Chapter 4 #2
The next hour became a blur of gilt-edged civility and social excavation.
Louisa and Alexandra, well accustomed to moving through drawing rooms with their eyes open and their manners immaculate, formed the natural center of the little mission.
Genny drifted in and out of clusters of ladies with the ease of someone long practiced in appearing ornamental while noticing everything.
The Penworth town house seemed to have divided itself into moods.
The blue salon held complaint. The music room held vanity.
The corridor outside the conservatory held speculation disguised as concern.
Everywhere, ladies stood beneath painted ceilings and crystal sconces performing calm while privately scenting blood.
They found Lady Dorring in the blue salon complaining that the peonies for the fête looked “lamentably limp,” which meant nothing Genny could decipher but sounded grave enough to satisfy Lady Dorring herself.
Mrs. Vale, encountered near the music room, declared that committees were the last refuge of women too old to flirt and too vain to die quietly.
Lady Castlemain had not yet arrived, though according to a maid she had sent word that her gown required an adjustment and she would call later to verify her place on the benefactors’ dais personally.
“Verify it personally,” Alexandra repeated under her breath as they withdrew toward the gallery. “That sounds ominous.”
“It sounds like Lady Castlemain,” Louisa corrected. “Ominous implies she has not already planned the ending.”
Genny was only half listening, because two ladies lingering near the staircase had lowered their voices at her approach and then raised them again just enough for selected words to float after her.
“Always where the confusion is worst,” one murmured.
“Poor Lord Penworth, to have entrusted anything to young ladies who think committees a lark,” said another.
“Miss Moreland was in tears, I hear,” added the first.
Genny kept walking. She did not slow or let her shoulders stiffen. She merely smiled at a passing footman and pretended she had heard nothing at all.
That, too, was a skill, honed over years in rooms where women measured one another in glances and half-sentences.
Yet the words found their mark. She had not been in tears, precisely.
She had only come closer than she liked, and the distinction mattered to no one but herself.
What mattered was the shape the story had already taken in other people’s mouths.
She was not a wronged girl or a possible victim.
She was a muddle, a source of amusement, a decorative creature who had exceeded her proper sphere and was now paying for it.
Alexandra glanced sideways at her. “Genny.”
“What?”
“You have that look.”
“I have no look.”
“You do. It is the one that means someone has been tiresome and you mean to behave as though they have not succeeded.”
Louisa sighed. “Who was it?”
Genny shrugged, which was safer than answering honestly. “No one important.”
“That is seldom true,” Alexandra said.
They turned into the small picture gallery, where spring light filtered through tall windows and warmed the painted faces of dead relations who had likely been just as meddlesome, vain, and quarrelsome in life as their descendants were now.
For a brief moment the corridor was empty, and the hush of it settled around them like mercy.
Louisa took Genny’s hand. “You know how these people are. A whisper enters a house and by the time it reaches the drawing room it has changed its dress twice and improved its own importance.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” Alexandra asked gently. “Because you look wounded.”
Genny laughed, though there was very little mirth in it. “That is because I am wounded. I dislike it, but there it is.”
Neither of her friends interrupted.
The honesty of that silence undid her more than sympathy might have done.
“I am tired,” she said after a moment, staring not at them but at a portrait of some solemn earl in a powdered wig, “of being delightful until the moment someone requires a villain. It is astonishing how quickly a woman may be transformed from amusing to irresponsible simply by being in the wrong room at the wrong time.”
Louisa’s grip tightened. “That is not how we see you.”
“I know,” Genny said, and she did know. “But it is how they see me, and I begin to suspect that matters more than I have liked to admit. I have always told myself it did not signify, that I could laugh and make them laugh and never mind the rest. Yet the moment something truly mattered, they were all ready to believe the worst, and I do not know whether I am more angry with them for it or with myself for pretending so long that it could not hurt.”
Alexandra came closer. “Because Harrison saw it too?”
Genny shot her a look that was less scandalized than wounded. “Must you be so direct?”
“Someone must be.”
Louisa’s brows rose. “Is it because his opinion matters?”
Genny opened her mouth, closed it again, and hated the warmth flooding her face. “Not entirely. But yes, curse him, more than it ought.”
That, apparently, was answer enough.
Alexandra’s expression turned very soft indeed. “Oh, my dear.”
“Do not oh, my dear me. I am suffering enough, and with very little privacy.”
Louisa actually laughed then, though with affection. “You are in more danger than I thought.”
“I am in no danger at all,” Genny said firmly. “I am annoyed, overobserved, and presently engaged in preventing a social catastrophe. Any inconvenient feelings that may have arisen are temporary and likely the result of nerves.”
“Of course,” Alexandra murmured.
Louisa nodded with grave agreement. “Entirely the nerves.”
Genny glared at them both.
It availed her nothing.
Before she could defend herself further, a footman appeared at the end of the gallery and bowed. “Miss Moreland? Viscount Woodmere asks whether you have learned anything of use.”
Louisa’s mouth twitched.
Alexandra’s did as well.
Genny gave them both a look that promised future retaliation and followed the footman back toward the library, where Harrison had apparently established himself with Lord Penworth’s correspondence spread across one long table.
He looked up when she entered, and the simple act of being seen by him with that immediate, level attention sent a most unhelpful little thrill through her.
This had to stop, which meant of course it would not.
“Well?” he asked.
The library was cooler than the rest of the house, shadowed by shelves and the deeper colors of leather bindings and walnut furniture.
Dust motes turned in the shafts of afternoon light, and the quiet of the room felt unlike the hush elsewhere in the house.
This was not the hush of gossip or watchfulness, but the settled silence of a place built for thought.
Harrison stood at the table in his dark coat, papers arranged before him in neat groups, looking as though he had been born to preside over ledgers and reluctant confessions.
Genny moved closer. “Lady Castlemain means to verify her place on the benefactors’ dais personally, which suggests she either distrusts everyone in this house or enjoys making them anxious.
Mrs. Vale considers every other woman on the committee beneath her.
Lady Dorring continues to regard symmetry as an instrument of tyranny.
And two ladies by the stairs believe I dissolved into tears and ruined the fête by breakfast.”
The last part escaped before she could stop it.
Harrison’s gaze sharpened. “Who said that?”
Genny waved a hand. “No one who matters.”
“I dislike that answer.”
“That makes two of us.”
For a moment he said nothing. Then, more quietly, he asked, “Did they trouble you?”
The question was so direct that she could not quite slip around it.
“Yes,” she said.
His mouth flattened. He looked, for one brief and deeply satisfying instant, genuinely angry on her behalf.
The sight warmed her after the cold of other people’s whispers.
Her shoulders, which she had not realized were braced, eased by a fraction.
It was a dangerous thing to witness. It would have been easier, in some ways, if he had offered smooth reassurance or brotherly concern or some useful platitude about not listening to malicious women.
Instead he looked offended for her, as though the injury had crossed his own pride somewhere along the way.
She busied herself with the papers before she could dwell upon that too much. “Have you found anything?”
“A little.” He indicated a page before him. “Lady Castlemain’s subscription was amended twice within the last week. Once to increase the amount, once to alter the placement of her acknowledgment in the printed order. Both changes are initialed, but the initials do not match the secretary’s hand.”
Genny leaned over the page. “Nor Mrs. Wexley’s.”
“No.”
She studied the marks more closely. “Could someone be trying to offend both Lady Castlemain and Lady Dorring in the same stroke? If Lady Castlemain expects prominence and does not receive it, while Lady Dorring is publicly set beneath her…”
“The result would be memorable.”
Genny glanced up. “You say that as though you dread memorable occasions.”
“I generally do.”
“Then you must find life with Esme exhausting.”
One corner of his mouth shifted. “Frequently.”
That tiny softening in him made her bold enough to ask, “And what of life with me?”
The question slipped out lightly, almost teasingly, yet the instant it was spoken she wished it back.
The air changed. Harrison looked at her, properly looked, and she became acutely aware that she was leaning over his table, that her hand rested near his, and that the room had gone too quiet.
Her pulse beat in her fingertips, foolishly close to his.
“Miss Moreland,” he said after a moment, “at present life with you is proving singularly difficult to categorize.”
It was not at all the answer she expected, and unfortunately, it was devastating.