frocks, clutching a rusk, shrunken but entirely the same, and growling, shot across Bella’s mind. Nor, in all conscience, could she respond in any way to what the Duchesse had said; she understood nothing of what she was referring to.
Elizabeth returned, and Bella felt able to escape. As they left, the Duchesse, still deep in her own thoughts, cried, ‘A word to the wise, my dear—’ and then, as Bella nodded her goodbyes, she made her astonishing bear’s growl once more. The surprising fact was that no one else in the bookseller’s shop – not even Elizabeth – seemed remotely troubled or interested by the remarkable performance. Bella stepped into the pillbox carriage waiting for them with a persistent and worrying sense that it was she, and not the extravagant old woman, who had made a spectacle of herself.
8.
She felt able to plead fatigue, and John took them back to Hanover Square, their errands almost complete. Elizabeth, inexhaustible, let Bella off at Hanover Square before asking John to take her on, wanting to make her farewells to a friend in Green Street.
It was three in the afternoon, and Burnes had been waiting, ‘no more than five minutes, I assure you’.
‘How did you know I – we should return soon?’
Burnes smiled. ‘I did not. I had set a limit on my patient waiting.’
‘And how long was that, Burnes?’ Bella said, long ago having passed to this intimate, military form of address. She began to unpick her bonnet as they sat down. ‘I would like to know what value you place on my company, and the length of time you would wait for my return seems as accurate a measure as any. For some truly important person – let us say for the Governor General, the King, or my sister’s friend Goethe—’
‘I believe Herr Goethe is dead, Bella.’
‘No matter – for these, let us say they would merit a whole afternoon’s waiting, hat in hand, jumping to your feet every time the maid enters to feed the fire. On the other hand, let us say, for our friend Stokes—’
‘I was truly asking myself whom you were planning to alight on, but Mr Stokes is a very fair choice.’
‘Thank you. For Mr Stokes, I do not suppose you would wait at all; a mere drop of the card in the bowl, and off you would fly like an afrit riding the West Wind. Am I correct?’
‘Quite so.’
‘And yet you waited for me – how long I do not know – and you would, I believe, have waited a minute or two longer. How long the limit you had privately determined is for me to establish, and that, I presume, will inform me what value you place on the conversation of a silly little girl. I wonder with what ingenuity I can discover the true facts of the case.’
‘No ingenuity is required,’ Burnes said, laughing at Bella, scratching her head like a regular urchin. ‘I will tell you – I had decided to wait for fifteen minutes. In any case, I knew you had gone to your bookseller’s two hours before, since Emily was so kind as to tell me, and I knew a bookseller could not detain you much longer than that.’
‘Very well,’ Bella said. ‘Fifteen minutes. Now I call that a very valuable contribution to knowledge, though, like the higher mathematics, I hardly know as yet what use I shall put it to.’
‘I dread your uses, Bella,’ Burnes said, helping himself to tea and, greedily, to sugar. ‘But how long would you wait for me?’
Bella was silenced, and Burnes, too, in a moment stopped laughing. There was no answer to that; in them both was the unspoken knowledge that the ‘six weeks’, so lightly spoken, so long ago, had shrunk now to one week, that then, he was gone, that after, there was nothing that either could see. In Burnes’s pained anxious face was some knowledge that he had not been fair to Bella, and it would have been better not to have come at all; in Bella’s face was nothing but a forgiveness for anything Burnes might do, be doing, have done. Bella’s forgiveness had no tense, had no aspect, and Burnes dropped his eyes from hers, from her sad, her shining eyes.
‘In the interests of coquetry,’ Bella said, collecting herself, ‘no woman would ever wait for a man as long as he would wait for her. If I were a flirt, five minutes; if I were a woman of normal self-regard …’
But she saw in Burnes’s face that he had no heart any longer for their normal banter, that their conversation, like the afternoon, like their lives, had turned in an unexpected direction, and now there was no retrieving it.
‘Perhaps ten minutes?’ she said, and faltered, her eyes, now, big and swimming and full of ache. She looked at her lap.
‘Bella,’ Burnes said again. ‘How long would you wait for me?’
She could not think, and she hardly trusted her voice to speak.
‘I don’t know,’ she said simply. He could not look at her, perhaps in shame, and he drew back a little in his chair.
‘That,’ he said after a moment, ‘must be your brother.’
For a second she did not know what he meant, and then she saw he was talking about the portrait above the chimney breast. He was right to move away from these dangerous and unstable territories. There could be nothing much gained by talking each other into ultimately painful declarations. She rallied herself.
‘Yes, indeed, Harry, my poor brother,’ she said briskly. ‘Not a good likeness, but – forgive me, I was about to say something uncharitable.’
‘I should forgive you,’ Burnes said, smiling.
‘Very well, then; I was about to say that few people would have wanted a good likeness of Harry in a drawing room. He was so very – so very …’
‘Do go on, Bella,’ Burnes said. ‘I think I understand.’
‘No,’ Bella said. ‘He was so very much not at home in a drawing room. He was not quite – not quite tamed, I think one might say. He had a knack, a habit, of arriving anywhere early, and then progressing swiftly to the furthest wall. And then he would stand there – I mean, at a rout, if there was any promise of a crowd, of fresh blood and new flesh.’
‘You make him sound quite the vampyr,’ Burnes said, looking at the faintly extraordinary portrait with the perfectly round head, the legs crossed at the knees and the hand resting, extravagantly, on a tiger.
‘Perhaps so,’ Bella said seriously. ‘If you had seen him against the wall, watching as people came in, assessing himself, preparing himself to spring on his victim – and yet, of course, he could be excellent company and he was my brother. He had to go to India – there was a between-maid, and then another, and debts, cards, and then – you know, Burnes, I feel it shows very bad judgement to attempt to elope with the mother of your principal creditor.’
Burnes, despite himself, laughed. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘But yes, not a highly judicious act. May I ask—’
‘Really, Burnes, she is still with us. You could hardly expect me to say Emma Franklin, could you? It was decided, then – Harry decided, and we decided, and London gave a great sigh of relief – that he should go to India and make his fortune. Not an unfamiliar story, you must admit, though Harry’s petits péchés were somewhat more ambitious than the common run. Packed
