Moonlight Over Paris(11)

“Good to meet you, Princess Dimitri, Lady Helena.”

“Please do call me Agnes, or Mrs. Paulson if you’re obsessed with minding your elders. Our royals anglicized their names, so why shouldn’t I? Besides, all that grand duchess folderol seems so terribly old-fashioned to me. I know dear Dimitri expected it, but he was the great-grandson of a czar, after all.”

“Well, then, Mrs. Paulson it is. Glad to make your acquaintance.”

It seemed as if Mr. Howard was about to say more, but the arrival of their waiter forestalled any further conversation until everyone had been furnished with their first course of sliced tomatoes with olives and a basil dressing.

“The chef is short-staffed, so I ordered for the table ahead of time,” Gerald explained. “After this we’ll have grilled leg of lamb, and then some figs and cheese to finish.” Instead of wine, they had one of Gerald’s cocktails with their first course. “I call it ‘Juice of a Few Flowers.’ My own recipe. Orange, lemon, grapefruit, and lime juices, with just a splash of gin. What do you think?”

Helena took a careful sip, for she had learned to be wary of Gerald’s concoctions, and promptly choked on it when Mr. Howard spoke again.

“Lady Helena and I actually met earlier today. On the road into town. She was having some trouble with her bike, so I stopped to see if I might help.” He smiled, revealing the boyish dimple in his cheek again.

“Helena! You didn’t say a thing,” Agnes chided. “You know how I feel about your riding miles and miles on that contraption. You might have become ill with sunstroke.”

She directed a frostbitten glare at her aunt. “I was fine. I am fine.”

Mr. Howard drained his cocktail, grimacing a little, and shook his head. “It wasn’t anything worth worrying about, Mrs. Paulson. Just a slipped chain. We fixed it in no time.”

Helena couldn’t help but smile at his generous use of the collective pronoun. “There was no ‘we,’ I’m afraid. I’d still be there if Mr. Howard hadn’t come along.”

“You divine man,” Agnes all but cooed. “You must come for lunch—tell me you will. Tomorrow? I insist absolutely.”

“Oh, Auntie A,” Helena pleaded. “I’m sure Mr. Howard has better things to do than—”

“I’d love to, but I’m only here a few days,” he explained. “One of my colleagues is in Nice for the summer with his family. They took the train down, but he wanted his Peugeot, too. So we drew straws, all of us on the rewrite desk at the paper, and I won. Wish I could stay longer, though,” he added, and he looked directly at Helena.

“You’re staying here at the hotel?” Agnes asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Lovely. How long have you known Gerald and Sara?”

“Oh, three or four years—does that sound right, Gerald?”

“We have mutual friends in Paris,” Gerald said. “Archie and Ada MacLeish.”

“Archie and I were friends at Harvard, and then we served together during the war,” Mr. Howard added. “He and Ada have been nice enough to introduce me to people of taste and refinement, unlike the crowd I run with most of the time.”

“Your colleagues at the newspaper?” Helena asked, belatedly realizing how insulting that sounded. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said with a grin. “They’re Philistines, almost to a man. And we deskmen are the worst of the lot.”

“What’s a deskman?”

“I work on the rewrite desk most evenings. Though I’ll sub in on days if they need an extra body.”

She nodded, though she still had no real notion of what he was talking about. “I’ve seen your paper. There was a copy on the train when I came here. It was very interesting.”

“Thanks. I’m glad you liked it. What do you do, anyway?” he asked.

It was such a surprising thing to be asked that she yet again found herself lost for words. Most people, after hearing her title, and learning a little about her upbringing, simply assumed she did nothing. That she had no identity beyond being the youngest daughter of the Earl of Halifax.

Sara answered him first. “Helena is an artist, and we all think she is terribly talented. She’s starting classes in September at the Académie Czerny.”

“I can vouch for Helena’s talent,” Gerald said. “She has a fine eye, particularly for color. Far better than my own.”

This was a grand compliment indeed, for Gerald, though largely self-taught, was an artist of some renown, with work that the great Picasso himself had praised. Only that spring, one of his paintings had caused a sensation at the Salon des Indépendants.

“Gerald and Sara are too kind. I still have so much to learn.”

“No better place than Paris. Not that I’d know—I can hold a pencil well enough to scribble down notes, but that’s about it. Is that the connection between you and my friends here? Art?”

“You know, I suppose it is,” Sara answered. “I was in London just before the war, and met Helena when I was there. Of course I was quite a bit older, but we soon discovered we had a lot in common. She came to my rescue one day, when I was trying to champion Cubism to some grandes dames—”