The Deception of the Emerald Ring pc-3

by Лорен Уиллиг

  Letty pressed her eyes shut again, fighting another wave of intense nausea, complicated by a pain that began somewhere behind her temples and marched relentlessly across the breadth of her forehead, like an entire troop of soldiers with a maliciously firm tread, all banging regimental drums.

  With a little whimper, Letty pressed one tight fist to her forehead in a futile attempt to make the battalions stop marching.

  "You've been sleeping forever," announced a cheerful voice, drilling against Letty's head like a hammer against tin.

  Letty could only groan.

  "You don't suffer from mal de mer, do you?" continued the relentless voice. "Because if you do, the voyage is going to be dreadfully dull."

  "Voyage?" croaked Letty, wondering if she could still be dreaming, and, if so, how she could feel herself hurt so. Her very skin felt sore.

  A weight plopped down next to her, causing the thin mattress to shift and settle. Letty swallowed hard as another wave of nausea surged against the back of her throat. Very slowly and carefully, Letty rolled from her side onto her back.

  "You are seasick, aren't you?" demanded the girl, because by now, Letty had managed to crack open her swollen eyelids, and could see that her tormentor was a girl with black hair that bobbed about her face in unfashionably long ringlets. She looked unfortunately corporeal for a figment of Letty's imagination.

  "I don't know," said Letty honestly. "I've never been to sea."

  The girl laughed and sprang up off the side of Letty's bed, and Letty revised her opinion of her companion's putative age. For all the childishness of her bouncing ringlets, her face lacked the roundness of youth.

  "Oh, I do like you! I thought I would, but you went to sleep as soon as you arrived last night, so it was impossible to be sure."

  "Last night," Letty repeated fuzzily. Her throat felt raw and strange, and her voice didn't sound like her own. "Please," she asked, around the drums in her head, "is there any water?"

  Her companion smiled brightly enough at her to make Letty's bloodshot eyes ache, flipped her dark curls over her shoulder, and announced, "I imagine there must be. I'll be back in a trice!"

  Letty let her head sink painfully back to the pillow, closing her aching eyes, weakly grateful to be left alone. Unfortunately, she was now entirely convinced that she had to be awake. She felt too awful not to be awake. She hadn't felt this awful since…well, never. Was there still plague in the world? If there was, Letty had caught it. The room swayed again, and Letty's stomach swayed with it. Whatever she had was clearly the prelude to a lingering and painful death.

  Letty touched a tentative hand to her head, marveling that even the muscles in her arm hurt. The skin of her forehead felt cool and dry to the touch. Not ill, then, but…An unaccustomed glimmer on her finger caught her attention, a band of gold mounted with a greasy-looking green stone.

  Married. Good Lord, she was married.

  Letty swallowed hard over another surge of nausea as memories began returning, disjointed memories of the endless walk down the aisle, the groomsman's impudent eyes on her modest bodice, the shuttered look on her husband's face as he had turned away from her in a crowded ballroom. After that, it all grew distinctly fuzzier. Letty passed her furry tongue over her chapped lips and tried to remember. Lady Henrietta had been there, hadn't she? And Mr. Dorrington. Letty remembered the dancing points of candle flames in a dark room—even the image of light remembered made her wince—and Mr. Dorrington pressing a glass into her hand, calling her Lady Pinchingdale, and saying something about a horse. A horse? None of it made any sense. There was something else, something crucial. Pink ribbons…it had something to do with pink ribbons.

  Pink ribbons and a midnight flight from the house. Oh, goodness. Letty clasped both hands over her mouth. Her trunk had still been packed, and she had ordered a footman to bring it downstairs, blithely informing him that she and Lord Pinchingdale were going on honeymoon, and urging him to tell his friends, all his friends, especially if any of those friends happened to be in service in the Ponsonby household. Letty winced at the memory. Oh, dear, she hadn't really, had she? But she had, she really had. Why would she remember something like that if it hadn't happened? And there was her trunk, lashed to the wall to keep it from skidding.

  Letty let out a little moan that had nothing to do with the pain in her head.

  It would have been less upsetting to have been kidnapped. At least then she wouldn't feel quite so irredeemably idiotic.

  "Oh, you poor dear!" The black-haired girl waltzed back in, letting the door slam behind her with a reverberating bang that set off an entire cannonade in Letty's skull. Letty was willing to forgive her that for the life-giving ewer she held in one hand. A bucket dangled from the other.

  "The nice man suggested I bring this as well," reported the girl, swinging the bucket so enthusiastically that Letty instinctively flinched. "Just in case." She dropped the bucket, setting off a new avalanche of cranial pain, and poured from the ewer into a glass that looked like it had seen better days.

  Letty was in no mood to be picky. Taking the glass, she ventured, "Have we…met?"

  "Oh, what an addlepate I am!" The girl looked like she was about to bounce on the bed again, but, mercifully, she checked herself and stuck out a hand instead. "I'm Emily Gilchrist."

  "I'm Laetitia Als—" Letty broke off. She wasn't anymore, though, was she? She was Laetitia Pinchingdale now. But that wouldn't do, either, to announce to the world that she had run off without her husband. As if she hadn't caused enough scandal already! "Laetitia Alsdale. I'm Laetitia Alsdale," she finished, on a desperate impulse.

  "Are you from London, Miss Alsdale?"

  "Mrs.," amended Letty, the gears of her mind grinding very slowly, but beginning to grind for all that. "Mrs. Alsdale. I'm…a widow."

  "But you're not in mourning?"

  "It was very recent," prevaricated Letty. "I hadn't the time to get clothes made up."

  Emily nodded as though that made sense, setting her determinedly childish curls bobbing. "There'll be plenty of time for that when we get there. I do love shopping, don't you?"

  Letty ignored the question at the end of Emily's statement. Running her tongue over her cracked lips, Letty forced herself to utter the fateful question. She thought she might know the answer, but…

  "Get where?"

  Emily regarded her indulgently. "You are bamming me, aren't you, Mrs. Alsdale? Dublin, of course. Where else would one go on a Dublin packet?"

  Chapter Eight

  By the following Wednesday, it was quite clear that he just wasn't calling. Even allowing for boy-time, a week and a half meant serious time lapse. Three days was normal. A week? Not optimal but still okay. But a week and a half? Lack of interest.

  Pushing my computer bag more firmly up on my shoulder, I battled my way through the throngs of tourists on Queensway up toward the Whiteley's shopping center. Depression or not, a girl had to eat, and my little fridge had been remarkably barren of late.

  Rather like my love life.

  I had spent the past week in that purgatorial state between elation and despair, leaping for the phone every five minutes, drifting off into gold-tinged daydreams on the tube, and generally behaving like a besotted fourteen-year-old. I had replayed every word we'd ever spoken—with improvements—overanalyzed every look, and named all of our children. There were three of them, and they were named Amy, Richard, and Gwendolyn (by then I'd hit the outer realms of slaphappiness). They all had Colin's golden hair and my blue eyes, except for little Gwendolyn, who had red hair like me.

  It was the children I really felt sorry for—poor little things, with no chance to ever exist.

  To my right, Warehouse beckoned, with large signs boasting up to forty percent off on selected items. Usually, those red signs would have occasioned a fierce struggle with my better nature, an immediate abrupt turn to the right, and the purchase of completely unnecessary articles of clothing that would do nasty things to my credit card st
atement and live at the back of my closet with the tags still on for the next six months. Today, the sale signs failed to exercise their usual siren call. My feet and mind both continued inexorably on their chosen paths.

  Last Monday, still buoyed by memories of the weekend, I had plunged into Letty Alsworthy's letters with nothing but contempt for the blind devotion that led Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe to be bamboozled by her scheming sister. It was, I reflected smugly, just like a man to be so taken in by a lovely face and a vapid smile—and most likely other attri-butes as well. The only thing that confused me was how so intelligent a man as Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe could fool himself so thoroughly. I had two theories, neither the sort one shares with academic journals, one being that the smartest men are often the most at sea when it came to dealing with the opposite sex (witness every computer science major I had known in college, and most of my male colleagues in grad school). Either that, or it was a reaction to the war, like all those men who rushed off to get married before shipping off for the front in World War II. The situation wasn't quite the same, but I would bet if I looked into it, there is literature on the topic about the need to create stability in a sea of troubles, the reestablishing of the fundamental human connection in the face of barbarism, and so on.

  I didn't even have a war to blame.

  I scowled at my own reflection in the window of Jigsaw as I stalked past, hating the comparison but unable to think of any convincing way to refute it. I knew it was true. A fat lot of right I had to be psychoanalyzing Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe, when I was doing the exact same thing, pinning all my hopes and desires on someone I barely knew—largely because I barely knew him. There's nothing so attractive as a blank slate. Take one attractive man, slap on a thick coat of daydream, and, voilа, the perfect man. With absolutely no resemblance to reality.

  After all, what did I know of Colin, other than that he was a descendant of the Purple Gentian, he had a very nice aunt, and he was appallingly rude to visiting researchers? That last wasn't exactly a plus. I didn't even know where he had gone to school or what he did for a living. Somehow, in our few encounters, it had never come up. For all I knew, he could be the Demon Barber of West Sussex, slicing off people's heads and baking them into pies.

  So much for Geoff building a future out of a pair of fine eyes. I had spun a fable out of a handsome face, a cute accent, and a few chance references that happened to resonate with me. Taken apart, bit by bit, my treasured hoard of memories was as tarnished and trumpery as a child's ring fished out of the bottom of a cereal box. So he had mentioned Charles II. Big deal. We were in England; unlike America, one could expect a certain basic familiarity with the country's more notorious monarchs. I had fallen, I realized, into that horrible, early stage of crush where everything becomes a point of commonality. If he compliments a song, your heart takes wing because, yes, you like music, too! Clearly, you are Meant to Be.

  As one of my college roommates put it after I had run through a breathless round of perceived similarities that didn't mean much of anything at all, "Ohmigod! He breathes! And you breathe! It must be love!"

  I hadn't succumbed to one of those all-consuming crushes since college. I had assumed it was one of those things one suffered through once and then got over—like the chicken pox. Unpleasant, messy, embarrassing, but once you've had it, you're done for life. I should have remembered that there are those rare sufferers who are cursed with recurrence—and it's always worse the second time around.

  The weather didn't help. It had rained for four straight days, the sky night-dark when I left my flat in the morning, with no discernible change by the time I returned home at night. I had begun to feel like the little girl in the Ray Bradbury story who lives on a planet where the sun only comes out once in a cycle of years, and then for a brief hour while she's locked in the broom closet. In my case, it was the British Library, not the broom closet, but it came to much the same thing. My raincoat was beginning to attain the dispirited air of an old dog, limp and slightly mangy. We won't even discuss the state of my shoes.

  If the research had been going well, perhaps none of this would have mattered. I could forge boldly through the dripping umbrella spokes outside the British Library, sit obliviously in the steamy confines of the tube, and endure with equanimity the ruin of my raincoat. But today I had come to the end of the Letty Alsworthy papers—at least, all the Letty Alsworthy papers the British Library would acknowledge owning—and I was no closer than I had been before to discovering the machinations of the Black Tulip in Ireland. Geoff and Letty's marital difficulties might be interesting reading, but their romantic peccadilloes did not a dissertation chapter make. I could just see the expressions of polite skepticism on the faces of the scholars assembled for the North American Conference on British Studies as I delivered my paper on "The Lives and Loves of the Associates of the Purple Gentian." They'd be dropping off in droves. And, incidentally, so would my grant money.

  At that point, I was so low that I couldn't muster more than a feeble flicker of alarm at the thought.

  If I were being fair, it wasn't really that bleak. I might have run to the end of the Alsworthy papers, but I did have a hunch as to where to look next—a hunch that didn't involve calling on either Colin or his aunt. Letty had written her parents, claiming to be on a wedding trip with her husband, but another letter, the very last in the collection, told a different story entirely. In the last two of her letters, addressed to her father immediately after her marriage, Letty had confided that she had followed her disappearing husband to Ireland. She urged her father to tell her mother that she had accompanied Lord Pinchingdale on a honeymoon trip, in the hopes that her mother would then blithely spread the misinformation around town. She was traveling, she informed her father, as a widow, under the name of Alsdale, and any urgent matters should be addressed to her in Dublin under that name.

  I had to admire her nerve. It was beyond gutsy of her to pick up and go after her errant husband like that. Raw indignation had seethed through every line of that last letter, from her terse account of her husband's departure to the punctures in the paper where she had dotted her I's with piercing precision. Would I have had that sort of nerve in a similar situation? Probably not, when I couldn't even bring myself to call Colin. I would have sat alone at home and called it pride—much as I was doing now.

  Tomorrow, I promised myself, dodging around a crowd of teenagers, I would type "Alsdale" into the computers at the British Library and see what came up. With any luck, there might be something from Letty's sojourn in Ireland, something I could use to track the movements of Jane and Geoff without having to resort to the Selwicks. And if my search for the apocryphal Mrs. Alsdale yielded nothing…Well, I'd have to think of something else. Maybe even a trip to the archives in Dublin, in the hopes that something might turn up there. But I would not, not, not call Colin. I thought about it and added another "not," just in case the previous three had seemed insufficiently resolute. He had made it quite clear that he didn't want to speak to me, and if he didn't want to speak to me, I didn't want to speak to him. So there.

  Ducking around the big Christmas tree that was already up in the middle of the mall, I skirted the booth selling sheepskin slippers and made straight for the Marks & Spencer at the far end of the mall. Above me, the PA system was already blasting out Christmas music, and the front display of Whittard's tea shop boasted a wide array of winter-themed items, from little mulling packets for wine to tins of cocoa decorated with stylized snowflakes and happy skaters. The front of Marks & Spencer was piled high with tinned plum pudding and dispirited-looking miniature fir trees in gold foil–covered pots. If they looked brown around the edges now, I couldn't imagine how they would survive till December, much less Christmas. It was only mid-November now, hardly late enough in the season to start buying Christmas trees.

  At home, it would be nearly Thanksgiving.

  Pammy would be having a Thanksgiving dinner for expats and assorted hangers-on at her m
other's house in South Kensington next week, but it just wasn't the same. There wouldn't be my little sister dangling bits of Aunt Ally's organic pumpkin bread to the dog under the table, or any of the hundreds of other unspoken traditions that made Thanksgiving more than just another dinner party. Picking up a black plastic shopping basket from the pile in the front of the store, I wandered dispiritedly past the rows of preprepared sandwiches, unable to get excited about the wonders of egg and cress or chicken and stuffing, all in triangular little packages. It wasn't the right kind of stuffing. Stuffing wasn't supposed to be crammed into sandwiches and sold in plastic wedges. Stuffing wasn't stuffing without gobs of turkey fat clinging to the mushrooms and a large, bickering family digging into the gooey mess, scattering bits of corn bread across the tablecloth. Here, they ate stuffing in sandwiches and turkey for Christmas.

  I was sick of here.

  Everything that had seemed quaint when I first arrived in London had become alien and irritating. Those tiny little bottles of shampoo that cost as much as a full-sized one back home. The way the coffee shops all inexplicably closed by eight. The strange way street names had of changing halfway down a block. The fact that I couldn't get a tub of American peanut butter and no one seemed to sell skirt hangers. I wanted to go home. I missed my little apartment in Cambridge where the sink leaked and the closet door wouldn't close. I missed the rutted brick streets of Harvard Square, where my heels stuck between the stones and my boots slid out from under me in slushy weather. I missed the musty, charred smell of Peet's Coffee that clung to my hair and wouldn't wash out of my sweaters. The thought of the microfilm readers at Widener made me weak with nostalgic sorrow.