Cardington Crescent - Anne Perry [6]
Emily could feel the misery and panic growing inside her. Everything around was color, gaiety, and sound; every face she could see was smiling—George at Sybilla, Uncle Eustace March at himself, Sybilla’s husband, William, at the fantasy on stage. His youngest sister, Tassie, only nineteen, thin as her mother had been and with a shock of hair the color of sunlight on apricots, was definitely smiling at the principal tenor. Old Mrs. March, her grandmother, was twitching the corner of her tight lips upward in spite of herself; she did not care to be amused. Great-aunt Vespasia, Tassie’s maternal grandmother, on the other hand, was delighted. She had a marked sense of the ridiculous and had long ago ceased to care a jot what anyone else thought of her.
That left only Jack Radley, the single nonfamily guest of the evening, currently also staying at Cardington Crescent. He was a ravishingly handsome young man with excellent connections, but unfortunately, no money worth mentioning, and a highly dubious reputation with women. He was another outsider, and for that alone Emily could have liked him, regardless of his grace or his humor. It was fairly obvious that he had been invited with a view to arranging a marriage for Tassie, the only one of the ten March daughters still unmarried. The purpose of this liaison was not yet plain, since Tassie did not appear to be fond of him and had considerably more substantial expectations than he; although his family was related to those who held power he himself had no prospects. William had said unkindly that Eustace hungered for a knighthood—and in time, perhaps, a peerage—as the ultimate accolade to his family’s rise from trade to respectability. But that was surely an observation more malicious than truthful. There was a tension between father and son, a sharpness that intruded like a sudden splinter of glass every now and then, small but surprisingly painful.
At present William was behind Emily’s chair, and he was the only one she could not see.
During the interval it was he who brought her wine and a chocolate bonbon, not George; George was standing in the corner laughing at something Sybilla had said. Emily forced herself to make some sort of conversation, knowing it was a failure even as the words fell into hot silence, and the minute after she wished she had not said them. She was relieved when the curtain went up again.
“I cannot think where Mr. Gilbert gets such ridiculous plots!” Old Mrs. March drummed her fingers irritably when the final applause had died. “There is absolutely no sense in it at all!”
“There is not meant to be, Grandmama,” Sybilla said with a dreamy smile.
Mrs. March stared at her over her pince-nez, the black velvet ribbon dangling down her cheek. “Someone who is foolish because nature has so designed them, I pity; someone who is foolish by intention it is beyond me to understand,” she said coldly.
“That I can well believe,” Jack Radley murmured behind Emily’s ear. “And I’d swear Mr. Gilbert would find her equally incomprehensible—only he wouldn’t care.”
“My dear Lavinia, he is no more foolish than some of the romances by Madam Ouida, which I see you reading under brown paper covers.”
Mrs. March’s face froze, but there were pink spots in her cheeks where rouge would have been on a younger woman. She deplored the vulgarity of painting one’s face; women who did that were “of a certain sort.”
“You are quite mistaken, Vespasia,” she snapped. “It is a pity your vanity