Was she? Oh, yes. She’d been really annoyed about it too.
‘That was what started it,’ she agreed. ‘But then he had the nerve to demand I tell him who had been talking about him, rather than just give me an honest answer.’
‘What cheek,’ said Nathan with mock horror.
‘Yes, it was, actually. He acted as though I had no right to question him, when I am employing him in a position of considerable trust. And I was just pointing out that if he wished to remain in my employ he had better come clean, when Fenella burst into the room and flew to his side. Saying it was all her fault. Well, he tried to silence her, saying that I didn’t know the truth, but she just said she couldn’t keep it a secret from me any longer and it all came tumbling out. Not about his real identity, not at first, but about how she and Gaston were going to marry as soon as we return to England.’
For one terrible moment she’d thought they’d hatched up some plot to swindle her. After all, they had spent so much time together poring over the correspondence from French firms it would have been easy. The thought of Fenella betraying her trust in that way had felt like a knife-blow. Like her sisters all over again. She’d wondered why it was that no matter how much she did for people, nobody had ever stood by her.
It had been a tremendous relief to find out that what they were hiding was merely a romance.
‘But why,’ he said as the queue shuffled further up the stairs, ‘did they need to keep their betrothal a secret from you?’
‘It was because he’d seduced her,’ she told him grimly. ‘The very first night we arrived in Paris. Oh, Fenella said it was all her own doing. She’d had too much to drink and was lonely. And they’d become such good friends during the voyage and had so much in common. And then she said she had missed the kind of closeness a woman can only find with a man. Which, by her blushes, I took to mean in bed.’
And because of the time she’d spent in Nathan’s bed, she could actually see why Fenella had succumbed to temptation, when only the day before, she would have been horrified. Sickened.
‘Suddenly, a lot of things made sense. Such as the way neither of them could quite look me in the eye any more. And the way he’d gone from being as sarcastic as he dared to being positively ingratiating.’ And the way Fenella blushed when she’d made what were, on the face of it, perfectly innocuous remarks.
‘And all the while he kept trying to shush her. But when he groaned and covered his face and sort of collapsed on to the sofa, Fenella finally realised we hadn’t been arguing about that at all. But it was too late. The cat, as they say, was well and truly out of the bag.’
‘I wish I had been there,’ he said, his lips twitching with mirth.
‘It wasn’t funny.’ Could he take nothing seriously?
‘I beg your pardon, but it sounds highly entertaining. When you have a middle-aged couple behaving like some latter-day Romeo and Juliet, with you cast as both sets of disapproving guardians. It’s preposterous.’
‘To be fair, they were both afraid I would try to part them.’
‘Why on earth would you want to do that?’
‘Because,’ she said, grasping the banister rail with such force it looked as though she was considering wringing someone’s neck, ‘he’d taken advantage of her. If I’d found out the morning after, when she was so upset about it, you may be sure I would have turned him out!’
‘But you said Fenella was as keen as he was.’
‘I know you don’t think there’s anything wrong with jumping into bed with people on the slightest pretext,’ she said coldly, ‘but Fenella was racked with guilt. So much that she couldn’t bring herself to confide in me. And he worked on those fears. And seems to have convinced her that they’re experiencing some grand passion that will end in marriage.’
She didn’t see him flinch when she assumed he had no morals. That he would, as she put it, jump into bed with any woman, on the slightest pretext. It took an effort, but he managed to carry on with the conversation after only the slightest hesitation.
‘And you don’t think it will?’
‘I...’
He watched the fire go from her. Her shoulders slumped.
‘This morning, I would have said not. But having been obliged to watch them...’
‘Billing and cooing,’ he supplied helpfully.
She shot him a brief, narrow-eyed glare.
‘Precisely,’ she said bitterly. ‘He is certainly very convincing in his role.’ Once they’d gone out and Fenella and Gaston no longer felt the need to conceal their relationship, they’d become remarkably demonstrative. Smiling at each other and laughing at silly little jokes that made no sense to her whatsoever. And looking at each other as though, given half a chance, they would dive into the nearest bushes and rip each other’s clothes off.
And yet somehow they’d managed to include Sophie in their happy little love bubble. They were bonding into a family unit, right before her eyes.
Leaving her trailing along behind them. Excluded, as usual. She’d felt almost as lonely as when her family had closed ranks against her.
She’d grown increasingly resentful of the fact that she’d stuck to the arrangement she’d made with this pair, thinking it would be bad form to abandon them in order to spend time with her new lover, when they could think of nothing but each other.
As soon as she got home she had sent word that she was ready to accompany Nathan to the party he’d mentioned, to be thrown by some minor politician of whom she’d never heard. If Fenella was going to be wrapped up in Gaston for the duration of their stay in Paris, then she might as well spend every moment she could with her own lover.
‘I can see why Fenella believes him to be in earnest,’ she admitted. ‘But what still worries me is the fact that Fenella really has fallen for him. She was almost weeping when she told me she never thought she’d find love at her time of life, but that Gaston had made her feel like a young bride again.’
And because she’d just spent the earlier part of the day feeling exactly the same, in relation to Nathan, she hadn’t been able to utter one single word of rebuke.
‘He got to his feet at that point, put his arm round her and claimed that the only reason he did not wish Fenella to tell me of their so-called plans until we returned safely to England was because he was afraid I would turn—’ She bit back what she had been about to say, unwilling to let Nathan know that Fenella was also in her employ, rather than just travelling with her as a friend, which was what she’d led him to believe.
‘Turn against her, for having loose morals,’ she finished lamely.
Monsieur le Prune—and she might as well call him that now, since Le Brun wasn’t his real name either—had pointed out that since she’d employed Fenella to give her an air of respectability, now that her own morality was in question, poor Fenella was terrified she would lose her job.
And then had come the only bright spot in her otherwise disastrous day. Fenella had looked up at him with reproach and declared that Amethyst would never abandon her in a foreign country, let alone Sophie. Even when he’d muttered that perhaps she did not know her employer as well as she thought, Fenella had been unshakeable. Fenella had stayed true to their friendship.
No matter what happened next, whether the romance blossomed into marriage, or whether Monsieur Le Brun turned out to be some kind of ageing Lothario, Amethyst was not going to lose her friend.
‘I think he had been trying to turn her against me for some time. He’s worked on the guilt she