once!”

“It has happened,” Irene said to her. “I have only just told Soames, but I have been certain for several weeks now.”

Lucie took her hands. “You look so happy!”

Irene blushed. “We have been seeking it. We agreed it was a good moment for a child, and I decided I was ready, and so—” She looked down and smiled briefly.

Lucie kissed her cheek. “You have been blessed. When?”

“February? If I have guessed right.”

If Irene was to be her support in Paris—Lucie counted weeks. If the disagreements about money and which church owned the children went into October, Irene would perhaps not be able to travel. And then she would not be able to travel for many months after the birth. It was selfish for Lucie to wish for it all to be resolved in time for Irene to be there with her, but she selfishly wished it. Her younger sister would be a poor replacement.

She could not say this to George. He would feel guilty without being able to repair it; the money was not his fault. He was indeed working like a dog, as the English said. She would not say it to Irene, either, because it was selfish.

So instead she kissed her friend again, and asked her to describe what made her feel it, and if she felt the nausées matinales yet or not. They sat together and talked for some time about what the experience was, and whether Irene was nervous or not, and what Soames had said when she had told him.

Later in the day, George called upon her, as she had requested, with his copy of the drafts in a document case. They sat in the little sitting room, door open, and talked seriously, with the case on the table beside them.

“There is something we are missing, George,” Lucie said. “It is to do with my father and his relations with my mother’s family. This cannot be a stalemate; there must be a move we can make.”

George sighed deeply, and she looked at him sharply, for there was something in that sigh that sounded like despair. He said, “I’ll convert, Lucie. Not a joke. I mean it. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“George, dearest. You must not. I will not allow it.”

“But it makes your mother happy, and gets their money, and that’s your father’s price. It’ll be done.”

“Your father will never speak to you again.”

George hung his head. “I’ve gone through months at a time when he wouldn’t speak to me without shouting, so I stayed away. Wouldn’t be much of a change.”

“You know you don’t want that. Winning my Maman and losing your Papa is not victory. George, my sweetest. It puts us in the same position we were in, and I will not allow it.”

“But the dowry money is how I meet your father’s terms without my father’s money.”

“My mother controls the terms of the contract because of this. They made Soames concede everything he was fighting against.”

George lifted his head, and he seemed to be thinking again instead of despairing. “I was surprised Soames lost that negotiation.”

“He yielded when he saw he could not win. He is wise, I think. And you are right that we need the dot.”

“Now that my father has exploded like Vesuvius,” George said. He tugged at his hair. “He wouldn’t even let me tell him it’s not legally binding.”

“There must be another way.” Lucie paused. Her fingers tapped on her chin as she thought. Then she understood the board. Her father. Her father was en prise, not she: both the white knight and the white bishop had her next move well-protected. But why? “Please allow me to read these drafts. There is something I am missing here. You brought them?”

“Yes,” George said. He opened his case, and took out a large envelope with a packet of papers covered with neat copperplate writing. He laid them on the table before Lucie. “Here they are. The contract with all the numbers, and the conditions from your mother’s side of the family.”

“I shall do what my father would do, and understand what everyone wants.”

---

To be continued… Finished at 20 chapters; posting 1 chapter at a time.