Page 67 of How to Lose a Lord in Ten Days

‘I used to love such games,’ she confided after a beat. ‘I think it unfair that they are abruptly deemed inelegant once one attains twelve years, don’t you?’

‘May I encourage you to share such confessions with a diary?’ Ashford said.

‘I suppose you would never have done something so undignified, even as a child,’ Lydia continued, ignoring this set down, and reaching out to pluck out a wilting peony spoiling the display. ‘Did you exit the womb reciting Latin conjugations?’

Ashford made no reply.

‘Or perhaps you were a sadly wild child.’ She began to pull the browning petals from the flower, one by one. ‘Until you decided to mend your ways and become the ponderous prig whom we all know and – well, whom we all know.’

Ashford still did not speak.

‘Though if Mr Brandon is to be believed,’ she said, attempting to flick the petals onto Ashford’s sleeve, ‘you were full of vim and vigour as a boy. What happened, to pop all that fun out of you?’

Ashford brushed the leaves away with the smallest of huffs and reached into his pocket for his snuffbox.

‘Come along,’ she encouraged, batting his arm playfully with the stem of the now-massacred flower. ‘Do be a good sport.’

‘Do you imagine I am going to have a chitchat with you about my childhood?’ he said, finally provoked into speech. ‘You?’

‘Will you not indulge my curiosity?’

‘No,’ he said, glancing at her grimly. ‘You are only hoping that I might confess some childhood fear with which you would then torment me.’

‘You think I would resort to such childishness?’ she said, with pointed emphasis.

Ashford turned away to regard the square again.

‘Did you have any childhood fears?’ she asked, after a beat.

‘No.’

‘Not even of beetles, perhaps?’

‘No.’

‘Not even a little?’

‘I’m ignoring you.’

‘What about a bedful of beetles?’

Ashford opened his snuffbox rather than answer. As ever, something about the way he did it – slow, unhurried, dismissive – prompted a rush of irritation in Lydia and her hand clenched around the stem.

‘My grandfather used to say,’ she said, as Ashford took a pinch to his nostril, ‘that taking snuff was a habit reserved for loose fish and lechers.’

Ashford inhaled rather sharply and spluttered.

‘A charming adage,’ he said, in a passable imitation of his usual calm – though his eyes were watering. ‘He would not have approved of me, I take it?’

Lydia snorted.

‘On the contrary.’ She examined the ruined flower in her palm. ‘He will be dancing in his grave at the thought of our marriage.’

‘The apple fell quite far from that tree, then.’

‘I resemble my grandmother more,’ Lydia said defensively. ‘She had a great deal of integrity’ – Why was she still speaking? – ‘and she felt very strongly, too.’

‘If you say so,’ Ashford said.