Letty stared at her sister. "But I never meant This wasn't any of my doing! Mary "
Letty held out a hand in mute appeal.
Mary narrowed the midnight blue eyes her admirers had compared to sapphires, velvet, and the water off the coast of Cornwall. Currently, they were as hard as agate, and as dark as a scoundrel's heart.
"Who asked you to interfere?"
Flinging her glossy tresses over her shoulder, Mary retreated up the stairs with all the dignity of an exiled queen. In the painful silence, Letty could hear the swish of her hem sweeping across the steps like a train, until a door thudded shut on the story above and even that small sound was blotted out.
Letty's mouth opened and closed but Mary wasn't there to argue with anymore. All the reasons that had seemed excellent two hours ago turned to dust at the back of Letty's throat.
"Wait!"
Lifting the hem of her cloak, Letty scrambled up the stairs after her sister, slipping and skidding on the treads. It was as if twelve years had rolled back, and she was a roly-poly little six-year-old again, scrabbling after her older, more interesting sister, desperately wanting to be allowed to do whatever Mary did, play whatever Mary played.
But no matter how she tried, she was always the one stumbling after, the one with tears in her dress and scrapes across her knees. Always the one running behind.
On the landing, Mary's door was closed. Letty barreled into it, scarcely taking time to turn the knob before tumbling into the room. Inside, all the candles were lit, branches and branches of candles, burning like little stars against the dingy wallpaper. The wallpaper had once been white with blue stripes, but time and indifferent care had faded the whole to a dull pewter. The room bore the signs of hasty action: Mary's traveling dress lay strewn across the unmade bed, and a portmanteau slopping over with scarves slumped next to the window. Letty could see the corner of Mary's silver-backed brush sticking out of one corner, smothered beneath a length of spangled gauze.
Mary stood by her dressing table, which, like the wallpaper, had once been white. Her perfect profile was averted, staring fixedly at nothing in particular, or, rather, nothing that Letty could see. Her stillness terrified Letty more than a dozen screaming rages.
"Mary?" she whispered.
At the sound of Letty's voice, Mary's head slowly lifted, her spine straightening. By the time she turned, moving as deliberately as an actor in a court masque, she was once again entirely in command of herself, her face as composed as a porcelain fig-urine, and about as warm.
"What would you like me to say?" she asked. "Congratulations?"
"Of course not! Mary, you know I didn't I wouldn't " Letty's protests faltered against her sister's unruffled regard.
"But you did," said Mary.
It was a simple statement of fact.
And there was nothing Letty could say to refute it. In the face of Mary's implacable poise, all her perfectly sensible arguments crumbled on her lips, like so much chipped paint.
It had always been like this.
"You didn't love him," objected Letty. "You can't claim you did."
Mary reached to rearrange a strand of her hair, and turned to examine the effect in the spotted glass of the mirror. "No. I didn't. Did I? You know best, of course. You generally do."
Doubt lacerated Letty's heart with ice.
"If you do really care about him " she began uncertainly.
"I suppose it could be worse." Mary's voice was as finely edged as frost. "At least one of us gets him. We keep it all in the family."
She smiled at Letty, the tight, social smile of the hostess speeding the parting guest.
"If you don't mind, it is quite late. I need my sleep if I'm to set my cap at a new prospect tomorrow. Good night."
Letty found the door neatly closed in her face.
There was very little she could say to a door, especially when she didn't know what she wanted to say in the first place. Please don't hate me? I'll make it right? She had been so sure that Mary's feelings for Lord Pinchingdale went no deeper than his title and fortune. Admittedly, there was a good deal there to love, but it wasn't the sort of love that drove susceptible maidens into a decline. If she barged back in, demanding answers, Mary would merely smile her enigmatic smile and reply in stinging commonplaces, turning Letty's questions back against her like a mythical hero's enchanted shield. It was impossible to tell whether Mary was speaking the bald truth and mocking herself for it, or hurt and hiding it. Either way, the acid tone was the same. Either way, she kept Letty on the other side of a door harder to breach than wood.
It had always been that way, too.
Well, nothing was final yet. If Mary wanted him, she could have him. One hand on the banister, Letty hurried back down the stairs in search of her father. There had to be some way around this ridiculous situation. It was ridiculous, as ridiculous as one of the Greek tragedies of which her father was so fond, where the hero inevitably managed to charge straight into whatever doom he was trying to evade. Letty had never had much patience for those heroes. Yet here she was, having tried to thwart an elopement, winding up having accidentally eloped herself.
Accidentally eloped. The very words made Letty wince. One didn't accidentally elope. One accidentally picked up the wrong book at Hatchards, or paired a dress with the wrong-colored shawl. One didn't accidentally find oneself in a carriage at the dead of night with a member of the opposite sex, bound for matrimony.
She supposed Oedipus hadn't exactly intended to kill his father and marry his mother either.
Letty nearly barreled into her father, who was just starting up the stairs, nightcap on his head and candle in hand. "I must speak with you."
"Must you?" Mr. Alsworthy stifled a yawn. "As much as I hate to agree with your mother, the hour is, indeed, unnaturally advanced."
"Papa " Letty said warningly.
Mr. Alsworthy bowed to the inevitable. "If you must."
Letty's breath released in a long rush. "Thank you."
Mr. Alsworthy led the way into his book room, a tiny square of a room filled with the boxes of books he had insisted on bringing down from Hertfordshire, augmented by his purchases since their arrival in London. The volumes filled the shelves and tottered in uneven stacks along the corners of the room. With the ease of long practice, Letty edged between two tottering piles and removed another from the room's only extra chair.
"How did you get yourself into such a pickle, my Letty?" inquired Mr. Alsworthy kindly, as Letty lowered the tower of books to the floor with a decided thump.
"With the best of intentions," began Letty irritably.
Mr. Alsworthy wagged a reproving finger at his favorite child. "That should cure you of those."
"I thought we were being robbed."
Mr. Alsworthy grimaced at the dust furring the edge of his desk. "A most undiscriminating burglar, to be sure."
Letty had long ago learned that the only way to conduct a conversation with her father was to ignore his little asides. "Instead," she continued determinedly, "I found Mary packing for a midnight elopement."
"Unsurprising," murmured Mr. Alsworthy. "Unfortunate, but not unexpected."
"I went downstairs to talk some sense into Lord Pinchingdale," Letty hurried on before her father could interrupt again, "and was accidentally carried off. It was all a ridiculous mistake. And now " Letty frowned at a battered copy of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Mr. Alsworthy steepled his fingers in front of himself. "Shall I begin for you? You," he said, "wish to remove yourself from this hasty arrangement. Oh, yes, it is hasty. There can be no two ways about that."
"And ill advised," replied Letty decidedly.
"I said hasty, not ill advised." Mr. Alsworthy contemplated the tassel on his nightcap. "The two are entirely different things."
"Not in this instance," Letty put in firmly, before her father could go off on a philosophical tangent about the merits of hasty action, as exemplified by the ancients. "This is entirely unnecessary. Don't you see? We'll just put it about that it was Mary in the carriage instead of me. Everyone knows how Lord Pinchingdale feels about hergoodness knows he hasn't exactly been subtle. It's far more believable than his being discovered with me."
"Truth is stranger than invention?" mused Mr. Alsworthy, who had developed the cheerful ability to turn any situation into an aphorism. "Be that as it may, it won't do. I take it you were seen?"
"By Percy Ponsonby," retorted Letty. "But Percy Ponsonby is a positive pea-brain. Everyone knows Percy Ponsonby is a positive pea-brain."
"Nonetheless, he was there on the spot, and that counts for more than intellect in such situations as these."
"This is the man who leaped out of a second-story window because he thought it seemed like a good idea!"
"It does make one wonder about the continued survival of the human race, does it not?" When Letty declined to follow him down that particular byway, Mr. Alsworthy recalled himself reluctantly to the situation at hand. "People are willing to believe anything that bears the promise of scandal. And you, my dear, have created rather a nice little scandal for yourselfI know, I know," Mr. Alsworthy said as he raised an admonitory hand, "with the best of intentions."
"Do you think I was in the wrong?" demanded Letty.
"I think," said her father gently, "that you reacted the only way that you could, being no other than yourself."
It wasn't exactly vindication. In fact, it sounded uncomfortably like a kindly worded condemnation.
"What else was I to do?" protested Letty, planting both hands on the desk as she leaned forward. "Let Mary elope? I couldn't."
"My point precisely," said her father. While Letty grappled with that, he added, "Pinchingdale is a good man and will deal with you fairly."
"Fairly! He wants to strangle me!"
"I often feel so about your mother, but, as you see, we've rattled on these twenty-odd years together."
Letty looked mutinous. "There's no reason to ruin three lives over a silly mistake."
Her father leaned forward in his chair, and, placing both hands on the desk, looked at her directly for the first time. The watery eyes, magnified by spectacles, weakened by reading by candlelight, regarded her kindly, and Letty found herself remembering a million other interludes before her father's desk, a million times she had come to him with a household problem or an amusing anecdote or just for the comfort of his gentle, detached voice after her mother's shrieks and Mary's mercurial moods. For all his vagaries and absentness, she knew he loved her, and she believed, with the last desperate hope of the child she had been, that Papa couldn't possibly let anything bad happen.
"Be kind to your brother and sisters when you are a vis-countess."
There were times when speaking with her father was quite as maddening as dealing with her mother.
"I am not going to be a viscountess."
"I don't see that you have much choice in the matter, my dear. When one marries a viscount, the title tends to follow."
"What about Mary?"
"In as much as bigamy continues to be frowned upon, one assumes that she will not be marrying the viscount."
"Papa!"
"Well, my dear, if you persist in wearying me with inconsequentialities in the wee hours of the night, you must resign yourself to being wearied in turn. Although I must say "
"Yes?" Letty urged hopefully.
"I have frequently wondered why they are commonly called 'wee,' when these nocturnal hours always seem to stretch on longer than all the rest put together. Have you ever considered that, my dear?" Her father beamed innocently at her over his spectacles.
"No, I haven't," Letty said bluntly, shoving back her chair. "If you'll excuse me, I believe it's well past bedtime."
Why had she, after all, thought this occasion would be any different from any other? Her father lived in a dreamworld of books and philosophers, far more real to him than the demands of household and family. Hertfordshire or London, it was all the same to him. And whether it was repairing the roof or a daughter about to be rushed into an imprudent marriage, his reaction never varied: if it required any effort, he wanted nothing to do with it. Not even for his favorite child.
Letty wasn't numb enough that she didn't feel the sting of it.
"If you won't think of me," she said bitterly, "think of yourself. Who will keep you in candles?"
"Ah," said her father. "Think how selfless I am being. I don't know how we'll get on without you. Your mother will spend us into the poorhouse within the year, and your sister will undoubtedly find some new scandal to visit upon herself. As for your younger siblings, I have no doubt that they will contrive to find some way to bring the house down about our ears. Such a pity, but it can't be helped."
For a moment, Letty harbored a host of mad fantasies. She could flee far from London and find employment in a rural inn as a maid of all work. Of course, that fantasy discounted the fact that she hated scrubbing things and her accent would give her away in two seconds as awhat was the slang word for it? A "toff"? A "nob"? Something like that. How could she hope to pass as a serving wench when she couldn't even speak their language? As for running away and joining the gypsies, she wasn't at all sure they would have her. She couldn't play the guitar; her idea of fortune-telling was to say, "If you don't pick that up, you'll trip on it"; and she would look ridiculous in a kerchief and gold bangles.
Recognizing the stubborn set of her chin, her father warned, "Don't think to take matters into your own hands."
"What else am I to do?"
"Marry him," said her father bluntly. "He'll serve very well for you, my Letty, very well, indeed."
"You can't really mean for me to go through with this?"
Her father's only response was to blow out the candle.
Letty exited the study, head held high, determined to prove her fatherand Lord Pinchingdalewrong. All they had to do was make sure that the story didn't get out. How hard could it be?