Radcliffe hummed, unconvinced. ‘Be that as it may, you are still very young. Barely a man. There is time enough for marriage. You ought to be falling in and out of love a dozen more times before you fix a particular attention on one lady.’
His voice was affable, his words kind, but Archie bristled immediately.
‘I’m not a boy,’ he said hotly. As Radcliffe’s face did not shift from its expression of jovial elder, Archie’s temper built further. ‘Which you might know, if you’d spent any time with the family in the past few years!’
As soon as the words had left his mouth, Radcliffe’s eyebrows shot up and Archie regretted speaking so hastily. ‘S-sorry, didn’t mean it,’ he stammered out.
‘I was in the country for business, Archie,’ Radcliffe reminded him coolly.
Archie kicked at the edge of the rug with his toe. ‘Must have been a lot of business,’ he muttered, a little bitterly.
Radcliffe, for perhaps the twelfth time that week, cursed Miss Talbot to hell and damnation. His family had had none of these problems until she had started putting her waspish thoughts into their heads.
He raised up his hands in supplication. ‘I am not against the marriage out of hand, my boy. My only stipulation is that you see what the Season has to offer. If your attentions are still fixed upon Miss Talbot, and hers upon you, in a few weeks, then by all means let us discuss it again.’
He then pressed a hand on Archie’s shoulder, turned him neatly, and propelled him gently towards the door.
‘You say that as though we’ve discussed it at all,’ Archie complained, dragging his feet a little.
Radcliffe affected not to hear. ‘With Montagu and Sinclair back in town, why not ride out somewhere – get out of London – have some fun?’ he suggested, nudging Archie gently onto the doorstep and waving him off. ‘I’ll see you at the Montagu ball on the morrow!’ Radcliffe called cheerily, and while the door didn’t quite slam behind him, Archie felt it was a near thing. He stared at the burnished doorknob, utterly befogged. What had got into James? He had been distant since he returned from Waterloo, to be sure – but at least when he was in Devonshire, he seemed by his letters to take an interest in Archie’s life. And yet now he could not be more slippery. Having his brother back in London had felt like the start of a new chapter for their family, all together again, but it seemed that even while in the same city, James didn’t want to have much to do with them.
Archie sloped off down the road, trying to shake off these gloomy thoughts. He would have to speak to Radcliffe again, soon, to convince him that this was a long-standing attachment – he could only hope that Miss Talbot would not mind the delay. Although, he thought bitterly, she had not exactly been that keen to speak to him in recent days, either – cancelling their walks, and not seeming at all concerned about not seeing each other for days and days. There was clearly something he was doing wrong – something he was missing about the proper way to conduct these sorts of things – and in the absence of being able to speak to his elder brother about it, he instead sought the company and advice of his nearest friends, who were finally back in London.
Gerry Sinclair, having attended the dinner party at Grosvenor Square, was complaining that the younger Talbot sister was a ‘dead bore’ when Archie joined them at Cribb’s Parlour later that day.
‘Damn near talked my ear off about Italian opera,’ he said indignantly, clutching his glass. ‘Who asked her, is what I want to know? But they were both devilishly pretty, Archie.’
‘But did she look in love with me?’ Archie demanded.
‘Fact of the matter, is, Archie, that she didn’t seem to be paying you much attention at all,’ Gerry told him apologetically. ‘Sure you heard her right?’
‘Yes,’ Archie said, though uncertainly. ‘I could have sworn that she said I ought to speak to my family before I could offer for her. And she wouldn’t have said that, if she wasn’t wanting to be engaged to me, would she?’
Gerry agreed that she most surely would not. Rupert, the other member of the group, did not appear to be listening. The young Lord Montagu considered himself a great poet and spent his days penning depressing verses and ruminating on his own artistry. When Archie insisted on hearing his opinion, he said darkly that the conversation threatened to pollute the artistic sensibility of his mind.
‘Furthermore,’ he added, ‘it does not surprise me that you thought Miss Cecily a bore, Gerry, given that her intellect far exceeds that of your own.’