Chapter 6
Viola walked the length of the drawing room and back, and her sister watched her with concern.
“I do not think I have the fortitude to go on like this, Hannah.” Her voice was brittle.
“This endless stream of gentlemen come to admire me, and ladies come to gossip — it is draining every ounce of strength I have.”
“I understand your weariness.” Hannah’s voice was gentle. “But it must be borne. There is nothing else to be done.”
“I can go home.” Viola’s voice cracked. “There is no reason for me to stay in London.”
Her sister sighed and shook her head. “And what would you tell Father, if you went home now? You read his letter. He wrote me the very same.”
Viola closed her eyes against the quick rise of tears.
Her father’s joy had filled every line — his delight at her news, his certainty of the happiness she must be feeling.
She had not had the heart to answer him with the truth.
It would only wound him, and he had so few joys to spare.
To go home now would be to take that joy from him, or else to lie to his face, and she did not know which she had less stomach for.
He meant to come and visit soon, once matters at home were settled, certain he would find her delighted with all that had befallen her.
“Perhaps he is right.” Hannah spoke more carefully now. “Perhaps we ought to make the best of the Season. And, Viola, you will need to reside at Stoneleigh House. I am more than glad to stay there with you. But society must see you take ownership of it.”
Viola sank into a chair and put her head in her hands.
Stoneleigh House was a monument to Lady Warrington — to her taste, her judgment, her long and ordered life.
Every room of it held the lady’s hand: the books shelved as she had shelved them, the portraits hung where she had chosen them, the very chairs set at the angles she had liked.
To walk into all of that and call it her own felt like trampling across the lady’s memory and breaking it underfoot.
Viola could not imagine moving so much as a candlestick without first begging the pardon of the air.
“I know it will feel strange,” her sister went on, easing her toward the thought. “You may feel as if you are on a stage, playing a part. But in time the house will come to feel like your own.”
“And how am I to pay for any of it?” The question had been pricking at Viola since the modiste’s. “The gowns, the household, a whole Season — Stoneleigh’s twenty thousand pounds is none of it in my hands yet, and may not be for months.”
Hannah did not answer at once. “My husband has seen to your Season,” she said at last, gently. “He would have it no other way. You are his sister now, near enough, and he is glad to do it.”
Viola stared at her. She knew what it had cost their father to refuse, year after year, every offer of help the Earl of Manion had pressed upon him — a father’s duty, he would say, his jaw set, and not another word. “Papa must not know,” she said softly. “He would never forgive it.”
“Papa need not know a thing,” Hannah agreed, “so long as you wear the gowns and hold your head up and let your sister’s husband do one kind thing unremarked.” Her smile was small and sad. “It is not charity, Viola. It is family. There is a difference, whatever our father chooses to believe.”
Viola slipped her hand into the pocket of her day dress and closed her fingers about her father’s watch chain, a small, cool weight, a reminder of the life she had come from and the home she had left.
“I feel as if my whole life has been pulled up by the roots and planted somewhere else.” She pressed a handkerchief to the corner of her eye.
“Every morning the cards arrive. Gentlemen linger over their conversation and their long looks; ladies who would not glance at me a month ago now greet me with a warmth I cannot believe. There is a motive behind every word and every smile. And not one of them is for my good.”
Hannah spread her hands. “Money alters a great many people. At least you have learned that the house and your fortune cannot pass to a husband. Once that is known about London, some of them may lose their eagerness.”
“And many will not.” Viola thought of Lord Carrington’s warning.
“In the three days since the ball, Lord Flanders has called twice. I told him plainly the house remains mine whatever my circumstances, and it made no difference at all.” She shook her head.
“The mere thought of living at Stoneleigh seems enough for some of them.”
“I did hear him praising Stoneleigh House most deliberately.” Hannah’s smile was wry. “He is very charming. He is also, I understand, something of a rake.”
“Then entirely unsuitable, even were I thinking of matrimony.” A rap came at the door, and Viola closed her eyes. “And now I must fix a smile upon my face and pretend all is well — when nothing is.”
Hannah rose and called for the footman to admit their first visitors. Viola steadied herself on her feet and clasped her hands before her. Whatever the afternoon brought, she had no choice but to endure it with a composure she did not feel. Fresh whispers would do her no good at all.
The card the footman brought in bore a name Viola did not know, and she readied herself for another half-hour of veiled curiosity.
“Lady Cordelia Asher.” Hannah read it over her shoulder and made a small, pleased sound.
“Oh, her you need not dread. Ravenscourt’s daughter.
She married a Mr. Asher with a great deal of money and no title at all, and shocked half of London by being perfectly happy about it.
” Hannah was already rising. “Show her up, by all means.”
Lady Cordelia came in unhurried, and Viola understood at once that here was someone entirely at her ease — a woman who had never in her life walked into a room uncertain of her welcome, because the question had simply never arisen.
She was perhaps thirty, fair and quick-eyed, beautifully dressed in the way of women who no longer have to think about it.
Her glance crossed the drawing room once, lightly, and Viola had the distinct impression of having been read from across it — the strain beneath her composure, the days of being looked at, all of it taken in and understood before a word was spoken.
“Lady Manion, how do you do — it has been an age.” She pressed Hannah’s hand, and then turned the full warmth of her attention on Viola.
“And Miss Trent. I have been meaning to call since first your name reached me, and only now found a pretext I liked, which is a great failing in me, leaving the kind things until one has an excuse for them.” She sat without being asked twice, in a soft rush of muslin.
“I shan’t pretend I have not heard your name.
One could hardly avoid it. I will only say that a good deal of what is said is being said by people who have never met you — and that I have always found that sort of talk answers best to being made to look foolish. ”
Viola did not quite follow. “Made to look foolish?”
“By the plain fact of you.” Lady Cordelia smiled.
“They have decided a great many things about a young woman none of them has spoken to. It is a weak position, though they don’t yet know it.
The moment you are seen to have friends who know better, it all begins to lose its savor.
” She said it lightly, almost idly, but her eyes held Viola’s a beat longer than the lightness accounted for, and Viola understood, slowly, that she was being offered something, and that the offering had been thought through before Lady Cordelia ever stepped into the room.
“You are very kind,” Viola said carefully.
“I am occasionally useful, which is better.” A flicker of humor.
“Kindness is easy. Half of London will be kind to you the moment it is safe to be — once someone else has gone first.” She let that sit a moment, then moved on before it could grow heavy, as though the matter were already settled and beneath further discussion.
“So I shall simply go first, and save them all the trouble of being brave.”
“You are very sure of yourself, Lady Cordelia.”
“I am very sure of you, which is different, and rather more flattering if you think on it.” She tilted her head.
“Lady Marchwood holds her rout next week, and it will be an unbearable crush, and you must come. I shall look for you, and we shall stand together a while where everyone may see us doing it, and you will find Friday a good deal easier than these past days have been. You needn’t decide this moment. But do decide yes.”
To her own surprise, Viola felt the corner of her mouth lift. “I believe I shall.”
“There. I knew it.” Lady Cordelia rose as lightly as she had sat.
“I shan’t stay and tire you — you have the look of someone who has had a great many callers and liked almost none of them.
But you have liked me, I think.” A quick, warm smile.
“People generally do, once I have stopped talking. Thursday, Miss Trent.”
The warmth of the visit lingered only a little while before more callers were announced.
But it was no gentleman who came in. It was two ladies, plainly known to her sister — an older woman, dark hair graying at the temples, who gestured to the younger beside her. “You remember my daughter, I trust?”
“Lady Henderson.” Hannah’s smile held a warmth that looked almost genuine, and Viola wondered whether this caller, at least, was nothing to fear.
“I did not know you were in London — though I had not meant to be in London myself.” She glanced at Viola.
“And Miss Galbraith — are you here to make your come-out?”
“I am, yes.” The young lady carried herself with far more assurance than Viola ever had, settling tall and poised into the chair Hannah offered. “It has been a most enjoyable sennight thus far.”
“Allow me to present my sister, Miss Viola Trent.” Hannah went to ring for tea.