Cardington Crescent (5 page)

“It is time the ladies withdrew,” she announced loudly, fixing first Vespasia and then Sybilla with a stony stare. She knew Tassie and Emily would not dare disobey.

Vespasia rose to her feet with the grace she had never lost; the air of moving at precisely her own speed, and the rest of the world might follow or not, as it chose. Reluctantly, the others rose also: Tassie demure; Sybilla svelte, smiling over her shoulder at the men; Emily with a sinking feeling inside her, a taste of Pyrrhic victory fast losing its savor.

“I’m sure something could be contrived,” Aunt Vespasia said quietly to Tassie. “With a little imagination.”

Tassie looked confused. “About what, Grandmama?”

“Mr. Beamish, of course!” Vespasia snapped. “I have longed for years to take that fatuous smile off his face.”

They swept past Emily, side by side, whispering, and on into the withdrawing room. Spacious and cool in pale greens, it was one of the few rooms in the house Olivia March had been permitted to redecorate from the old lady’s taste, which was dictated at a time when the weight of one’s furniture indicated the worthiness and sobriety of one’s life. Later, fashion had changed, and status and novelty became the criteria. But Olivia’s taste flowered during the Oriental period, around the International Exhibition of 1862, and the withdrawing room was gentle, full of soft colors and with only sufficient furniture to afford comfort, quite unlike old Mrs. March’s boudoir. The other downstairs sitting room was all hot rose pinks, with drapes over mantel and piano, and jardinières, photographs, and antimacassars.

Emily followed them and took her seat, after offering token assistance to old Mrs. March. She must keep up the act every moment until she was alone in her room. Women especially notice everything; they would observe the least flicker of expression or intonation of the voice, and they would interpret it with minute understanding.

“Thank you,” Mrs. March said tersely, rearranging her skirts to fall more elegantly and patting her hair. It was thick and mouse gray, elaborately coifed in a fashion common thirty years before, during the Crimean War. Emily wondered fleetingly how long it had taken the maid to dress it like that. There was not a wisp out of place, nor had there been at breakfast or luncheon. Perhaps it was a wig? She would love to have knocked it and found out.

“So kind of you,” Mrs. March went on. “Too many young people have lost the consideration one would wish.” She looked at no one in particular, but the tightening at the corners of her mouth betrayed an irritation that was not in the least impersonal. Emily knew Tassie was going to receive a curt lecture on the duties of a good daughter the moment they were alone, foremost among them being obedience and attention to one’s betters—and doing everything possible in aiding one’s family to obtain for one a suitable marriage. At the very minimum one positively did not get in the way of such efforts. And Sybilla also would come in for some grim correction.

Emily smiled warmly back at her, even if it was amusement disguised, not sympathy. “I daresay they are merely preoccupied,” she said sententiously.

“They are no more preoccupied than we were!” Mrs. March retorted with a waspish glare. “We also had to make our way, you know. Being with child is an excuse for fainting and weeping, but not for sheer inconsideration. I have had seven children myself—I know what I am talking about. Not that I am not pleased. Goodness knows, it is more than time! We were beginning to despair. Such a tragedy for a woman to be barren.” She glanced at Emily’s slender waist with implied criticism. “She has certainly caused great disappointment to poor Eustace; he so much wanted William to have an heir. The family, you know, the family is everything, when all is said and done.” She sniffed.

Emily was silent; there was nothing to say, and that curious pity came back, violently unwelcome. She did not want to remember that Sybilla also had been an outsider in this family, a failure in the one achievement that mattered to them.

Mrs. March settled a little deeper into her chair. “Better late than never, I say,” she repeated. “Now she will stay at home and do her duty, fulfill herself, instead of all this ridiculous chasing of fashion. So shallow and unworthy. Now she will make William happy and create the kind of home for him he should have.”

Emily was not listening. Of course, if Sybilla was pregnant it might account for at least some of her behavior. Emily could quite clearly remember her own mixture of excitement and fear when she was expecting Edward. It was a total change in her life, something that was happening to her and was irreversible. She was no longer alone; in a unique way she had become two people. But for all George’s pleasure it had set a distance between them. And sharp in the middle of all of that was her fear of becoming ungainly, vulnerable, and no longer attractive to him.

If Sybilla, in her middle thirties, were facing this confusion of emotions—and perhaps also a fear of childbirth; the pain, the helplessness, the utter indignity, and even the vague possibility of death—it might well account for her selfishness now, her compulsion to draw all the masculine attention while she still felt she could, before matronliness made her awkward and eventually confined her.

But it did not excuse George! Fury choked Emily like a hot lump in her chest. All sorts of actions careered through her mind. She could go upstairs and wait until he came, and then accuse him outright of behaving like a fool, of embarrassing and insulting her and offending not only William but Uncle Eustace, because it was his house, and even all the rest of them, because they were fellow guests. She could tell him to restrict his attentions to Sybilla to those courtesies which were usual, or Emily would leave for home immediately and have nothing more to do with him until he made full apologies—and amends!

Then the rage died. A feud would bring her no happiness. George would either be cowed and obey, which she would despise—and so would he—and her victory would be bitter and of no satisfaction; or else he would be driven even further in his pursuit of Sybilla, simply to show Emily that she could not dictate to him. And the latter was far the more likely. Damn men! She gritted her teeth and swallowed hard. Damn men for their stupidity, their pigheaded perverseness—and above all for their vanity!

She could feel the lump growing larger in her throat, impossible to swallow. There was so much in George she loved: he was gentle, tolerant, generous—and he could be so much fun! Why did he have to be such a fool?

She shut her eyes, opening them again only with effort. Aunt Vespasia was staring at her. “Well, Emily,” she said briskly. “I am still waiting to hear an account of your visit to Winchester. You have told me nothing.”

There was no escape; she was drawn into conversation. She knew Aunt Vespasia had done it intentionally, and she did not want to let her down by being defeatist. Aunt Vespasia would never have given up and gone away into a corner to cry.

“Certainly,” she said with artificial eagerness. And she plunged into a story, largely invented as she went along. She was still involved in its ramifications when the gentlemen rejoined them rather earlier than usual.

All evening she managed to keep up the charade, and when it was finally time to retire she had the small victory of having lived up to the task she had set herself. She saw the flash of approval in Aunt Vespasia’s silver-gray eyes, and something in Tassie’s face that could have been admiration. But only once had George looked at her, and his smile was so artificial it hurt more than a scowl, because it was as if he did not see her at all.

The sense of closeness had come from a direction she had learned to expect, but when she thought about it, not really to welcome. It was Jack Radley who joined her laughter, whose quick humor followed hers, and who at the end of the evening walked up the broad stairs with his hand at her elbow.

She stopped on the landing, almost oblivious of him, waiting for George’s step but hearing instead the rustle of silk against the bannisters below her. She knew it would be Sybilla, and yet compulsion, a thread of hope, kept her looking till they came into sight, just in case it was not. George was smiling. The gas bracket on the wall shone on his dark hair and the white skin of Sybilla’s shoulders.

George moved away from her as he saw Emily, the spontaneity dying out of his face and faint embarrassment taking its place. He looked back at Sybilla.

“Good night, and thank you for a most delightful evening,” he said awkwardly, caught between the ease of intimacy the moment before and the faintly ridiculous formality he now finished with.

Sybilla’s face was glowing; she was completely enclosed within whatever they had been saying—or doing. For her Emily did not exist, and Jack Radley was merely a shadow, part of the decor of the weekend. Words were superfluous; her smile said everything.

Emily felt sick. All her efforts had been so much waste of time. She had been an actress in an empty theater, performing only for herself—as far as George was concerned she had not been there at all. Her behavior was immaterial to him.

“Good night, Mr. Radley.” She stumbled over the words, and reaching out for the handle of her bedroom door, she opened it, went in, and closed it firmly behind her. At least she could shut them out until tomorrow. She could have nine hours of solitude. If she wanted to weep no one else would know, and when she had let go of some of the confusion and pain bursting inside her, there was the refuge of sleep before the necessity of decision.

The maid knocked.

Emily sniffed hard and swallowed. “I don’t need you, Millicent.” Her voice was strained. “You may go to bed.”

There was a moment’s hesitation; then, “Very well, m’lady. Good night.”

“Good night.” She undressed slowly, leaving her gown over the back of the chair, then took the pins out of her hair. It was a relief not to feel the weight of it on her head.

Why?
Was it something about Sybilla? Her beauty, her wit, her charm? Or was it some failure in herself? Had she changed, lost some quality that George had loved? She searched, trying to recall what she had said and done recently. How was it different from the way it had always been? In what way was she less than George wanted, or needed? She had never been cold or ill-natured, she was not extravagant, she had never been rude to his friends—and heaven knows she had been tempted! Some of them were so facile, so incredibly silly, and yet they spoke to her as if she were a child.

It was a futile exercise, and in the end she crept into bed and decided to be angry instead. It was better than weeping. Angry people fight, and sometimes fighters win!

She woke with a headache and a rush of the memory of failure. All the energy drained out of her, and she stared up at the sunlight on the plaster ceiling, finding it colorless and hard. If only it were still night and she could have more time alone. The thought of going down into the breakfast room to face all those bright smiles—the curious, the confident, the pitying—and having to pretend there was nothing wrong ... What everyone else could see of George and Sybilla was of no importance; she knew something the others did not, something that explained it all.

She curled up smaller, hunching her knees, and hid her head under the sheet a few moments more. But the longer she stayed, the more thoughts crowded her head. Imagination raced away, giving reality to every threat, every possible misery, till she was drowned with wretchedness. Her head throbbed, her eyes stung, and it was past time she got up. Millicent had already knocked at the door twice; morning tea would be cold. The third time she had to let her in.

Emily took extra trouble with her appearance, the less she cared the more it mattered. She hated color out of a pot, but it was better than no color at all.

She was not the last down. Sybilla was absent, and Mrs. March had elected to have breakfast in bed, as had Great-aunt Vespasia.

“You look well, my dear Emily,” Eustace said briskly. Of course, he was perfectly aware of the situation between George and Sybilla, but deplore it as she must, a well-bred woman bore such things discreetly and affected not to have noticed. He did not approve of Emily, but he would give her the benefit of the doubt unless she made such a charitable view impossible.

“I am, thank you.” Emily forced herself to be bright, and her irritation made it easier. “I hope you slept well too?”

“Excellently.” Eustace helped himself with a lavish hand from several of the chafing dishes on the massive carved oak sideboard, set his dish in his place, then went over and threw open the windows, letting in a blast of chill morning air. He breathed in deeply, and then out again. “Excellent,” he said, disregarding everyone else’s shivering as he took his seat at the table. “I always think good health is so important in a woman, don’t you?”

Emily could think of no reason why it should be particularly, but it seemed to be largely a rhetorical question, and Eustace answered himself. “No man, especially of a good family, wants a sickly wife.”

“The poor want it even less,” Tassie said bluntly. “It costs a lot to be ill.”

But Eustace’s pontification was not to be interrupted by something so irrelevant as the poor. He waved his hand gently. “Of course it does, my dear, but then if the poor don’t have children it hardly matters, does it? It is not as if it were a case of succession to a title, of the line, so to speak. Ordinary people don’t need sons in the same way.” He shot a sour look at William. “And preferably more than one—if you wish to see the name continue.”

George cleared his throat and raised his brows, and his eyes flickered first to Sybilla, then William, and lowered to his plate again. William’s face tightened sharply.

“Being sickly doesn’t stop them having children,” Tassie argued, spots of color in her cheeks. “I don’t think health is a virtue. It is a good fortune, frequently found among those who are better off.”

Eustace took a deep breath and let it out, in a noisy expression of impatience. “My dear, you are far too young to know what you are talking about. It is a subject you cannot possibly understand, nor should you. It is indelicate for a girl in your situation, or indeed any well-bred woman. Your mother would never have dreamed of it. But I’m sure Mr. Radley understands.” He smiled across at Jack and received a stare of total incomprehension.