Chapter Six
"The violet creams," Adrian said to the girl behind the counter, in the voice he used for reading verdicts. "The half pound box, not the pound. And the grey ribbon."
"We have a new silver that's very popular, sir."
"The grey," said Adrian, with the gravity of a man declining a plea deal. "We tried silver once. In another decade. We do not speak of it."
Cordelia stood beside him in the smallest, oldest sweetshop in the city and watched the driest lawyer of her acquaintance adjudicate candied violets, and felt the week's whole ugly weight lift half an inch off her shoulders.
"All this time," she said, "I thought you kept this family's secrets. It turns out you keep its sweet tooth."
"I keep everything." He moved down the glass case, scanning it like a brief.
"Vivian Pembroke receives flowers by the barrow from people who want things.
The creams say you knew her before you wanted anything.
The grey ribbon says you were raised properly.
" He allowed himself a judicial pause. "The silver ribbon says you have a new assistant and no shame. "
"And you learned all this at your father's knee, I suppose."
"I learned it at Vivian's knee, which is a harder school.
" He nodded at the case. "My father brought her the wrong almonds in 1989 and billed the family half rate for a year out of remorse.
You don't call on that house empty handed and you don't call carrying the obvious.
You bring the one sugar she admits to, and a piece of news she doesn't have yet. "
"Well," said Cordelia, and picked out a candied violet from the sample dish and ate it, mostly to watch him disapprove, "it's a mercy I'm bringing both."
He turned from the counter and looked at her properly then, and she watched the errand fall away from his face and the appetite arrive under it, not for the sweets.
"The lunch," he said. "You've made me wait four days. I want everything, and in order."
So she gave it to him, right there among the jars, in a voice pitched for two, the whole gleaming disaster of Sunday, and she found she had been saving it the way you save the good wine, for the one person who would know what he was drinking.
She gave him Maureen pricing the hallway before her coat was off.
She gave him the tableau by the stairs, the boy held high, the four of them arranged like a portrait she wasn't in, and she gave it lightly, and he didn't take it lightly, and she moved past the moment before it could become one.
She gave him the resemblance line and the mint sauce grabbed twice, and his eyebrows went up by a full quarter inch, which from Adrian was a standing ovation.
"And then Sabrina proposed that I was an incompetent mother."
"She did not."
"In my own garden room. Over my own lamb. So I agreed with her completely, and observed that for a woman who never bore a child she knew the most extraordinary amount about raising one, and asked where she'd picked it all up."
Adrian turned abruptly to the shelf beside him and gave a jar of barley sugar his complete professional attention. His shoulders were not entirely still.
"You may laugh. The shopgirl already suspects you of a soul."
"I'm not laughing." His voice was magnificently level. "I'm admiring the barley sugar. What did the table do?"
"The table held its breath. And then Maureen forgave me for being attacked, which I want you to think about, because it's the finest piece of tablecloth work I've ever seen, and then Sabrina toasted Preston.
" She let the beat sit. "For the Halloran account.
The clever, clever man. Who'd own half the skyline, apparently, if certain people only backed him properly. "
He did look at her then, and the suppressed laugh had gone somewhere else entirely. "She said that. At your table. On your wine."
"I nearly died of joy, Adrian, I had to convert it into a cough.
And then I'm afraid I was provoked, so I asked Preston to tell the family how the pitch had actually gone.
What Bridget Halloran said at the door, and about which end of the table.
" She ate another violet. "He got it out.
Through his teeth, in front of both of them.
'Married the brains.' I've had it framed.
Privately. In here." She touched her temple.
"You made him confess it to his mistress." Adrian said it slowly, the way a man reads a beautiful clause. "Over Sunday lunch."
"And then I proposed a baby."
The barley sugar received no further protection. He turned all the way around.
"Half a baby," she amended. "I said Oliver was becoming a handful and we ought to try for another, and that perhaps I'd have better luck this time, and I said it into the middle of the table like a hostess offering more gravy, and Adrian, I want you to guess who said no.
Out loud. First. Before my husband could assemble one word. "
"Sabrina."
"Like a shot going off. And when I floated finding her a nice husband of her own, since five years is mourning enough, guess who said no then, instantly, in exactly the same voice."
"Preston." He had gone very still, the working stillness, but the corner of his mouth had surrendered. "Cordelia. You detonated a proposal of marriage and a proposal of children at one family lunch, to see who dived on which."
"And while everyone was diving," she said, "I watched the one person who should have found the whole afternoon merely eccentric.
And what Maureen did, at the end of it, was look at her son.
One look. Half a breath. The kind of look you'd give a junior partner about to say the quiet part in front of a client. "
Adrian watched Cordelia's face with the laughter dying out of his own by degrees, because he had arrived, as she had known he would, at the place where the comedy stopped.
"She knew," he said. "The mother."
"She's known from the start. I'd bet the house. I can't prove a syllable of it, and I don't need to yet."
Cordelia looked at the jars without seeing them.
"I mourned her for exactly one breath, you know. The mother-in-law I thought I had. A woman who never existed. One breath, and then I ordered the boy his chips."
She said it evenly, and heard, underneath her own evenness, how much it had cost, and knew he heard it too.
He did not touch her. His hand came off the counter, and settled back onto it an inch nearer hers, and stayed there, and that was all, and it was somehow the most eloquent thing anyone had done for her all week.
"So," he said, gently, "Pembroke."
"Pembroke." She straightened. "He asked nicely, since you'll want the contract settled.
Three days of courtship, flowers, my own coffee brought to me with the cinnamon, which I'll admit I enjoyed as pure theater.
And I granted it. On one condition, delivered as wifely propriety.
" She smiled. "Sabrina attends as my guest. Mine.
Her invitations, her introductions, her whole evening, mine to make. "
Adrian considered that the way he considered a signature page.
"As your guest," he said slowly. "So her entire evening lives and dies on your arm. In that room a climber breathes through her sponsor, and you've just been handed the tap."
"Every introduction mine to make. Or not make." She took the tied box from the counter as the girl finished the ribbon, grey, correct. "Preston thanked me for it, of course. He thinks he's smuggling her in. He's actually signed her over."
"And what happens in that room, Cordelia?" The reader's question, asked in the lawyer's voice. "Walk me to the end of it. Because if your guest disgraces herself in Vivian Pembroke's ballroom, the splash reaches the woman who brought her."
"Does it? Sabrina begged for that invitation at my own table, in front of witnesses. Maureen seconded it, for the family's credit. Preston endorsed it on the spot. Three of their voices, none of mine. I only ever surrendered to a family campaign."
She stepped past him toward the door.
"And the woman whose ballroom it is will have had me to tea, with violet creams, the week before. Which is where you come in, since it's your quarterly errand we're hijacking."
"And in the room itself?"
She paused with her hand on the door and let him see exactly how much thought was underneath the lightness.
"Nothing I do. That's the whole art of it. I bring a climber to the one room in this city that punishes climbing, and I let the room be the room."
"And when the damage lands?"
"It lands on the Boyd name. On his reputation, in front of the account he's just signed." She pushed the door open. "And then we'll see how in love they stay."
Adrian held the door for her, and the bell rang them out into the grey afternoon, and at the corner a newsstand board said CARRIERS BALLOT, FINAL WEEK, and she glanced at it in passing the way other women glance at their horoscopes.
"Sugar's handled," Adrian said, settling the box under his arm. "Now the news."
"Oh," said Cordelia, stepping past him toward the car, "I am the news."
Vivian Pembroke received them in a drawing room that had not rearranged itself for anyone's opinion in forty years, a small upright woman in wool the color of good pewter, with rings on both hands and eyes that did your accounts while you were still crossing her carpet.
"Edmund's boy," she said to Adrian, presenting her cheek, "and the Hargrove girl, in the same afternoon.
Either the foundation's bankrupt or somebody wants something.
" Her eyes found the box, and the grey ribbon, and something in her face performed the smallest possible ceremony of approval. "The creams. You may both stay."