Ever After (5 page)

After a silence Eden said:

“Won’t he want to marry her?”

“He’s not quite fool enough for that,” Cabot replied.

“Then what about Bracken? Must there still be a scandal?”

“What happens in Europe won’t stink too loud over here, I hope. Anyway, she’s gone, and Bracken’s bank account won’t be bled to death any more, and he isn’t going to be harried into an early grave by a wife he hasn’t been, as we say, living with for some time. Maybe the boat will sink under the weight of her sins. Maybe Hutchinson will shoot her full of lead before he’s through, he all but wore a brace of Colt ·45’s at Delmonico’s! Let him have her, with our blessing. It’s better this way, hard as it seems.”

“But it still doesn’t leave Bracken free.”

“No. It only leaves him in peace. We shall have to trace them now, to get divorce evidence. It will be a long, expensive, legal business, I’m afraid, but we shall win in the end and write her off somehow.” He shifted cautiously to lay his face against hers. “Oh, my poor dear—tears. Don’t cry, sweetheart, he’ll weather it. Bracken has the stuff he needs, he won’t go under.”

Her arm went round his neck, and she held to him convulsively.

“I feel so
wicked
,” she sobbed, “to be so happy and
safe
with you, when everybody else is so
miserable
!”

I
N SPITE
of the extravagant gifts from Sally and the Murrays, it was a meagre Christmas nowadays by the standards of Ransom’s
childhood
. Ransom could remember when the family Christmases were spent at the Sprague plantation called Farthingale, which lay up the river near Westover and was burned down after Cold Harbor in ’64. Ransom could remember a household of twenty guests and as many more darky servants, not counting the pickaninnies; great feasts which went on for hours, and dancing which lasted till dawn in a big south room with six french windows on to a Virginian garden, and the portraits of Grandfather St. John and Grandmother Regina looking down from the walls.

It was all gone now, and even the exquisite Regina’s portrait was ashes. All gone, except these grandchildren of his own, dancing in the Sprague parlour in England Street while Melicent played waltzes for them on Fitz’s new grand piano. Ransom’s clear,
far-seeing
eyes followed the drifting couples with interest; Miles and Virginia, Bracken and Phoebe, Fitz and Sue, Eden and Sedgwick,
Cabot and Charl—odd how they paired off, with Dabney sitting beside Melicent at the piano. Wasn’t Miles going to dance with anybody but Virginia all evening? What would Phoebe think? Virginia wasn’t for bookish, bedazzled Miles….

“How long does it take to get presented at Court?” Miles was asking jealously.

“About three minutes. You place your right hand four inches below the Queen’s and kiss the air four inches above it, bending very low meanwhile in a Court curtsey—and then you retire
backwards
, contriving not to trip over your train, and dipping curtseys as quickly and gracefully as possible to all the other members of the Royal Family who happen to be present, as you go. You must on no account touch Her Majesty’s hand with your own, or with your lips. She hates that.”

“And what then?” asked Miles.

“Then you either go in a dizzy splendour to somebody’s
train-party
—that means one given specially for débutantes after their presentation—or else, if you haven’t a strong constitution, you go straight home in a state of total collapse and have a hot bath with ammonia in it and go to bed for the rest of the day to recuperate.”

Miles opened his eyes.

“From what?”

“Excitement. Of course I don’t expect it to prostrate
me
like that, but Marietta says the tension on the staircase and in the Picture Gallery—that’s the last room before the Presence Chamber—is really devastating, particularly if the Queen herself is receiving the presentations. She doesn’t always. Usually it’s the Princess of Wales or Princess Christian, deputizing. In that case you don’t kiss her hand, you only curtsey.”

“It sounds very complicated,” Miles puzzled. “Why is it so important?”

“Oh, Miles, really, what a heathen you are! It just
is
, that’s all! No English girl is anybody at all until she has been presented, and most of them come straight to it from the schoolroom and almost die of stage-fright. Of course it won’t be so bad for me,” Virginia added a little complacently, “because I’ve already seen something of the world in New York. At least I don’t expect to chuck the bunny in the corridor, like one poor girl the year Marietta made her début.”

Miles was horrified.

“You mean—?”

“Right at the feet of a gentleman-at-arms!”

“B-but what did they do?”

“Well, the girl felt better, of course—pretty shaky, but definitely improved. And everybody sort of made a screen by turning their
backs and pretending not to notice, while a tactful footman in powdered hair and white gloves came and tactfully mopped it up with a tactful cloth and tactfully retired. And everybody said it always happens at least once, and drew a breath of relief that now it was over.”

“I should think she would have just died in her tracks,” said Miles.

“Well, if she had, a powdered footman would have tactfully
removed
the corpse, and everyone would have moved up one place,” said Virginia. “It’s the waiting that destroys you. The
Diplomatic
Circle goes in first, and that keeps the rest of you hanging about for hours with your train over your arm.”

“Can’t you sit down?”

“Part of the time, if you’re lucky.”

Miles pondered it, as they danced. It was to him another world. He was beginning to feel as though he held Royalty itself in his own arms.

“Will Bracken go too?”

“Oh, Bracken goes to the levee and makes his bow to the Prince of Wales—wearing knee breeches, silk stockings, and a velvet coat at two o’clock in the afternoon! Wouldn’t you like to see him do it?”

“I reckon what I really meant to ask was how long will you be away,” Miles reflected.

“All summer. Maybe long enough to get some hunting in the autumn. But the Drawing Room is in May.”

“I’d like to go to London, I think,” said Miles, though it had never occurred to him before.

“Well, come on, then!”

“Oh, not this spring,” he qualified hastily. “I have to finish school first.”

“This is the year to go. It’s the Jubilee. Victoria has reigned for sixty years, think of that!”

“Heavens, how old is she?”

“Turning seventy-eight.”

“Nearly as old as Grandfather Day,” he marvelled.
“
His
grandmother lived to be a hundred and one. Think what you could remember! And now you can tell your grandchildren that you saw Queen Victoria!”

“Oh, Miles, don’t let’s talk about my grandchildren
yet
!”

“Would you marry an Englishman, if you got the chance?”

“Of
course
I shall get the chance, idiot, I’m going to take London by storm and have dozens of proposals!”

“Well, but would you?” he persisted, and his arm tightened a little.

Virginia looked up at him through her eyelashes and smiled her closed, mysterious smile.

“Would it ruin your life if I did?”

“Well, I—I—I—” Miles heard himself stammering and pulled up desperately. “I’d miss you terribly,” he got out.

“Every Christmas!” she nodded.

“We might—see more of each other—after I graduate. That is—if you—I’ll never forget you as you are tonight!” he stumbled on, caught in the maze of a new emotion. “That dress—the way you’ve got your hair—you’re the most beautiful thing I ever saw! Please come back—won’t you?”

The music stopped, and they stood still, both rather breathless, looking at each other for a moment before they realized that another waltz was not going to begin at once, and they moved away side by side to a sofa against the wall.

Bracken saw Phoebe’s eyes follow them and he said:

“Don’t worry about Virginia, my dear, she’s just practising.”

“She’s so lovely,” said Phoebe sincerely. “She makes me feel dowdy and plain.”

“Didn’t that gown you’re wearing come from Cousin Sally in Paris?”

“Oh, yes, but we made it over, sort of, because it was so low in the neck, and now it doesn’t look quite right, somehow—not like Virginia’s.”

“Virginia is an awful flirt, but it doesn’t mean anything, you know.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” she assured him stoutly. “Miles and I aren’t—we’re just friends.”

Meanwhile Eden had been saying to Sedgwick as they danced:

“I’m afraid Cabot is going to miss Bracken more than he anticipates, during the coming year. Do you think Fitz might like to take a job on the paper to fill in?”

Sedgwick gave her a surprised glance, and seemed to come to a quick decision.

“It might get him out of the rut,” he said. “Would he really be worth anything to Cabot, though?”

“We won’t know till we try. He might come for six months, and see how it goes.”

“Did Cabot suggest it?”

“We were talking about it last night,” she evaded. “He takes this business of Bracken’s very hard. I thought perhaps if he had another boy to train—one of the family—it might help to occupy his mind—”

“I’m at my wits’ end about Fitz,” Sedgwick confessed. “So I’m willing to try anything now. Shall I have a talk with him about it?”

“Let’s leave it to Sue,” Eden suggested. “Let’s get Sue to put it to him. She knows how to handle Fitz.”

“Better than I do, I admit! And about her going abroad with you in the spring—I think it’s a fine idea, and I’ve told her so.”

“I’m glad, Sedgwick. You’ll miss her here, I know, but it’s only for a few months.”

“Do you think you can persuade her?”

“I’m going to try. And I’ve still got an ace up my sleeve.”

E
DEN
played her ace next morning when she and Sue settled down for a chat in Sue’s bedroom after breakfast. The letter, she
explained
, had only been to break it gently.

“The fact is, Sue, honey, you’ve just got to go with Virginia in my place this year. Marietta has started a baby and isn’t at all well and has become an absolutely fraidy-cat and vows she’ll die if I’m not near her the whole time. So then Virginia threw a perfect fit for fear she’d have to give up being presented and miss the Jubilee, and I promised her you’d go
with her instead of me.”

“But I don’t know anything about going to Court and all that!” Sue protested. “I’d be paralysed with fright!”

“You won’t have to go to Court. In fact, you can’t, the lists will be closed. My dear friend Lady Shadwell has arranged
everything
and is going to act as Virginia’s sponsor, just as she did for Marietta three years ago. But no-child of mine is going to travel without a chaperone. All you’ll have to do is go with her to balls and house-parties and see that she doesn’t go on too much of a spree at the dressmakers’. And you’ll play hostess for Bracken too, of course. We’ve engaged a suite of rooms at Claridge’s Hotel, so you won’t have the bother of housekeeping.”

Sue was looking utterly bewildered.

“But,
Eden
, I’ve never stayed at an hotel in my life!”

“And it’s high time you did. Virginia has already been abroad half a dozen times, and Bracken knows London as well as he knows New York, it’s a second home to both of them, and so you can rely on them for everything. What’s more, you’ll have the time of your life with them! Bracken gives the most delightful little parties, and he said himself that you’d look very sweet at the other end of the table. You must come to New York a while before sailing, and we’ll get you some clothes—just leave all that to me,
please, you’re not to touch a penny of your own money from the time you leave Williamsburg till you return.”

“B-but Father—” Sue began feebly.

“Father seems stronger than he was last year, doesn’t he? Now, honey, don’t be a stick-in-the-mud,
Sedgwick
thinks you ought to go, you know he does!”

“He wants me to see the other Farthingale, down in
Gloucestershire
.”

“Yes, you must do that for him, he asked me to years ago and I’ve never got round to it, I’m ashamed to say. Bracken can ask Cabot’s handyman in London to find out all about it—a Mr. Partridge at the Temple. He’ll write the present owner and arrange for you to visit the house when it’s convenient. If they’re nice people you might accept an invitation to stay, later on. They might allow Bracken to send a man down to photograph the place for Sedgwick, he’d like that. And speaking of Sedgwick—he’s willing that Fitz should come up to New York and work for the paper and see how he likes it. It was Melicent’s idea. She thought it might help Fitz to find himself. Do you think you could persuade him to corned?”

Thus adroitly diverted from her own appalling prospects, Sue agreed to talk to Fitz without delay, and the sisters conferred
carefully
as to how best to put it to him. While they were still closeted, they heard Sue’s piano being played downstairs.

“There’s Fitz now,” Eden said. “Melicent said she’d send him over this morning. You’d better go down and deal with it, he always listens to you, and Sedgwick is pretty well distracted with him.”

Sue went down the stairs slowly, feeling as though a strong wind had blown through her. Herself to go to London, Fitz to go to New York—which was going to be worse?

He looked up at her from the piano as she entered the
drawing room
, rose and kissed her cheek, and settled back on the bench.

“This thing wants tuning again,” he muttered, striking the chords.

“Yes, dear,” she agreed absently, and stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder, wondering how to begin.

“Mother said there was something you wanted to see me about,” he suggested, his hands still moving on the keys.

“Fitz, honey—they want you to go to New York for a while. Bracken’s got to be in London—and they want to have one of the family in the office with Cabot, and—Miles is too young.”

“I couldn’t leave here now,” said Fitz unargumentatively. “My piano has just come.”