The Ballad of Gregoire Darcy (59 page)

“Is the house large enough?”

“Have you seen the renovations?”

“Did they ever finish that wing? The Oriental one?” Mr. Bennet asked.

“Always under construction.”

“You're not thinking of doing something to Kirkland are you, Mr. Bingley?” Elizabeth asked.

“No,” Jane answered before Bingley could. She gave him a soothing look, which silenced his opposition.

“If we turn England into the Orient, perhaps everyone will be less inclined to go there,” Darcy said, “and come back with all sorts of…things.”

“Monkey is not a thing!” “Anything you can toss is a thing,” Darcy said, and took a sip of his wine.

“Who's tossing Monkey?” Elizabeth said, with an accusing look at her husband.

“
Thinking
of tossing it,” Darcy corrected.

“Who in the world is Monkey?” Lord Kincaid finally asked. He was seated next to Caitlin, who was similarly clueless.

“His name is very self-descriptive,” Jane said. “He's our pet.”

“Somehow he was left off the invitation list for tonight,” Elizabeth
said. “Because someone banned him from Pemberley.”

“Someone didn't appreciate having to chase him around the house while he was covered in mud before he woke half the house—”

“If you hadn't upset him—”

“There is nothing upsetting about telling an animal to leave. My dogs would do it on command—”

“You tossed him out the window!”

“He was in my hands. He
leaped
out the window. And then back in. Just to annoy me. Do you have any idea how long it took the maids—”

“Fortunately,” Elizabeth said, interrupting the argument between her husband and brother-in-law, “it will not be your decision as to whether Monkey is invited to the celebrations, as they will be held elsewhere—”

Grégoire cleared his throat. “Speaking of—Would you all mind terribly if I
asked
Her Highness and Mr. Maddox if we could use their property before we begin to plan an event there?”

Mr. Bennet laughed. “That does seem the polite thing to do, no?”

“Her Highness?” Caitlin finally said, her first words in three courses. “Yer all
royalty?
”

“Mr. Maddox is married to a minor Hungarian princess,” Darcy quickly explained to his guest and future sister-in-law.

“She is much less intimidating than you might think,” Georgiana Kincaid half whispered to her. “Oh! Except for all the swords.”

Caitlin nodded politely and kept silent for the rest of the meal.

“I can't do dis.”

“You can.”

Grégoire and Caitlin had found the chapel to be the best location to be unchaperoned. Even if someone came upon them, nothing could be suspected of them, especially given Grégoire's religious devotion and respect for sanctified places. There they could sit in the pews and he could put his hands over her trembling
ones. “They're just people,” he said. “Their clothing is different and their speech is different and sometimes even I get confused by all of the titles and orders of names, but we are all the same on the inside.”

“Do yeh t'ink dey loike me?”

“If they have any sense at all, they think you're a sweet, polite woman who will make me a wonderful bride,” he said, kissing her. “And if they don't…well, we are all foolish sinners, and of that sin I will absolve them.”

“Of bein' idiots?”

“Assuming so, yes,” he said with a smile. “You don't have to impress them.You are not marrying
them.
”

“But if—”

He kissed her to silence her. “No ‘if 's.' They are good people and you are a wonderful woman and you make me happy. For that alone, they already love you.” He squeezed her hand. “They have seen me poor, filthy, half starved, beaten, and even harmed by my own hand. And yet my brother, who may seem to the world a pretentious, arrogant English gentleman, loved me as a brother from the moment we met. He gave me advice but he never stopped me from doing otherwise—even when he should have.”

She bit her lip. “'As 'e said somethin' 'bout me?”

“He does not find conversation easy,” he replied. “It is not in his nature. Nonetheless, if he truly disapproved, he would have said something months ago. And even if he had, I could have replied that he had been bothering me to leave the church and get married since the day we met in Mon-Claire. So there is no high ground for Darcy on this subject.” He added, “Nor do I truly care.”

“Den why don' we run off an' marry?”

“Because,” he said and sighed, letting her lean into him and wrapping his arms around her, “when I wrote to him of our situation and asked him to come to Dublin and put his own life and reputation in danger for a woman he did not even know, he did not hesitate or ask a single question. He made our union possible and if he wants to be a part of it, who am I to stop him?”

She rested in his arms. It had been a tiring day.“I wish I'd had a family ta love so much.”

He kissed her hair and said, “You're about to have one.”

CHAPTER 37

IT WAS A YEAR AND A SEASON since rescuing Grégoire from certain death in Spain that the Maddoxes opened their house to receive him and his bride-to-be.

“I should warn you,” Grégoire said to Caitlin as they approached the doors of the non-Japanese side of the house, “Mr. Maddox dresses as if he were mentally unbalanced. He is not.”

“Den why—”

But Caitlin didn't get to finish her question, because the door opened and Brian appeared in his usual garb. “Hello, Grégoire. Mrs. MacKenna, I presume.”

She curtsied. “Mr. Maddox.”

“Please come in. You must be freezing,” he said. “Excuse my wife—Nady is cooking. She insists on subjecting us all to Transylvania's finest—”

“
Subjecting!
” came a heavily accented voice from the other room. Princess Maddox emerged, wearing her Romanian dress and jewelry, looking majestic but for the fact that she was wearing sandals and an apron.

Brian smiled apologetically at his wife, “Nadi-chan—”

“
Subjecting!”

“Not everything
necessarily
needs sour cream—”

She rolled her eyes and turned to her guests. “Grégoire. Mrs. MacKenna.”

“Your Highness,” Grégoire said, bowing, and Caitlin followed with a curtsy to the princess, a little confused by the couple before her—a man in a skirt and bathrobe wearing two swords in his belt and a woman in an embroidered gown and with her hair covered in silk veils and a gold circlet.

“Welcome to our home,” she said. “Mrs. MacKenna, would you like to join me in the kitchen while my husband runs away in fear of my wrath?”

“I love you,” Brian said, kissing his wife on the cheek before quickly running away to show Grégoire something or another, leaving Caitlin with her royal host.

Caitlin smiled shyly as she followed Princess Nadezhda into the kitchen, where servants were running around. “He says otherwise, but he likes my cooking,” Nadezhda explained. “Besides, English food is so plain. In my homeland, at least there is some flavor.” She spooned some soup off the top of the pot.“Here.Too much cream?”

Nervously she tried it. “No. 'S quite good, actually.”

“Good. It is your party,” she said.

“T'ank yeh fer hostin' it,Yer Highness.”

“We are honored,” she said, removing her apron and handing it to the cook. “Anything that makes Grégoire happy makes us happy. I do not know what you did to him, but he is not the same man he was when we found him in Spain, or even when he had recovered from Spain.”

Caitlin looked down at her feet. “Not al' of dose t'ings were good,Yer Highness.”

The princess did not look concerned. “To be together, Brian and I went through a lot and put our family through even more, but now everyone is happy. And now Grégoire will be happy. He has suffered so much.” She shook her head. It was a little hard to understand her because of her accent, but then again, Caitlin imagined that her own Irish accent might be sometimes hard to understand. “You know, in Spain, they thought he was a saint.”

“I can imagine.”

“No, I mean that very seriously,” the princess said. “They were going to let him die and put his bones in a reliquary. The abbot excommunicated him from his order to save his life. Of course, I'm not Catholic, so I don't understand. But I don't think anyone does.” She shook her head. “The abbot thought it was better to have a living man than a dead saint. He was a good man, I think, this abbot.” She was interrupted by the distinct sound of something shattering. “And my husband, who is twice my age, is a child with our things and is always breaking them. That or the Bingleys have arrived. Should we find out?”

They should, Caitlin said.

One smashed crystal decanter later (because Brian's carpentry skills were not what he thought they were), order was restored, just in time to receive the guests from London. Even without their children, the Darcys, the Kincaids, the Bingleys, the Maddoxes (both couples), and, of course, Grégoire and Caitlin themselves made up a gathering of respectable size.

Caitlin was introduced to perhaps the oddest couple she had ever met, in terms of sheer mismatch. There was the spectacled Dr. Maddox, tall and thin as an overgrown weed and shy but rather pleasant. Beside him was his wife, Charles Bingley's sister, a head shorter than her husband and with everything about her perfect—her hair, her gown, her matching bonnet, and her jewelry. Everything except the smile, the only one at the gathering that seemed a little false, but as she was to be only distantly related to this woman, Caitlin was not overly concerned, and a smile from Grégoire dissolved her unease.The Maddoxes (the hosting ones) had no children, just a large house filled with oddities from their travels abroad, and they seemed quite happy with their situation.

Separated by gender from her betrothed on the premise of discussing “womanly” things, Caitlin sat on the wooden porch with
the other ladies. She was the only one with her hair down (all attempts to pin it up nicely had failed) but had a bonnet on, at least, so she did not feel so out of place beyond where her accent already put her.

“Have you selected a location for the wedding?” Jane asked.

“Somewhere—near. Ta de house,” she said. “Any church.”

“But Catholic,” Mrs. Maddox said. “Of course.”

“'Course,” she replied. “Yeh can come, if yeh want, but I know'tis a long way.Yeh know.”

Mrs. Maddox said, “I'm afraid I haven't been, Mrs. MacKenna.”