Unraveled (Turner #3)(49)

“Your porter taught you your accent?”

“Jonas wasn’t a porter.” Miranda had a dreamy little smile on her face. She looked up and away, as if recalling that happy time. “It happened before I was born, but Jonas used to be a fellow at Oxford before he ran off with my father’s troupe. I gather it was quite the scandal. His family disowned him. He used to study classics. In any event, he taught me how to speak this way.”

“You had an Oxford fellow moving your scenery?” Smite asked in disbelief. “Wait—you cannot mean Jonas Standish?”

Her eyes widened. “You know him?”

“By reputation only. He was well before my time. Jonas Standish,” he repeated, feeling slightly dazed. “But he’s brilliant. I saw some of his work when I was there. No wonder you’ve heard of Antigone. I can’t believe he walked away from everything to join a traveling troupe. Your father must have been quite persuasive.”

“Not my father,” Miranda replied. “They quarreled over everything. My father only tolerated him because Jasper would have walked off, had he sent Jonas on his way. I followed Jasper and Jonas everywhere from the moment I could walk. They taught me half the accents I know how to do.”

“Did Jonas also teach you proper deportment?”

Miranda shook her head. “That was Mama. She said if anything ever happened to her, I’d need to take her place. She and my father had this act they would put on whenever there was a disagreement with anyone outside the troupe. He would bluster and shout about aesthetics; she would timidly explain that my father was a temperamental man of art, and couldn’t be made to see reason. So perhaps the theater owner would just consider a small, tiny alteration…?”

“Putting on an act—that worked well, did it?”

She must not have heard the hint of disapproval in his voice, because she grinned. “Like a charm. They would laugh and toast each other with cheap wine every time they succeeded.”

He might have criticized, but her eyes were alight, and he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “You had a happy childhood,” he remarked instead. He couldn’t imagine what that would be like.

“I’m sure someone could point out the many imperfections of my childhood, but I loved it. I loved it all.”

In fact, her eyes seemed suspiciously bright. He remembered what she’d told him last night about her father. “So when the troupe fell apart, you lost everyone. Not just your mother.”

“Yes,” she said softly. And then after a pause, “Well, no. Jasper and Jonas had already left a few years back. Father found a patron, and so we’d been in London for a good space of time, see.” She looked to the window, dark as it was. “They didn’t like staying in one place too long. People talked. The last I’d heard, they were in Bristol. It’s why I came here with Robbie—I’d been hoping to find the two of them. But they’d moved on, and I’ve never had the means to search them out.”

He’d never wondered why she was alone with Robbie. Perhaps he should have. But he was so solitary by nature; it often slipped his mind that others naturally were not.

“Besides,” she continued, “Robbie was ship-mad. And when I thought of him crawling about some mine in Yorkshire…” She shook her head. “But enough of me. Tell me more of you.”

“I’ve talked of myself enough for today.” He gave her his most repressive cold glance.

His most repressive cold glance bounced ineffectually off her sunny smile. She helped herself to a second serving of carrots and said, “No, you haven’t. Tell me about your brothers. There are three of you in your family, are there not?”

Four.

But he didn’t correct her. “Ash,” he said. “The eldest. He’s a damned nuisance.” But he could feel himself smiling despite his words. “I would say that he’s like Midas, turning every enterprise he touches to gold, but it’s not that. He’s just one of those men that brings out the best in everyone.”

“Everyone except—I am guessing—you.” Miranda took a bite of carrots.

“Except me. I am his brother, after all. He went to India at the age of fourteen. Five years later, he returned, conversant in several languages and with a fortune in the thousands of pounds. Which has only grown since. He has some of the most incredible stories.” He shook his head. “Then there’s Mark, my younger brother. For a while, he was the most popular fellow in all of London. He wrote a book, for which the Queen knighted him.”

“Mark Turner,” she said. “Sir Mark is your brother?”

Smite gave her a repressive nod.

“Sir Mark of the Practical Gentleman’s Guide to Chastity?”

“Yes,” he growled.

“Oh, you do have disagreements with him, then.”

“No. We are in perfect accord.” He glanced at her. “Mostly because my letters to him have made no mention of you.”

In any event, he suspected that even Mark might thank the Lord if he found out about Miranda. You’re too solitary, Mark had said a few months ago. Smite shook his head.

What he said instead was, “Mark makes no mention of my affairs. I believe he harbors hopes that one day I’ll fall in love. Always the damned optimist.”

The tiniest intake of breath across the table betrayed what Miranda thought of that disclosure.