“Where are your wits, girl? Don’t gape like that! On my honor, I think you are mad.”
She suffered her mother’s hectoring with an apathy that betrayed neither resentment nor understanding. Her eyes held John Gore’s for the moment. Then she turned and walked back to the window as though she had no more interest in the affair.
Yet—she had seen on the cloak that John Gore was wearing three short chains of gold, each with a knot of pearls for a button. They were spaced out irregularly, those three strands of gold, as though one had been lost—perhaps torn off in a struggle and never been replaced.
XI
My lord paused abruptly with the wine-decanter in his hand, his eyes fixed in a vacant stare on his son, who was drawing a high-backed chair forward to the table. The rumble of the wheels of the coach that had brought them home from Hortense Mancini’s could be heard dying away along St. James’s.
“Wine, Jack? They should have got Pembroke comfortably to bed by now. The man will be about again in a month—ready to quarrel with his best friend. What made you meddle in the game? A little mockery might do Nan Purcell’s girl some good.”
John Gore was unfastening the curbs of his black cloak. His father watched him, his brows knitted into a sudden frown of uneasiness—the frown of a man surprised by a spasm of pain at the heart.
“You all seemed so ready to make a fool of the child.”
“Tut—tut, sir, you ought to have come by more shrewd sense than to make a pother over such a piece of fun. Where the devil, may I ask, did you get that cloak?”
John Gore glanced down at the garment as though my lord’s tone of contempt might have made the thing shrivel on his shoulders.