Bethlehem Road - Anne Perry [74]
By the time she alighted in Kensington she was composed in her mind and had her story rehearsed in detail. A small boy with a hoop and a stick ran down the pavement past her, and his governess hurried along, calling after him. Zenobia smiled and ascended the steps. She presented her card to the parlormaid, outstared the rather pert girl, and watched with satisfaction as she departed to take the news to her mishtress.
She returned a few moments later and showed Zenobia into the withdrawing room. As she had expected, Mary Carfax’s curiosity was too sharp for her to wait.
“How pleasant to see you again, Miss Gunne, after so very long,” she lied with a chill smile. “Please do take a seat.” Her concern was polite, but there was also a solicitude in it, a reminder that Mary was a fraction younger, which fact she had treasured even in their youth and now found too sweet to let pass. “Would you care for some refreshment? A tisane?”
Zenobia swallowed the reply that came to her lips and forced the opening she had planned. “Thank you; most kind.” She sat on the edge of her chair, as manners dictated, not farther back, as would have been comfortable, and bared her teeth very slightly. “You look well.”
“I daresay it is the climate,” Lady Mary answered pointedly. “So good for the complexion.”
Zenobia, burned by the African sun, longed to make some withering reply but remembered her niece and forbore. “I am sure it must be,” she agreed with difficulty. “All the rain—”
“We have had quite a pleasant winter,” Lady Mary contradicted. “But I daresay you have not been here to experience it?”
Zenobia satisfied her.
“No, no I returned only very recently.”
Lady Mary’s rather straight eyebrows shot up. “And you came to call upon me?”
Zenobia did not twitch a muscle. “I wished to call upon Beatrice Allenby, but I cannot find a trace of her. No one seems to know where she is presently staying. And remembering how fond you were of her, I thought perhaps you might know?”
Lady Mary struggled, and the opportunity to relate a scandal won. “Indeed I do—although I hardly know if I should tell you!” she said with satisfaction.
Zenobia affected surprise and concern. “Oh dear! Some misfortune?”
“That is not the word I would have used for it.”
“Good heavens! You don’t mean a crime?”
“Of course I don’t! Really, your mind is—” Lady Mary caught herself just in time before she was openly rude. That would have been vulgar, and she disliked Zenobia Gunne far too much to be vulgar in front of her. “You have become more used to the unconventional behavior of foreigners. Certainly I do not speak of a crime—rather, a social disaster. She married beneath her and went to live in Belgium.”
“Good gracious!” Zenobia let her amazement register fully. “What an extraordinary thing! Well, there are some very fine cities in Belgium. I daresay she will be happy enough.”
“A cheesemaker!” Lady Mary added.
“A what?”
“A cheesemaker!” She let the word fall with all its redolence of trade. “A person who manufactures cheese!”
Zenobia remembered a dozen such exchanges years ago—and Peter Holland’s face so full of laughter. She knew exactly what he would have thought, what he would have said in a snatched moment alone. She raised her eyebrows. “Are you perfectly sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!” Lady Mary snapped. “It is not the sort of thing about which one makes mistakes!”
“Dear me. Her mother must be distraught!” A very clear picture came into Zenobia’s mind