An Indecent Gambit

Chapter Nineteen: Strong Incentive

When the crowd was thinning, when it was mostly relatives and close friends remaining, Grace felt a faint touch at her wrist and turned to see James behind her. She had been trying to avoid him.

"Are you leaving?" she asked. "Did you receive a favour yet?"

"I'm not leaving, and yes, your mother gave it to me. I've got something for you, actually."

"What?" She stared at him and he gestured to a table by the fire on which a pot of tea and a teacup stood. "Oh. Tea."

She made her way to the chair — the most comfortable chair in the room — and plopped down into it. James sat down next to her and poured her a cup of tea, adding a generous amount of milk and sugar.

"You should have sent for more than one cup," she said.

"If I had, you'd be offering tea to everyone in the room." A wry smile pressed at the corners of his lips before fading. "You've been looking after everybody else. You will sit down and drink tea and the others, I assure you, will manage without you for a quarter of an hour."

"Did Mr Redwood put you up to this?" she asked, sipping her tea.

"No, I just thought... you look harassed."

She curled her fingers around the warmth of her teacup, not willing to admit that she was harassed and have to thank him for his kindness. "It seems more like something your father would do. He is always so very kind to everybody."

James twisted to look at his father, who was standing by Mrs Follet and gently disengaging her from a rather obnoxious conversation with Bernard Follet about what she ought to do now that Mr Follet was dead.

"I suppose he is," James said. "I never really... thought about that. He gets severe with me." He winced. "I probably deserve it."

He did, Grace thought, and she wished that she could be severe with him, but she dared not bring up what they had said at the ball, for what she had said had been just as bad as what he had. She drained her cup, unwilling to meet his eyes, and started to stand, but he took her hand and stopped her.

"Fifteen minutes," he said. "I will leave if you wish, but you will spend fifteen minutes sitting down and looking after no one but yourself."

She sat down again, not entirely reluctantly, and poured herself another cup of tea.

"Should I go?"

"No." She stared resentfully at her steaming cup of tea. "What happened at the funeral?"

"The usual."

"Describe it."

James breathed out slowly. "Uh, we followed the hearse to the church. Then we stood and we listened as the vicar read from the bible. It was... 'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want...'"

"Psalm twenty-three," said Grace.

"Yes. It's... it's a nice one. We listened to the vicar read that, and it was very... comforting. Then a few men came forward — your uncle, my father — and read their own passages from the bible or talked about your father... mostly they talked about him. They shared their memories of him."

"What sort of memories?"

"Um. Mostly, you know, witticisms he had once said. A few of them talked about how clever he had been when he was practicing law. I didn't even know he had practiced."

"Years ago. He quit the law to take up being a gentleman, as he called it."

"Yes. That was one of the witticisms they brought up."