Chapter Seven
"I'll say this for you." Preston caught her hand as the car climbed the drive to the Pembroke house, pleased with himself and therefore pleased with her.
"Bringing Sabrina tonight. That was a kind thing and a clever one.
She's wasted sitting alone in that townhouse.
A woman like her ought to be out, meeting people, building something of her own again.
She's good in a room, Sabrina. Always has been. Tonight could be the making of her."
"I thought so too," Cordelia said, and squeezed his hand, and turned to the window so he would not see her face, because there was nothing she could have done to it that would have survived that sentence.
He had asked for this at her own sink, and courted it for three days with flowers and good behavior, and she had yielded the way a fortress yields when it was built to be taken, slowly, on one condition delivered as wifely propriety.
Sabrina came tonight as her guest. Mine.
Every introduction mine to make, or not make.
He believed he had smuggled his mistress into the oldest ballroom in the city.
He had signed her over, and he was holding the pen warm in his hand and calling it kindness.
The Pembroke autumn benefit was the oldest charity night in the city, three generations of the same families gathered in the ballroom of the old house on the hill, white flowers to the ceiling, a quartet on the dais, four hundred people who had known one another's grandmothers and decided among themselves, without ever once saying so, who counted in this city and who did not.
Cordelia had come here since she was a girl in a velvet dress on her father's hand, and tonight the room received her the way it had always received her mother, with the easy warmth it kept for its own.
Vivian Pembroke, eighty if she was a day and the nearest thing the city had to a reigning queen, took her by both hands and held her out to be looked at.
"Your father's girl. The blue, at last. Your mother's blue, and her stones with it.
He would be quite unbearable about you tonight.
" It went through Cordelia like warm water.
Old men who had known her father told her she had his eyes and his trick of listening as though you were the only person speaking.
A woman she had built sandcastles with at six pressed her hand and said the room was brighter for her being in it, and meant it.
Seven years of a husband who found her world too fussy and trimmed her quietly down to fit his, and she had forgotten the simple thing this was, the ease of walking into a place that was glad she had come.
Then, before Cordelia could shape the one introduction she had planned to make all evening, Preston made it for her, beaming, a man presenting a prize he expected to be thanked for. "Vivian, may I introduce my sister-in-law. Sabrina Boyd. She's new to all this. You'll be kind to her."
Vivian Pembroke turned her head, and the temperature of her changed.
Her eyes went once from the widow to the man presenting her, the wrong sponsor noted and priced, and then she looked at Sabrina the way she might look at a place card bearing the wrong name, a brief and total assessment, the too new gown noted, the too bright jewels priced, the whole of her read and shelved inside a second.
"Clark's widow," she said, placing a face she had been told about and finding it rather smaller than advertised.
"The eager one. Yes. I was sorry to hear of it.
" She gave Sabrina two cool fingers and took them back before Sabrina had got to the end of her bright little speech, the one about how honored she was and how much she had heard and what a privilege it all was, and she turned the whole of her warmth back to Cordelia as though a draft had blown briefly through the hall and been shut out.
"Find me at supper, Cordelia. I'll want you at my right hand. "
That was the whole of the introducing, as it turned out.
Cordelia had come prepared to make exactly one, the owed one, and her husband had spent it for her at the door.
For the rest of the evening she made none at all.
It required nothing but timing. Whenever Sabrina drifted toward her through the crowd, hopeful, angling, Cordelia was always just then leaning into the middle of some dowager's story, sweetly and completely occupied, and a guest in that room breathed through her sponsor or did not breathe.
Nobody watching saw anything but a wife enjoying her evening. The tap simply stayed closed.
It was a small thing and a complete one, and Sabrina felt every degree of it.
Cordelia watched her take the snub and do what she always did, which was reach, doubling the smile, lifting the warmth, working outward to the next group and the next, holding out her hand and her widow's story and her lovely face to people who accepted none of it.
They gave her the bare minimum that manners required and closed their circles a half step against her, and within twenty minutes she had surrendered the room and taken out her phone, and stood among the white flowers angling it to catch the chandeliers and the back of someone worth being photographed near, narrating her own glittering night to the thousands who followed her, manufacturing for an audience that was not present the standing the room in front of her would not give.
Cordelia had nearly walked into her brother before she saw him.
Theo was the last person she had expected.
Theodore Hargrove did not do galas. He ran the broadcasting side from behind a desk and left the family's social face to her, and yet here he stood in a dinner jacket that fit him like an argument he was losing, grave and tall and wearing their father's careful face.
"I wasn't going to come," he said, before she could ask.
"Then my office flagged a name on the Pembroke list this morning.
A Boyd widow, on our family's line, for the first time in her life.
I came to see it for myself." His jaw was tight.
"You should not have brought her into this room.
She has been climbing on your name for years, and you have let her, because you are generous and you do not look. "
A month ago the interference would have shut her face like a door, Theo who had warned her against Preston and been proved right, presuming again to manage her life.
She felt the old slam rise in her, and then felt it simply fall away, because he was right about this too, and because there was something steadying in being guarded by the one man in her blood who had never wanted a single thing from her but her safety.
"Thank you," she said, and watched the word land on him, gratitude being the one thing he had not braced for, and something in his stiff face came open.
"Is something wrong, Cordelia. Something you would tell me, if it were."
For one dangerous second she nearly told him the whole of it, there in a room of four hundred people.
Then she saw Sabrina lift her head from the phone and begin to drift toward them, drawn to the brother whose name opened every door she wanted opened, and Cordelia touched his sleeve, quick and warm, a thing she had not done in years.
"Another time, brother. Soon. I promise you.
" He held her eyes a beat, saw who was coming, gave her a short grave nod, and removed himself from the woman's path the way a man steps around a thing he has decided not to dignify, gone before Sabrina reached the place where he had stood.
She found Adrian instead at the edge of the floor, where he always stood, the family's lawyer, a fixture as expected as the quartet, and for once Cordelia let herself cross to him and stay.
He was worth the crossing tonight. The firm did not pay for that dinner jacket and it fit him the way nothing off a rack ever had, and the gray at his temple under the chandeliers did the opposite of softening him.
"You look," she said, and let the rest go unsaid, because the word she wanted was not one a married woman gave the family lawyer in a public room.
"So do you." He did not turn to her as he said it, both of them facing the floor like two people exchanging nothing of weight. "You look like yourself. I haven't seen that on you in a long while."
Neither of them had mentioned the car. Neither of them mentioned it now. It stood beside them anyway, the traffic light and the four words and everything neither of them had done about it, a third guest at the edge of the floor, and they let it stay.
From where they stood they could hear her. Sabrina had found a circle at last, three women near the far window, and was pouring herself into it.
"...so I told him he had to let me redo the entire east wing, I've got the best eye, everyone says so." A bright laugh, alone in it. "That was before, of course. You do what you can now, on your own."
An east wing, Cordelia noted, pricing it with the room, that no Boyd house had ever possessed. The town they had all come up in would have fit its best street into Vivian's garden. A past let out a size, and then another, and the women by that window could smell alteration through walls.
"Mm," said one of the women, in a voice like a door easing shut.
Then Sabrina reached, the way a person reaches for a railing, and turned her warmth on the small upright woman beside her, nodding at the bag on her arm. "Oh, what a heavenly thing. Is it this season? I have been hunting everywhere for one just like it."