The boys made admiring murmurs, and Simon made his way over to join Archie. "What do you call that color?"
"I don't know, exactly. It is very like a liqueur my mother is fond of called Chartreuse. She imports it from France. I believe it is made by monks."
Effie was a trifle surprised no one questioned the concept of a green sky. When he'd painted his first, it had been an accident. He'd been sipping the liqueur in question, and somehow, its color had made it onto his canvas. Then he'd just kept doing it. He wasn't sure why, only that it almost seemed as though the sky came out of his paintbrush that color, without any apparent forethought on his part.
"Who is that woman?" Archie asked.
Effie hesitated. "I imagined her."
It was not, strictly speaking, a lie. He did not know what Julianna looked like. He knew the components of her visage, based on her own reporting: brown, almost black hair that curled more than she preferred when it was down; green eyes; "tall for a woman." But one could invite a dozen ladies fitting that description to tea and end up with a drawing room full of a dozen different-looking ladies.
So, no, the woman against the chartreuse sky was not Julianna. It was an idea of Julianna.
"This is extraordinary," Archie said.
"Indeed," Simon said. "It feels as if she's looking at you. Into your very soul, even."
That's because she is.
Effie did not care, though, for the notion of Julianna, or this Julianna avatar, looking into Simon's soul. Looking into anyone's soul but Effie's.
Still, he was chuffed by the praise. "It is my best work, I think. Which of course is not saying a great deal. We all know that my skills with a paintbrush are generally on par with those of a girl in the schoolroom. A very young one. I ought to stick to poetry."
"But you persist," Archie said. "It is admirable."
Simon nodded at the painting. "And, apparently, efficacious." A knock heralded a footman with a trunk.
"Go!" Leander screeched, and Effie began tossing apparel into the trunk.
Before too long—Archie still lost the wager, though, thanks to the Lansing siblings—they were ready.
A pair of footmen took the trunk, and Effie picked up Leander's cage. "Surely you are not bringing that creature with you," Simon said.
"I have to. He's only recently learned to vocalize. If I leave him alone for a fortnight, he's likely to backslide." When no one said anything, he added, "He needs someone to talk to him."
"Cannot a maid talk to him?" Simon asked.
"Do I trust a maid to talk to him?" Effie asked. "To feed him, yes, but to tend to his education?"
"He has a point," said Archie, suppressing laughter. "I imagine your maids have better things to do with their time than talk to birds."
"And look how big he is!" Effie said. "He needs regular exercise outside of his cage. Can I trust that to a maid?"
"Oh, for heaven's sake," Simon said.
The three of them bickered good-naturedly about avian intelligence or lack thereof as they descended to the foyer.
Whereupon they ran into Father and Mr. Nancarrow.
Effie's first impulse was to think, 'My goodness, are we ever going to get out of here?'
His second impulse was to panic.
The second impulse won out. The sight of the earl filled Effie's ears with the roaring of an imaginary sea.
He did not want to be the sort of man who panicked when encountering his own father, but here they were.
To be fair, he did all right when he had time to prepare, when he knew he would be meeting his sire. So perhaps he was merely the sort of man who panicked when unexpectedly encountering his own father.
And also the sort of man who held his pet macaw behind his back when unexpectedly encountering his own father.
When the cacophonous waves receded, the boys were in the process of making greetings to his father. The panic subsided, soaking into the sand with the waves, because of course his father would behave in the company of Effie's friends, highborn as they were.
