Chapter Five #2
I attacked no one, Cordelia observed, from behind her pleasant face, and I am somehow the one being forgiven. It was masterful, in its way. Twenty years from now, in some other life, she might have taken lessons.
Sabrina, restored by rescue, reached for her glass and rose an inch out of her chair, glittering.
"Well, I think we're all forgetting what today is actually about.
A toast." She turned the full performance on Preston, eyes shining, glass high.
"To Preston. The Halloran account, the biggest fish in the city, and my brilliant, brilliant brother-in-law landed it.
I've always said it, haven't I, always. Give this man proper backing and he'd own half the skyline by now.
" The glass tilted a half degree toward Cordelia on the word backing, sweet as arsenic. "To Preston."
It was so magnificently upside down that Cordelia nearly laughed into her wine, a real laugh, and had to convert it at the last instant into a cough and a raised glass.
The mistress, toasting the kept man, for the account his wife had won, while hinting the wife kept him short of backing.
Somewhere a god of comedy was taking notes.
"To Preston," Cordelia agreed warmly, and then, as the glasses came down, she turned to her husband with wifely, luminous pride.
"Though he's far too modest to tell it properly.
Tell them how the pitch actually went, darling.
Tell them what Bridget Halloran said at the door, about which end of the table won her.
" She smiled at him, radiant, merciless. "Don't be shy. It's family."
The silence that followed had a texture, and Preston sat in the middle of it. She watched him look for a way around the truth and find the exits covered, his own account director had heard it, half his agency had the story by now, Bridget Halloran had said it in a voice built for boardrooms.
"The vans were Cordelia's idea," Preston said, to his plate, in the voice of a man reading his own sentence. "Halloran signed because of her." The jaw came up with the grin nailed to it. "I keep telling everyone. Married the brains."
"You did," said Cordelia tenderly, and let him live, for now.
Sabrina was looking at Preston as though he had personally handed her something dead. Maureen was buttering bread, to the edges, with great concentration.
And into that lovely wreckage, Cordelia dropped the bomb she had been carrying since the carving.
"Actually, all this family feeling has me thinking.
" She said it lightly, to the table at large, spearing a carrot off Oliver's abandoned frontier.
"Oliver's five now, and getting to be such a handful, and I've read that an only child...
well. Preston." She turned to her husband, bright, half laughing, wholly watching.
"We should try for another. A brother might settle him.
" A beat, timed like a fuse. "And who knows, perhaps I'll have better luck this time. "
The table detonated politely.
Preston made a sound that had intended to be a word.
His glass, arrested halfway up, released a single drop onto the cloth, and he watched it fall as though it were his own career.
"Another. You. Well. Ha. That's..." He got a breath in.
"That's a conversation, certainly, darling, that's, with the account launching, the timing... "
"No." It came out of Sabrina flat and fast and hard, one syllable fired from somewhere real, and the whole table turned, and she heard it herself, arriving back at her own ears, and scrambled.
"I mean, no, only that, the timing, exactly as Preston says, with everything the two of you have on.
I wasn't. I didn't mean anything by it, I only...
" Her hand had closed on her napkin and was slowly strangling it. "It's not my business at all, is it."
"Poor Sabrina." Maureen glided in like a lifeboat, all sympathy, patting the strangling hand. "All this talk of happy couples. It must sting, dear, five years alone, and here they are billing and cooing over second babies. We're thoughtless."
"You're so right, Maureen, and it's exactly what I've been thinking.
" Cordelia picked the rescue up by its own handle and turned it, gently, into the third probe.
"It's high time we found Sabrina somebody.
Five years is grief enough for any heart, and she's young, and she's lovely.
" She smiled down the table at the silk and the heels and the mouth that had dressed for her husband.
"You'd still be family, darling. Even wearing another man's name. "
"No."
It was Preston.
It came out of him before anything in him could dress it, a blurt, bare and instant, and the second syllable of it died in the open air while three women looked at him, and Cordelia watched her husband hang above his own answer like a man over a drop.
"I mean." The laugh he found was terrible.
"I mean, it's not, we can't just, Sabrina doesn't want that.
" He appealed to her directly, too directly.
"Do you. You've said. She's said she doesn't."
"No. No, I've, no." Sabrina had her glass again and was holding it with both hands, like a rail. "Not yet. I'm not thinking of anything like that yet."
"There, you see," said Preston, to his wife, with enormous relief, as though something had been settled instead of skinned alive.
"Of course," Cordelia said, and smiled, and let it go, and did not let anything at all go, because in the second of letting go her eyes had been exactly where she had trained them to be, on the margin of the scene.
And in the margin, Maureen was looking at her son.
It lasted half a breath. It was not sympathy and it was not confusion.
It was a warning, flat and specific, delivered from mother to son along a channel worn smooth with use, the look that says not here, you fool, hold your face, and Preston received it and dropped his eyes to his plate like a scolded boy.
Cordelia passed the gravy.
Vermin, she thought, with a calm that felt almost like peace.
All of them. The whole nest, down to its matriarch.
No proof yet, nothing Adrian could file.
But the question she had carried into this lunch was answered, and the answer was sitting at her table in its Sunday best, eating her lamb, warning each other with its eyes.
After the meal she washed her mother's crystal herself, as she always did, staff not being trusted with it, and the kitchen was warm and loud with distant family noise, and Preston came in carrying two glasses nobody had asked him to carry.
He set them down and leaned against the counter beside her, close, easy, and she felt him assembling an approach the way she felt weather.
"You were odd today," he said at last, fond, careful. "All those jokes. Babies and matchmaking and God knows. Mother thought you seemed tired."
"Did she." Cordelia turned a glass under the water. "It's been a long week. I'm allowed one strange Sunday a quarter, I believe it's in the marriage contract."
He laughed, relieved to have the laugh, and stayed, and she waited, because he had not come in here to carry glasses, and after a moment he arrived at his errand by the scenic route.
"You know, your idea, about Sabrina getting out more.
You're not wrong, actually. She's been shut in with the boy and the grief for years, it isn't healthy.
" A pause, hand through the hair, the boyish look deployed.
"I was thinking. The Pembroke thing, next month.
We should bring her. Do her a world of good, a night like that, meeting people.
She's even talked about starting up some little business of her own, you know, and a room like that, the people in a room like that.
" He shrugged, all casual generosity. "It'd be a kindness. Your kind of kindness."
Cordelia dried her hands slowly and looked at her husband, who was watching her with the open guileless face he did best, and read the want underneath it as easily as a headline.
Not kindness. Not Sabrina's little business.
He wanted them both in that ballroom, the wife on his arm and the mistress across the room in something backless, wanted to stand in the oldest room in the city with his entire secret arranged around him in plain sight, owning it, the particular twisted thrill of a man eating stolen fruit at the table of the man he stole it from.
She could see the whole appetite through the kindness like a coin through wet paper.
"The Pembroke," she said, slowly, as though it were a new idea and a slightly troublesome one. "It's not really a room one brings extra people to, darling. Vivian's list is Vivian's list."
"You ARE Vivian's list."
"I'll think about it," Cordelia said.
And because he had asked, and because Sabrina had just appeared in the kitchen doorway with the dessert plates she had insisted on carrying, Cordelia set down the cloth, and stepped into her husband, and slid a hand up the front of his shirt, and tilted her face, wifely, warm, entirely for the doorway.
"Ask me again nicely," she murmured, "and we'll see about your charity case."
Preston, delighted, kissed her cheek, his hands settling at her waist, husband of the year in his own kitchen, and Cordelia held the embrace one careful second longer than it needed, her cheek against his jaw, her eyes half closed and not closed.
In the very corner of her vision, holding the dessert plates, Sabrina burned.