Paragon Walk - Anne Perry [92]
“Oh, I couldn’t,” Grace looked uncomfortable, “Freddie would be most angry. He gives me so many things, he would think me most ungrateful if I were to make an issue of such a small matter.”
This time it was Charlotte who poked Emily discreetly, with her foot, under the clouds of her skirt. She did not want Emily to press too hard and make their interest obvious. They had already learned enough. The garden room was behind that hedge, and Freddie did not want peaches anywhere near it.
They excused themselves, after again saying how delighted they were to be there.
“The garden room!” Emily said as soon as they were out of earshot. “Freddie does not want her going there to pick peaches at awkward moments. He has his private parties out there, I’ll wager you anything.”
Charlotte did not take her up.
“But parties are not much,” she said slowly, “unless something quite awful goes on. What we need to know is who goes to them. Do you think Miss Lucinda recalls with any clarity at all what she saw? Or will it be so embroidered over with imagination by now that it isn’t any use? She must have told it umpteen times.”
Emily bit her lip in irritation.
“I really should have asked her when it happened, but I was so annoyed by her, and so delighted that someone had given her a good fright, that I deliberately avoided her. And I didn’t want to pander to her vanity. She was sitting up on the chaise lounge, you know, with smelling salts, an embroidered cushion with Chinese dragons behind her, so Aunt Vespasia said, and a whole jugful of lemonade, receiving callers like some duchess and insisting on telling the whole story right from the beginning to every one of them. I simply could not have been civil to her. I should have burst into laughter. Now I wish I’d had more self control.”
Charlotte was not in a position to criticize, and she knew it. Without replying, she looked around the rose-hung garden to see if she could find Miss Lucinda. She was bound to be with Miss Laetitia, and they were always in the same color.
“There!” Emily touched her arm, and she turned. This time they were in forget-me-not blue, and it was far too young for either of them. The touches of pink only made it worse, like some confection that had become overheated.
“Oh dear!” Charlotte said under her breath, stifling a gasp of laughter.
“It’s got to be done,” Emily replied severely. “Come on!”
Side by side, they attempted to look casual as they drifted over toward the Misses Horbury, hesitating on the way to compliment Albertine Dilbridge on her gown and exchange a greeting with Selena.
“How did she take it?” Charlotte asked the moment they were away from her.
“Take what?” Emily was for once confused.
“Hallam!” Charlotte said impatiently. “After all, it’s a bit of a letdown, isn’t it? I mean to be ravished in overwhelming passion by Paul Alaric is rather romantic, in a disgusting sort of way, but to be molested by Hallam Cayley when he was too drunk and wretched to know what he was doing and didn’t even remember it afterward is just terrible”—she stopped, and all the mockery drained out of her—“and very tragic.”
“Oh!” Emily obviously had not thought of it. “I don’t know.” Then the idea began to interest her. Charlotte saw it in her face. “But now that I consider it, she has rather gone out of her way to avoid me ever since then. Once or twice I have thought she was going to speak to me, then at the last moment she had suddenly found something else more pressing.”
“Do you suppose she knew it was Hallam all the time?” Charlotte asked.
Emily screwed up her face.
“I’m trying to be fair.” She was finding it an effort, and it showed. “I don’t know what I think. I don’t suppose it matters now.”
Charlotte was not satisfied. Some small doubt, a question unresolved, gnawed at the back of her mind. But she suffered it to remain for the moment. They were approaching the Misses Horbury, and she must compose herself to pry discreetly and with grace. She fixed an interested