Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [14]
Gallantine was thus driven to exert his powers more forcefully to impress himself upon the young ladies. By various subtle hand-wavings he managed an invitation to one of the mamma’s afternoons, and to hold the girls’ admirers at bay long enough to engage, first the older then the younger in several minutes ‘conversation’, during which each responded most politely to his observations on the weather, the present company and the pleasantness of walking in parks.
He came away satisfied that he had fixed himself in their memories as an intriguing man of the world. He read interest into the smiles he had collected, quickenings of the heart into the girls’ casting their glances downward or away from him. He was very hopeful of his chances with either of the lovelies.
He next engineered his attendance at a ball at which the daughters were to be present. He went to great pains and some expense to prepare himself, travelling up to the port city to have himself outfitted by a good tailor. Once he was dressed he put what he felt must be an irresistible glamour all around himself, and he was rewarded at the ball by many glances, dances and fan-flutterings from the older women, as well as a dance with each of the daughters. He was light on his feet, you can imagine, which left the girls free to concentrate on words, and words they had in plenty, buoyed up by their excitement at being out in society and by far the most marriageable persons in the room, indeed in the town. Gallantine read their happy chatter entirely as regard for himself. Watching them in exactly the same play with others on the dance floor, he thought the girls very kind for their patience with lesser men when their hearts were so clearly leaning and yearning towards his own.
When he felt that enough such meetings had taken place, Gallantine made his feelings known, first to the older daughter and then, on being rejected by her repeatedly, to the younger. At first made gentle by her own surprise and by the strong glamours he had carried to the meeting, this lovely girl did not utterly reject him, but soon, with her sister’s and her mother’s horrified exclamations ringing in her ears, she found sufficient will, reinforced by true and natural feelings of revulsion, to be definite enough in her refusal of him that he could hold no further hopes of a match with her.
Well, it’s never a good idea to get on the wrong side of a fascinator, is it? For he’s unlikely just to retire and lick his wounds. Gallantine went off to his house—which was not small and not large, and not in a good part of town nor yet in a bad, but which of course bore no womanly touches barring some lace at the windows put there by his late mother that, if touched (which it never was), would have crumbled from age and poor quality—and he brewed himself a fine magic. It was so powerful that to all intents and purposes Gallantine did not exist for a while, except as instrument or agent of his own urge to revenge. And so at this point in the story it behoves us to leave Gallantine in his formless obsession and join the two daughters, through whose eyes the working-out of that obsession is much clearer.
So here is the younger girl, alone in her room, sitting up in bed writing a breathless account of that evening’s events in her day-journal.
And here is the older, sitting more solemnly in front of her mirror, having just accepted (her father is to be consulted tomorrow) an offer of marriage to a most suitable gentleman: young, fine-looking and possessed of a solid fortune, and of a character to which her heart can genuinely warm.
Under each girl’s door, with a small but significant sound, is slipped a white envelope. Each starts up, and crosses her room; each takes the envelope up and listens for—but does not hear—receding footsteps outside. The seal on the envelope is unfamiliar, marvellous; breaking it releases a clean, pine-y, adventurous scent onto the bedroom air, and each girl breathes this scent in.
Step through the