Passion and Pretense

by Susan Gee Heino

  Because that’s who she truly was now.

  A swift knock at the door, and the curt entry of Molly, her maid, snapped Sarah to attention.

  “Ah, miss, quite the party tonight!” Molly said, efficiently straightening her cuffs before she approached Sarah and struck a flint to light the candles at the mirror.

  “Yes,” Sarah said, again painting her face with the serene smile she had tried to adopt all night. She was certain it had only fallen a few times over the course of the evening, and that she had quickly recovered. “My mother does love to have her friends over.”

  Molly, whose professionalism belied her youth—she couldn’t have more than a few years on Sarah herself—hummed a noncommittal reply, as she began pulling the pins from Sarah’s hair.

  But the sweet relief of having her thick straight hair give in to gravity’s pull was negated by the truth Sarah knew, and Molly was too smart to say.

  “Be honest, Molly.” Sarah finally broke the silence that had been filled only by the brush being pulled through her hair. “Tonight was a disaster.”

  “It was no such thing, miss!” Molly declared, the brush never stopping. “The courses were all served on time. None of the china was cracked. And we could all hear her Ladyship’s laughter all the way in the kitchens.”

  It was true. Her mother’s laugh did carry—especially when it was forced.

  “I suppose your definition of success differs from mine.” Sarah sighed.

  “It might at that”—Molly shrugged—“but don’t think we didn’t see you standing up to dance with that Lord Seton. He seemed a jolly sort.”

  He seemed the sort to report back the answers to any and all of his probing questions to the nearest gossip columnist, Sarah thought wearily, recalling his pointed questions and his short breath, due to too-tight stays. Worse still, he was the only one to have asked her to dance. Maybe she no longer looked the type to wish for a dance.

  Maybe that was one of the times the ancient woman who lived beneath her skin had slipped through the surface.

  “Now, would you like to dress for bed, miss?” Molly asked, taking the pearl-headed pins and placing them precisely, in the case next to the matching jewelry. “Your parents are still in the drawing room, having a bit of cold cheese before retiring. Perhaps you’d wish to join them first?”

  Sarah saw herself blanche in the mirror. But while the thought of rehashing the evening with her parents was bad, the idea of lying in bed with nothing to do but rehash the evening to herself was even worse. She needed a distraction.

  A warm glass of milk. A lurid novel. Anything that could remove her from herself.

  From what they called her in whispers.

  “Thank you, Molly, I can see to my dress. The kitchens must need an extra hand this evening.”

  “You have the right of it, miss.” Molly smiled kindly as she curtsied. “Good evening, miss.”

  “Good night, Molly,” Sarah replied distractedly.

  A novel. From the library. She could slip down the servants’ staircase, and avoid the possibility of her parents hearing her on the main stairs. On the way back up, she could retrieve a glass of warm milk from the kitchens while enjoying the distracting comfort of their bustle and hum.

  A novel. That should do the trick.

  UNFORTUNATELY, WHILE ONE COULD IN THEORY AVOID the drawing room doors if one were, say, leaving the house, it was impossible to cross to the library without passing said doors.

  It was luck that had them closed.

  It was bad luck that they were thin enough to hear through.

  “It could have gone worse.” Sarah heard her father’s gruff voice as she tiptoed across the foyer. His usual booming jubilance was countered by a certain reserve. As if he were asking a question instead of knowing his own opinion.

  “Not much worse,” Sarah heard in a feminine grumble of reply. She would have continued on past the drawing room doors, she would have nodded and smiled curtly to the servants bent over pails to clean as she headed briskly to the library, shutting the door behind her.

  She would have done so—except for one thing. The voice that responded to her father had not belonged to her mother. It instead belonged to her sister, Bridget.

  “Come now, my dear,” Lady Forrester replied this time, the weariness apparent in her voice. “I thought the evening went…as smoothly as we could expect.”

  “Smoothly?” her sister scoffed. Sarah, via some previously unknown gift for subterfuge, silently went to the door and knelt at the jamb, half concealing herself behind a potted plant. She briefly locked eyes with a footman, who was busy dusting footprints from the marble tiles in the foyer. He looked back down again, and quickly resumed his work.

  “Smoothly would have been if Sarah hadn’t looked like she was about to faint the entire time,” her sister replied in that lecturing tone she took on when she thought she knew better than everyone else. “Smoothly would have been if Rayne’s wedding announcement hadn’t been printed just yesterday.”

  Sarah could feel the blood rising to her face. It was silent beyond the doors, Bridget’s pronouncement simply hanging in midair for the barest, longest of seconds.

  The announcement. God, what horrific timing.

  It had been almost four months since that terrible night, when Jason Cummings, the Duke of Rayne, had dashed everyone’s hopes and called off their engagement. Shortly thereafter, Lord and Lady Forrester had retired with their daughters for the spare remainder of the Little Season to Primrose Manor, the family seat near Portsmouth. Four months should have been plenty of time for people to forget. For Sarah to forget.

  It had been peaceful at Primrose. Comfortable. There, Sarah had room to breathe.

  But it was also quiet. And the quiet only let the memories slip in.

  As such, she had been determined to return to London for the Season proper. New gowns, new plays, new people. It would be, in her estimation, a fresh start.

  She had expected some questions. Some whispers.

  But not like this.

  It hadn’t helped that Jason had been so bloody good about the matter! Once the engagement was called off, he told everyone who would listen that absolutely no fault lay at Sarah’s door, that she was nothing if not a kind and deserving young lady. And then, blessedly, he left town for an extended stay on the Continent.

  But when Jason left London, he left the gossipmongers behind.

  The day after they first arrived back, the gossip columns noted their arrival. Strange, as no one really noted the comings and goings of the Forresters before. They were proper young ladies of good family, of course, but not high ranking enough or scandalous enough to pique a newspaperman’s interest. For heaven’s sake, her father was president of the boring, stuffy, academic Historical Society. The Forresters could not have been less salacious if they tried.

  But there it was. In bold print.

  “The Girl Who Lost a Duke Returns to Town.”

  After that, Sarah avoided the papers.

  So she hadn’t known about the announcement. Until yesterday, when one of her mother’s “friends” told her.

  “Oh my dear,” Lady Whitford said, coming over to clasp her hands in a show of sympathy early in the morning. Too early, really, to be paying calls. And far too early to be wearing such a ridiculous silk costume of patriotic ribbons across her bodice. But there she was, her round face shining with predatory concern, the feathers from her striped turban flopping into her earnest eyes. “How can you stand it? How can you go on?”

  And then she told her. The Duke of Rayne had been married last week in Provence, to noted historian Winnifred Crane. Sarah tried to feel something. Anything. Other than a wistful sort of dread.

  Because, while Sarah had been certain that she would be quite able to go on, contrary to Lady Whitford’s opinion, it seemed more and more people were just as certain that she wouldn’t. She couldn’t, they’d said. Enough people repeated the same thing to her with wide, sad eyes, and thus
she began to question herself.

  Would she be able to go on? Should she even try?

  She held out a small hope that something, anything would happen to distract the population. A global catastrophe, a declaration of war, anything. But sadly, the only bit of gossip involved some gentleman who got caught in, and then managed to escape from, Burma—and since most people could not locate Burma on a map, it was not of nearly enough interest to waylay the ogling of the “Girl Who Lost a Duke.”

  Therefore, the dinner party that Lady Forrester had planned for weeks, as a casual reintroduction of herself as a hostess, while also easing her daughters into society again, had been a clamorous game of expectations. People had been expecting her to break. To make some sort of comment about the situation.

  And the whispers and stares had made her want to do nothing more than oblige them.

  To give in to gravity’s pull.

  Bridget’s imperious voice broke the silence from within the drawing room, and broke through Sarah’s racing thoughts. “And smoothly would have been if anyone had bothered to remember that they were there to meet me, too.”

  “Bridget!” her mother admonished, shocked.

  “It’s true, Mother!” Bridget replied, adamant. “Any woman that spoke to me made sure to ask, ‘Oh, and how is your sister?’” Bridget’s voice took on a quality of mock concern, her pitch eerily like that of Lady Whitford. “And any man who thought to talk to me could barely put two words together, as if they were afraid that I was tainted with the same man-repelling stain!”

  “For heaven’s sake, Bridget—” her mother tried, but Bridget would not be stopped.

  “This was to be my Season. How am I supposed to catch a husband when Sarah looks like she’s going to break into pieces at the idea of a dance?”

  “Bridget, that’s enough!” her father interrupted. “Such petulance is ugly.”

  Sarah could have heard a pin drop. Their father usually left the set downs to their mother. If such words from him landed heavily on Sarah all the way through the door, she could only imagine her sister’s expression.

  “Ugly it may be,” Sarah finally heard Bridget say shakily, “but it is the truth. And if you don’t do something, we may as well all dye our clothes black to join Sarah in mourning her lack of husband!”

  Sarah barely scooted back behind the potted palm in time to avoid the swinging door as her sister made a dramatic exit, unknowingly marching past the object of her fury and up the stairs without a backward glance.

  The door slowly creaked closed, a million years passing before the latch caught. Sarah caught the eye of the scrubbing footman again, but this time, before he looked away, Sarah knew the blush that crept up over his face was a mirror to hers.

  The young footman might feel for her, but Sarah was alone in her humiliation. Of all people, Bridget! Of her whole family, Bridget had been the most supportive, the one who had propped her up the most through the winter months in Portsmouth with little to do but watch the ships sail in and out of the harbor. The one who had immediately sworn a lifelong vendetta of hatred against the Duke of Rayne, as all good sisters do. The one who had their trunks packed to come back to London before the decision had even been made.

  Foolishly, Sarah had thought she was doing so in support of her. The fact that it was to be Bridget’s debut Season had completely slipped her admittedly preoccupied mind. But obviously, it had not slipped Bridget’s.

  So now, not only was Sarah miserable and wretched, but her mere presence was destroying her sister’s Season, too.

  Brilliant.

  Sarah was so caught up in her own burning frustration, she almost missed her father’s voice when it rumbled forth again.

  “I received a letter from the Portsmouth steward,” he began, his voice hesitant and careful. “He has asked that I return to oversee the installation of the new well. It shouldn’t take me more than a few days.”

  “Darling, I really would prefer if you didn’t leave just now.” Her mother’s voice was honey and lemon—soothing but stern, the way it always sounded when she negotiated for what she wanted. “Or if you must, make it as short as possible. The Season has only just begun, and if Sarah is to endure, she needs the support of the family behind her.”

  “I was thinking I would take Sarah with me,” her father replied, much to Sarah’s own surprise. And her mother’s, apparently.

  “What on earth for?” Lady Forrester asked.

  Her father paused a moment before answering.

  “I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

  There was a pause, heavy in the air.

  “Neither did I,” her mother finally said softly. “But we’d hoped…”

  “Hoped, but not prepared,” her father countered.

  In her mind’s eye, Sarah could see her father. He was likely sitting on the edge of her mother’s favorite stuffed settee, looking down at his interlaced fingers, twiddling his thumbs the way he always did when he was thinking.

  “I don’t know if she’s ready for this. I don’t know that I am.”

  Sarah’s heart, dampened under layers of her own effort, went out to her father. Outside of herself, he had been the one most hurt by the Event.

  Her father had loved Jason. They became acquainted as members of the Historical Society, and Lord Forrester (father of three daughters) had been practically giddy at the idea of not only a son-in-law but also one with whom he could converse for hours and hours about antique pediments and arcane painting techniques.

  “Oh my darling.” Her mother’s voice came through the thin door, placating her husband. “Maybe we can find a way to take Sarah’s—and your—mind off the troubles.”

  “I would have him removed from the Historical Society if I could,” her father stated, his voice muffled by what Sarah had to assume was her mother’s shoulder. “But I cannot allow personal feeling to belie—”

  “I know, I know,” she soothed. “But for now, let us be thankful that Rayne had the good grace to remove himself to the Continent. And let us hope he—”

  And that was the point that Sarah decided she had heard enough.

  Because as hard as it was to think and hear about her parents’ disappointments in her—it was infinitely more difficult to dwell on the Duke of Rayne, where he was, and what he was doing.

  She stood up abruptly, and crossed the foyer as fast as her feet would carry her to the library, without concern that her footfalls were too loud or rapid to be mistaken for a servant’s. Without care for the eyes of the footman following her. And without any idea for whom she would meet inside the library’s doors.

  “Oh my God!” Sarah cried, coming to a sudden halt.

  “I’m afraid not, Miss Forrester,” the elegant figure that lounged with a volume of poetry in her hand said. “It’s just me.”

  “L-Lady Worth,” Sarah breathed, as breeding won out over shock and she curtsied. Phillippa, Lady Worth, the unofficial but undeniable reigning leader of the ton, did not smile and stand in return. Instead, she flipped the book shut and regarded Sarah with a bemused expression.

  “Oh, so you do know who I am. I was beginning to wonder if you remembered me at all from last Season.”

  “Lady Worth, of course I remember you,” Sarah replied, blushing to the roots of her hair. “I attended your garden party last year, and of course you were at…” my engagement party, she stopped herself from staying. Instead she shook herself. “I apologize, let me fetch my parents. It is quite odd hours for calling, but—”

  “Yes, I am aware it is quite odd hours for calling,” Lady Worth replied as she stood to her full height. She was dressed in easily the most beautiful evening gown Sarah had ever seen, but to Lady Worth, it was likely just her Tuesday ensemble. “Your butler may seem stern, but entry was fairly simple. I just told him I had been here for your supper party, and had left a reticule behind. He allowed me to search on my own.” Lady Worth suddenly frowned. “I am going to recommend to your mother that you reinf
orce the need for security with your staff. After all, I could have been a thief—or worse yet, a reporter.”

  “My mother,” Sarah repeated, latching onto a solid form throughout Lady Worth’s bewildering speech. “Yes, allow me to fetch her, she’s just across the hall…”

  “Never mind that.” Lady Worth waved her hand in dismissal of the idea. “I have come here to see you.”

  “Me?” Sarah squeaked.

  “Yes, child. For heaven’s sake, when did you become such a mimic? Last Season you seemed to have more brains that that.”

  Sarah, not having an answer to that, prudently remained silent.

  “How long have you been in town, Miss Forrester?” Lady Worth asked, as nonchalant as if she had asked the question in full daylight in a room full of society ladies.

  “A fortnight, ma’am,” Sarah answered, her eyes following Lady Worth as she gently paced the carpet.

  “And in that fortnight, how many invitations have you received from me?”

  “Ah…I am uncertain…” Sarah hedged.

  “Lucky for you, I am entirely certain. Two. You have received two invitations from me to come to tea. I know this because I rarely ask anything of anyone more than once.”

  “Oh,” she replied, knowing she sounded stupid and out of her depth…because in truth, she was. “I think, ma’am”—she tried valiantly—“that my mother thought—that is, she didn’t want us to accept any invitations until after we had settled…”

  But at that, Lady Worth stopped pacing, and simply stood with her hands on her hips. “I have always preferred the truth to pretty lies, my dear. But if you insist upon continuing with that sentence at least speak it with conviction.”

  Sarah’s head came up sharply. She met the challenge in the taller lady’s eyes. And decided to rise to it.