Unraveled (Turner #3)(58)

“Don’t think anything of that,” Miranda said, coming to stand by Smite. “For him, that was an apology on bended knee. Anything more than he just managed, and he’ll overload his sentimentality quota.”

Smite felt a touch of annoyance, and he yanked his hand away.

But Richard Dalrymple gasped. “Never tell me he still has the sentimentality quota.”

Miranda’s look of surprise mirrored his. “Never tell me that the sentimentality quota truly exists.” The two of them exchanged shocked glances, and Smite found himself folding his arms across his chest.

“Oh, yes,” Dalrymple breathed. “He’s had a sentimentality quota since he was thirteen.”

“Good heavens.” Miranda looked up at Smite.

Smite pressed his lips together and gave her a repressive shake of the head. She ignored it and turned to Dalrymple. “I assumed he’d made it up to put me off.”

“You thought I was lying to you?” Smite growled. “That was a poor guess on your part. Why would I invent such a thing?”

“Hmm. Why did you invent such a thing?”

“Sheer perversity.” Dalrymple stood and walked to the sideboard, where he poured himself a tumbler of brandy. “But—ah—rather, I suppose I should leave the story for Turner to tell.”

“No, go on,” Smite said. “You’ve been telling my secrets for years. Why stop now?”

Dalrymple flushed. “God, one mistake, and you make me pay for it—”

“What he meant by that,” Miranda interrupted, “was ‘I’d rather not speak of it myself, and so if you would be so good as to explain, you would be doing me a great favor.’”

Smite felt a rueful smile tug at his lips. “I might have so meant,” he muttered.

“He has a politeness quota in effect, too,” Miranda said, looking toward Dalrymple with excessive earnestness. “He used up the sum total on the greetings this evening.”

In response, Smite raised an eyebrow at her. “I would implement a quota on cheekiness, if I thought I had any hope of enforcing it.”

Miranda smiled outright at that. “In other words,” Miranda said, turning to Richard, “ignore his glower and satisfy my curiosity, please.”

“Turner, are you sure you want me to tell the story?”

He shrugged. “Go ahead.”

“So, when Turner first came to Eton, he was a bit behind the other boys in his schooling. His tutoring hadn’t been quite up to par.”

“Ha,” Smite said.

“And he was rather upset for a variety of reasons.”

Smite folded his arms. “No need to delve into those. She’s heard most of it anyway.”

Dalrymple accepted this. “In any event, Turner decided that…dealing with the aftermath of his tragedy was all well and good, but he needed to concentrate on his Latin. So he gave himself a sentimentality quota—thirty minutes a day to think of all those things, so long as he worked the rest of the time.”

“Thirty entire minutes?” Miranda said. “Goodness. I’m so glad you’ve ceased to be so self-indulgent.” She looked at Dalrymple. “He’s down to twenty now.”

Dalrymple was just beginning to warm to his subject. “You have no idea how irritating it was. I would repose the greatest confidences in him. He’d listen intently, kindly even—up until the minute he’d interrupt me mid-sentence to inform me that we’d reached our sentimentality quota for the day, and it was back to Virgil with us.”

Miranda let out a delighted laugh.

“It’s not the least bit amusing,” Dalrymple said. “I didn’t have a sentimentality quota, and I resented being subject to his. In any event, he passed me up in Latin in a few months, and had mastered Greek entirely by the end of the year. So maybe it had some utility.”

“Of course it did,” Smite put in. “My studies benefited, and I limited my indulgence in sentimentality, which is a particularly useless waste of time.”

Miranda laughed. “I like you better and better the more I learn of you,” she said to Smite. “If I could have subjected some of the actresses in my father’s troupe to a sentimentality quota, oh, how easy things would have been.”

That was not how things were supposed to be. After what had been said this evening, she was supposed to shrink from him. Instead, there was a playful lilt to her words, but no smile lingering on her face. He didn’t even need to search his memory to understand. After all, it wasn’t an actress’s temper that came to mind. It was her father who’d needed to limit his sentiment.

She sighed in memory, and Smite reached out and took her hand in his.

“There,” Dalrymple said, pointing. “What’s that? That’s sentiment. I can’t believe I’m seeing this.”

Smite looked at her hand, intertwined with his. He turned it in his grip. “I have no idea what you’re speaking of.”

“Hush,” Miranda said to Dalrymple. “I’ve found that if you don’t speak of them, he doesn’t count gestures against the quota.”

Smite met her eyes. Quite deliberately, he folded his other hand about hers. “You’ve both got it entirely wrong,” he said. “The sentimentality quota only forbids the tired relation of mawkish particulars. It has never forbidden action. That is the point of it: to channel what would otherwise be endless yammering into firm resolve.”