Pentecost Alley - Anne Perry [70]
“No.” Tallulah took a shaky breath. “But, you see, when Papa asked where I had been, in front of Mama, and the servants, and Mama’s doctor … I said I had been somewhere else. No one would believe me now. They’d think I was just lying to protect Fin! And who wouldn’t think so? If I were them, that’s what I’d think.”
Emily would like to have argued, said something comforting, but she knew that Tallulah was right. No one would take her testimony seriously.
Tallulah looked down at her hands lying on her skirt. “Damnation!” she said fiercely. “Isn’t this a mess!” She clenched her fists. “Sometimes he’s so stupid I could hate him.”
Emily said nothing. She was thinking hard, searching for any thread she could grasp that might help. This was a practical problem. It would not be solved by indulging emotions, however justified.
“I remember I used to think he was marvelous,” Tallulah went on, as much to herself as to Emily. “When I was young he used to have such exciting ideas. He would invent games for us, turn the whole nursery into another world, a desert island, a pirate ship, the Victory at Trafalgar, or a palace, or the Houses of Parliament.” She smiled and her eyes were soft with the memory. “Or a forest with dragons. I’d be the maiden and he’d rescue me. He’d be the dragon as well. He used to make me laugh so much.”
Emily did not interrupt.
“Then of course he had to go away to school,” Tallulah went on. “I missed him terribly. I don’t think I’ve ever been as lonely as I was then. I lived the whole term time until he should come back home again. To begin with he was just the same, but gradually he changed. Of course he did. He grew up. He only wanted to play with boys. He was still kind to me, but he had no patience. All his dreams were forward and not backward to where I was. It was then I began to understand all the things that men can do and women can’t.” She looked across at a group strolling past, a man in a tall hat with a young woman on one arm and an older woman on the other with a magnificent feather-trimmed hat, but she did not seem to see them.
“Men can go to Parliament or become ambassadors,” she went on. “Join the army or the navy, become explorers or bankers or deal in stocks or imports and exports.” She shrugged dramatically. “Write drama, music, be philosophers or poets. Women get married. Men get married too, but only as an incidental. I realized that when I understood what Papa expected of me and what he hoped for Fin. He would like to have had more sons. Mama was always sorry for that. I suppose it was her fault.”
Emily had a suddenly bleak picture of family life at the FitzJameses’, a little girl realizing with a rush of coldness how small a part of her life was in her own control, how restricted her choices compared with those of her brother. Her mother’s success or failure depended on how many sons she bore, and it was not something she could help. Perhaps Tallulah would be the same … a failure. Only one thing of importance would be asked of her, and she might not manage to do it.
Emily’s own life was the same. She had married a man who wanted sons to carry on his title, but she had not felt the same pressure. She could not recall even doubting herself. But then she had had no brothers.
“Sometimes when Fin was home from school there’d be some terrible quarrels.” Tallulah was still staring into the distance, living the past. “Papa would call him into his study, and Fin would come out white-faced. But it was always all right in the end. Nothing terrible ever happened. I was very frightened at first. I remember I sat on the landing behind the stair rail and looked down into the hall, waiting for him to come out of the study, terrified he’d been beaten or something. I don’t know what I really expected. But it never happened. It was always all right.”
Someone laughed in the distance, but she barely seemed to hear it.
“Fin and Papa still made their plans. Fin went back to school, then to University, then into the Foreign Office. If this