“Dress-up?” Phoebe stormed up to her brother, hands on hips. “I’ll give you dress-up, you misogynistic prat!”
While the two raged at each other in what I could only assume was a prequel to double-sibling homicide, I snatched up the matching smoke-colored reticule Madame Belisle had left for me, and backed toward the door.
“So, yeah,” I called over the cursing. “I’ll just be down in Ladies’ Reception, trying to suss out info on that soiree Tesla attended. Attends . . . will attend . . . whatever.”
Phoebe, from her new spot atop the ironbound steamer trunk Oscar Tschirky had so thoughtfully provided, raged at her brother. “I’ll remind you I am not a child anymore, Collum Michael MacPherson! I’ve nearly as much experience as you, and?. . .”
I let the door click shut behind me. When those two reached the point of calling each other by their full names, things tended to get a little dicey.
The inside of Ladies’ Reception looked as if someone had picked up a room in one of Marie Antoinette’s Versailles apartments and plunked it down smack in the middle of New York City.
Everything in the oval-shaped room was white, gold, or pink. An inset ceiling soothed in a pastel mural of chubby angels and fluffy lambs, uplit by crystal chandeliers. As I was escorted inside, I eyed pieces of dainty furniture that looked as though they might collapse under the weight of a chunky cat.
In small groupings around the room, upper-crust women in high-necked day gowns gossiped over tiny sandwiches and tea in paper-thin china. High hair on swan necks pivoted my way as I entered. Having decided I was no one of consequence, they returned to their shark smiles and polite verbal eviscerations.
“Look, Jemima,” I heard one croon as I passed by. “Carlotta is wearing that lovely rose gown of hers . . . yet again.”
“Why, Letitia, dear,” said another between sips of tea. “That extra weight you’re carrying fills your face out so nicely.”
“Here you are, miss.” The maid spoke up, directing me to a seat next to a marble pillar. “I’ll see to it that tea is brought right away.”
As I perched on the edge of the tapestried chair, the corset dug into my rib cage. My spleen or pancreas or some other solid organ shifted into a space it was decidedly not meant to enter.
Least I don’t have to worry about slumping.
When the maid, bowing, brought my tea tray, I tried my best to appear haughty and bored, not nauseated and sweaty. The glances I kept getting from the little gossip groups, however, suggested that my attempt to fit in wasn’t working all that well. Or maybe they did that to every newcomer.
While I pretended to ignore the whispered conjectures about who on earth I was supposed to be, and where I’d gotten my “most interesting” gown, the middle-aged woman seated next to me resumed her hushed conversation with the pretty young girl seated stiffly on her other side.
“Don’t you dare swallow that.” The older woman thrust out a large linen napkin. “You know what Mr. Fletcher says. ‘Chew each bite one hundred times, and then spit it out. Never swallow.’”
“But.” The girl’s light eyes skittered around the room. “It’s only that I am so very hungry, Mother.”
“I see,” the mother said. “Well, if you wish for your ingratitude and disobedience to cause me another arrhythmia . . . If you want me to take to my bed again . . . Or . . .” Her plain features gone cunning, she looked straight at the girl. “Or perhaps you prefer to send me straight to my grave, Consuelo . . .”
The woman—?whose features bore an uncanny resemblance to a potato, and whose sturdy proportions beneath her expensive, pea-soup velvet suggested more than a few bites had made their way down her esophagus—?clutched at her heart. The girl’s face went white. “No, Mother. Oh, please, Mother, forgive me.”
As the stricken girl fluttered around her mom, the name pinged something in my memory files. Consuelo.
“How is it,” Phoebe had asked me once, around a mouthful of Moira’s famous jam sandwiches we’d carried out to the stables, “that you aren’t completely nutters?”
She didn’t elaborate, but I knew what she meant. Feet shuffling across the straw-strewn floor, I’d breathed in the homey scents. Hay and horse. Leather and wet stone and mud. Before following my best friend up the wooden ladder to the hayloft, I removed an apple from my pocket, held it to my nose. When my mare, Ethel, whuffed an impatient horsy breath into my hair, I let my forehead rest against her homely face. “I know,” I whispered. “I miss him too.”
In a liquid twilight, with the rain pounding outside, the cozy stable at Christopher Manor had felt like peace. Like safety and solidity. Protected by the overhang, Phoebe and I had settled in the hayloft door to peer out past silver sheets of rain that drained off the slanted slate roof. Far below, lambs cavorted across the Highland valley, bleating and getting very, very wet. Our feet dangled, heels kicking weathered stone.
Phoebe plucked a piece of straw from her mouth and let it drop to the churned-up mud below. “I mean, I can barely hold enough in this barmy noggin . . .” Tapping a fingertip to her forehead, she left behind a sticky red dot, a strawberry jam version of an Indian bindi. “To make it through exams. And once they’re done, I just let it go. But you. To think of all that’s rolling around beneath those gorgeous black curls of yours. It’s pure amazing. But I don’t get how your head doesn’t simply explode.”
Sometimes it felt like that. An explosion. When the vast information contained inside the flesh and blood and neurons of my brain expanded too quickly. When I lost control of it. When—?instead of teasing out one or two tidy threads—?a whole skein of it blew out at once in a massive, knotted tangle. Those were bad days.
Not this time, though. Fortunately for me, I’d never developed the same fascination with American history as I had with British or European. My mother taught me plenty about the land where we lived, of course.
But this was manageable. Green-tinged portraits of wealthy young girls with elaborate hair and gorgeous gowns flickered by. My fingers twitched as my mind flew through the data I’d collected on the notable people of New York City in the late eighteen hundreds.
Too old. Too young. Wart.
An image slowed, cleared. My eyes snapped open. I smiled into my teacup.
Gotcha.
“Had it from Mrs. Paget herself,” potato mama was saying, the napkin’s scalloped edges still dangling from her outstretched fingers. “The duke abhors plumpness in women. Several of his set will be in attendance. And what will His Grace say when he learns you appeared at your own mother’s soiree looking like a stuffed Christmas goose? We shall all be shamed.”