Pentecost Alley - Anne Perry [67]
“So have I,” Emily admitted. “But I’m not sure I could live with anyone who always spoke the unadulterated truth. I don’t think I want to know it, and I’m quite sure I don’t want to hear it. It may be very admirable, but I would sooner admire it from a distance … quite a large distance.”
Tallulah laughed, but there was no happiness in it. “You are deliberately misunderstanding me. I don’t mean he’s tactless, or cruel. I just mean he has a sort of … light inside him. He’s … whole. His mind doesn’t have lots of different pieces, like most people’s, all wanting different things, and lying to each other so you can try to have everything, and telling yourself it’s all right.”
“How do you know?”
“What?”
“How do you know that?” Emily repeated. “How do you know what is inside him?”
Tallulah was silent. Two girls in pink and peach walked past them, deep in conversation, heads close together, the brindled light in their hair. “I don’t know why I’m explaining all this to you!” Tallulah said at last. “It doesn’t really fit into any words. I know what I mean. I know that he has a kind of courage that most people haven’t. He faces what really matters, without evasions and excuses. His beliefs are whole.” She stared at Emily. “Do you understand me at all?”
“Yes,” Emily agreed quietly, dropping the challenge from her voice. “I only wanted to see if you really care for him as much as you think. Wouldn’t you find him a little serious? After a while might not so much goodness become a trifle predictable, and then ultimately become even boring?”
Tallulah turned her head away, her profile outlined against the bank of blossoms. “It really doesn’t matter. He’s never going to look at me as anything but Finlay FitzJames’s rather shallow sister who wastes her life buying dresses that cost enough to keep one of his Whitechapel families in food and clothes for years.” She looked down at her exquisite skirt and smoothed it over the flat of her stomach. “This cost fifty-one pounds, seventeen shillings and sixpence. We pay our best maids twenty pounds a year. The scullery maids and tweenies get less than half that. I saw it in the household accounts. And I have a dozen or more dresses as good as this one.”
She shrugged and smiled. “And yet I go to church on Sundays and pray, and so does everyone else I know, all dressed in clothes like this. It isn’t that Jago would tell me I’m wrong. If no one buys them, then the people who make them have no trade. He just wouldn’t be bothered with me, because I care so much what I look like. But then for an unmarried woman that’s what matters, isn’t it.” It was not a question but a statement of fact.
Emily did not argue, nor did she bother to mention money or family influence. Tallulah knew the rules as well as she did.
“Would you marry him?” she asked softly, thinking of Charlotte and Pitt. But Charlotte was different. She had never been the socialite that Tallulah was. Her wit was far too acerbic, her outspokenness seldom—not often—funny. She was not intentionally outrageous; she was a genuine misfit. And to be honest, it was not as if she had had so many other good offers. She rather put people off.
Although in spite of her father’s wealth, if Tallulah continued to behave as she had done this afternoon and the other evening in Chelsea, she might not receive any offers in the future. There were many women whom people found vastly entertaining but did not marry.
Tallulah sighed and looked up at the flowers overhead, her expression a strange mixture of wistfulness and horror, and a kind of desperate laughter at herself.
“If I were to marry him, I would have to live in Whitechapel, wear gray stuff dresses and be happy ladling out soup to the poor. I should have to be polite to the self-righteous women who think laughter is a sin and love is telling people