It seemed strange to buy things but not emerge from the shop with a delicious carrier bag full of gorgeousness and tissue paper. Sophie would have felt seriously short-changed, but apparently everything would be delivered as a form of delayed-gratification torture.
Bookshops were the same, it seemed. Luc had a pile on the bookseller’s desk and an assistant was hovering with brown paper and string. I tipped my head on one side to read the titles. Wordsworth – something in two volumes, Alexander von Humboldt’s Voyages and Tales From Shakespeare. ‘And some novels for the lady,’ he added blandly as I came in. ‘Whatever is new and fashionable.’
‘A subject for conversation at receptions and so on,’ he said as he ushered me out again, protesting that I wanted to choose my own books.
‘Fair enough,’ I agreed. ‘Now I am absolutely gasping for a cup of coffee.’
‘Tea,’ Luc said firmly, cutting diagonally across New Bond Street. ‘Ladies do not frequent coffee shops. There’s a fashionable tea shop just up here. Very respectable,’ he added with a grin.
‘So I should hope,’ I said with my best Dowager Duchess of Grantham vice (proving watching Downton Abbey had not been in vain) voice.
As a result we were both snorting with laughter when we went in and had to make a rapid recovery when several parties of ladies turned to look at us. It was really rather charming, all sea-green paintwork with little round tables and very dashing waiters in tight trousers – chosen to please the mainly female clientele, I guessed – gliding about with menus on wooden paddles and making eyes at the customers while tempting them with tiny sweet morsels.
Someone waved from a table in the far corner and I recognised Lady Henrietta Fanshawe, the cousin of Sir Clement Selborne who had been at the heart of the adventure I had fallen into last time. Henrietta was a complete air-head, but quite sweet with it. I wouldn’t have minded saying hello, but she was sitting with a young man and they looked like a couple. Goodness knows what her mama would say – Lady Fanshawe probably thought she was shopping with friends. I waved back but made no attempt to go over and she looked relieved. Yes, definitely a clandestine meeting.
We ordered tea and a selection of mixed pastries and did our
best to behave ourselves. The problem was the laughter had completely undermined my efforts to behave as though Luc and I had not slept together, had not spent the hours after dawn making love.
It seemed to have had the same effect on him, judging by the brush of his foot against mine. I pressed back, then reached out, put my hand on his thigh and squeezed gently.
‘Baggage,’ he murmured, but he placed his hand over mine and made no attempt to move it until the waiter appeared with our order.
‘Who, me?’ I batted my eyelashes and did my best to look demure. It was such an unfamiliar expression it hurt.
‘Have a lemon tart,’ Luc growled. ‘I refuse to be thrown out of a Bond Street teashop for lewd behaviour.’
The pastries were so good I stopped teasing him. ‘What do I do at Whitehall?’ I asked.
‘Look impressed, decorative, and say as little as possible. You can try the eyelash-batting trick if you like and we find a gullible employee to try it on.’
I gave him A Look. Impressed, decorative, quiet. Oh yes?
‘Is something wrong?’
‘Let me count the ways.’ I sank my teeth into another lemon tart, let the sweet acidity work its magic. ‘Have you read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman?’
‘Mary Wollstonecraft? Yes.’ Sensibly, he was looking wary now.
‘Take that as a slight hint on how women in my time view things. We do not do impressed simply because a man is speaking, we do not tolerate being told to be quiet while a man is speaking and if we set out to look decorative it is for our own pleasure.’ I smiled. Sweetly.
To do Luc justice he didn’t flinch. ‘You could pretend?’ he suggested. Innocently.
It took me a moment to realise I was being teased. ‘What is the penalty for upending a plate of cakes over the head of a member of the House of Lords?’
‘You are bundled into the nearest hackney carriage, taken back to his abode and forced to lick off all the cream.’
‘Is that a promise?’
I thought his eyes were going to cross, then he sobered. ‘You make me laugh. I cannot recall the last time I just laughed over something foolish. Not clever or cutting or witty, just warm and friendly.’
I wanted to hug him which was clearly impossible, not in the middle of a tea shop. But the silly moment was gone and I remembered why we were there. ‘It is good to stop being serious for a few minutes,’ I suggested. ‘To be thankful that we’re alive when two friends of James are not.’
Luc nodded and gestured to the waiter for the bill. ‘We had best be on our way.’
Driving down Whitehall was interesting. I had done the journey from Trafalgar Square to Westminster Abbey only a few weeks before with a Belgian friend, showing her some of the sights. There was no Trafalgar Square now, of course. No National Gallery, just the Royal Mews, a chaotic maze of alleyways and a vast inn. And then I saw the familiar equestrian statue of Charles I staring down towards the place of his execution and pointed it out to Luc before I realised that there was no Admiralty Arch to our right and the bulk of Northumberland House loomed on the left.
I spotted the Admiralty building on the right and I was almost leaning out of the window of the cab by that point. ‘I recognise this!’ I announced as the driver pulled in and we got out. ‘Oh, look, there’s the telegraph on top.’