Bonfire Night by Deanna Raybourn Page A

reminded why. He was always a little too quick to find my soft spots and prod them. Pointedly.
    Portia sat forward, her expression avid. “Yes, I only ever forgot Jane once, and that was because I saw the most delicious first edition of Bacon’s essays in the window of a bookshop. I left her pram on the pavement without a thought.”
    Plum snorted. “You’ve never pushed a pram in your life. You left the nanny is more like it.”
    Portia’s gaze was glacial. “The nanny’s presence was immaterial. I still forgot the child. Although,” she added, turning to me, “I’ve never forgot her four times.”
    I looked to Brisbane. “I can’t decide if she is trying to defend me or accuse me,” I told him.
    “A little of both,” he decided. “She wants you to know that she sympathises with your peccadillo but would never be quite so daft as to commit it herself. At least not four times.”
    “That’s very helpful,” I said with a dangerous smile. He smiled back, and there was intimacy in that smile and a promise of something delightful yet to come.
    “Stop staring at your husband, Julia,” my sister instructed. “You’ve gone pink as a virgin and it’s unseemly.”
    Plum spluttered into his whisky, but Brisbane remained unperturbed.
    Portia turned back to me. “And you never answered Plum’s question. How
did
you manage to forget Jack?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know. If I knew why I did it, I could stop. But it just happens. I will take him out for some air and then start wool-gathering about something. Before I know it, I’m somewhere entirely new and he’s nowhere to be found.”
    “Thank God for Morag,” Plum said fervently.
    “Yes, thank God for Morag,” I echoed, my voice tight. The fact that my lady’s maid had taken it upon herself to act as nanny to the child was both a godsend and the rankest betrayal. She had served me faithfully for five years, and while I would cheerfully have cut her throat a dozen times a day, I had taken her defection badly. But it had been love at first sight between Morag and the baby, and I did not have the heart to keep her from him. From the day Brisbane and I had agreed to bring up the child as our own, Morag had been there, coddling and crooning, securing the best wet nurse and jealously guarding
her
Little Jack as she insisted upon calling him. My only consolation was that it meant her incessant mooning over Brisbane was a thing of the past. She had transferred her affections to his tiny half-brother, the child Brisbane and I had brought into our house after we could make none of our own.
    “Morag as devoted watchdog,” Portia said in a state of wonder. “It still doesn’t quite bear thinking about. What a journey she has had. Whitechapel prostitute to lady’s maid to the daughter of an earl, and now nanny to the little foundling.” My lips tightened and Portia flapped a hand. “Don’t pull a face, darling. I call Jane the Younger the same. Who would have guessed it? That we two should become mothers to other women’s children?”
    “Who indeed?” I said. I put on a deliberately cheerful face. “Now, who is ready for dinner? I think the banana sandwiches must be ready by now.”
    * * *
    After a better supper than I had expected—chops and vegetables with an excellent soup, passable pudding and no bananas to speak of—we repaired to the only room in the house besides the cellars that had not yet suffered from the invasion of the builders in search of dry rot. Brisbane’s study was my favourite room, perhaps in all the world. It reflected the man and his travels and the life he had led before me. I think I began to fall in love with him in that room, and it never failed to take me back to those first heady days when he was enigmatic and implacable, observing everything with witch-black eyes that gave nothing away. We had just settled in with small cups of Turkish coffee and water pipes full of apple-scented tobacco when our butler, Aquinas,