Oliver had played the role of invalid for over a week and Ivy still had not returned to Fenwick. Initially he’d enjoyed Lilac’s attention to his imaginary malaise, but boredom, along with Rosemary’s disapproval of his person, had conspired to bring about a complete cure. He took glee in using the duke’s candles for the light he needed to compose poems to Ivy.
He glanced up as Lilac entered the room with his supper tray. “Hungry yet, Sir Oliver?” Lilac inquired with a cheerfulness he didn’t know how she could maintain.
“And what is on the menu this evening, my dear?” he asked from the couch in the drawing room where he posed in languid discontent. “Ragout of duck and asparagus points washed down with champagne?”
She cleared away his papers and set the tray down on the table. “Carrot broth, stewed cabbage, and raspberry trifle. Oh, and tea.”
“Ye gods,” he said, hoping his reflexive grimace passed for a grin in the poorly lit chamber. “I mean, you spoil me. I don’t deserve your continued kindness.”
Lilac plopped down in the chair on which she had placed his papers. He thought to protest, but then she pulled them out from beneath her derrière and placed the pile on the end of the couch. “I’m enjoying taking care of you, really. I never thought I had it in me.”
He stared down at his broth and swore he felt his nose twitch and sprout whiskers. “How could you enjoy it?”
“Well, it isn’t every day that Rosemary traps a man in the tunnels and forgets about him.”
“How would anyone know?” he asked with a morbid sniff. “There could be dozens of lost souls down in those—tunnels, did you say?”
“Yes. The passages are attached by tunnels. We explored them every summer when we were girls.”
He was appalled, both by the soup and the thought of little girls crawling through cobwebs and who knew what else. “Your parents allowed you to do this alone?”
“Sometimes Mama accompanied us. But usually it was Quigley or Terence who came along as guard.”
Quigley, the gardener, had yet to succumb to Oliver’s charm. Quigley had lived at Fenwick since before the sisters had been born. He might know a thing or two about hidden treasure. “Who is Terence?”
Lilac blushed a becoming shade of peach. She was a golden-pink-complexioned girl, lovely in her own way, if eccentric, as were the rest of the quartet. “Terence is my best friend. He sailed off somewhere for the East India Company, Morocco or—”
“Malacca.” He grinned. “How long has he been gone?”
“Six or so years.” Lilac put down the soup spoon. “Don’t give me a lecture, Sir Oliver. Everyone else has. It’s my affair if I choose to wait for him.”
“Well, have you heard anything from him?”
“Perhaps.”
He didn’t ask her how long ago that had been. There was no reason to embarrass her, but Oliver couldn’t imagine waiting six months for a woman, never mind six years. A week had strained his patience. “When do you think Ivy will come back?”
Lilac had picked up his notebook and was moving her lips as she read his latest rendering to herself. He watched her face, forgetting what he had just asked her. She appeared to be lost in his most recent poem. He was entranced, aroused, her opinion suddenly all that mattered in the world.
“What do you think?” he asked softly.
She blinked. “It’s enchanting. I’ve never read anything like it.”
A thousand stars shone upon you like day
While I stood alone in the dark
That night in Bulgaria when you went away
With a stranger you had met in the park
He winced. “It’s Belgravia, Lilac, not Bulgaria, and the way you read it, it sounds awkward and lacking cadence.”
“It’s not the way she read it,” an amused voice announced from the doorway. “It’s how you wrote it. ‘Stars shining upon one like day.’ I think, Sir Oliver, it would have been more enticing if you had written a poem about a stranger in Bulgaria.”
His mouth tightened. He set aside his tray as Rosemary pushed the door open with her shoulder, a handful of dried thistles in her hands. “And your obscure novels are blazing a trail across the Continent, are they?”
She tossed the thistles in the fireplace. “I could have been a best seller in Bulgaria for all you know.”
“I was a guest at one of Lord Byron’s house parties last year. He declared one stanza of my work to be practically excellent.”
“How cruel of him,” Lilac said after a long pause.
“It could have been worse,” Rosemary said, plucking a burr from her skirt.
Oliver gave her a negligent glance. “Oh?”
“He could have declared you to be practically awful.”
He laughed reluctantly. She was a bold Amazon whose face became breathtaking when she smiled. Oliver was quite unprepared for the impact. Whatever the Fenwick sisters lacked in reputation they atoned for in allure. “When do you think Ivy is coming home?” he asked her, uncomfortable with his thoughts.
“I honestly don’t know. Is that raspberry trifle?”
“Yes,” Lilac said. “You might as well have it. He hasn’t touched it. And, Oliver, I’m afraid if you want Ivy, you’ll have to go after her.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, expelling a sigh.
“Obviously she isn’t about to chase you,” Rosemary said, squeezing in the chair beside Lilac.
“It’s almost as if she’s forgotten you exist,” Lilac said with her typical candor.
Oliver tapped his spoon against the bowl of tasteless broth. “I realize that all of you are the victims of circumstance, and that owing to events over which you had no control, you withdrew from society and have during the period of your involuntary ostracism—”
“You think we’re ill-mannered,” Lilac said as Rosemary calmly devoured the trifle.
“I wasn’t being insulting.”
“It’s all right,” Lilac said. “We are social exiles and do not care for convention.”
He glanced at Rosemary. “So you think I should pursue your sister?”
“I said nothing of the sort,” she replied, and set her empty bowl back on the tray.
“You did,” he insisted.
“No. I said she would not chase you. If you go to Ellsworth and the duke catches you, you shall get whatever you deserve.”
Lilac nodded. “You didn’t see the way the duke looked at Ivy. Perhaps there’s a reason why she hasn’t come home. Sir Oliver, I’m afraid you might be too late.”