Лорен Уиллиг - The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

It didn't seem to matter to Geoffrey. His eyes followed his wife as she made her way across the room, his lips tilted up on one side in a smile so intimate that it hurt to observe it. There wasn't anything lustful about his gaze. Mary had seen enough lust in her time to become inured to its expression. It was something much more personal, that spoke of genuine fondness.

He had never looked at her like that.

"Must find Papa!" said Mary brightly, sweeping up her skirts in one hand. "Until supper, then."

For a man who had once haunted her steps and doted on her smiles, he barely seemed to realize she had gone.

Knowing the importance of a good exit, Mary kept her head high and her back straight as she moved deliberately towards the heavily carved door that led out to the gallery that overlooked the Great Hall. She let a slight smile tease the edges of her lips, the sort of smile that always made gentlemen wild to know what she was smiling about. It drove women equally wild for entirely different reasons.

Pausing in her leisurely progress, she stopped to examine a particularly busy portion of tapestry with every sign of antiquarian absorption. Two paces away, she couldn't remember a single thread of it. All she could see was Geoff's dark eyes drifting away over her shoulder towards her sister.

A woman scorned had a certain grandeur to it; a woman forgotten was merely pathetic.

Only when she had achieved the empty space beyond the door did she allow herself the luxury of defeat. Letting her seductive smile melt into blankness, Mary trailed one pale hand along the worn wood of the balustrade that ran along the upper gallery of the hall below. According to Geoffrey, a Pinchingdale bride had flung herself from that balcony rather than submit to a loveless marriage. More fool she, thought Mary. What was it about idiocy that attained veneration through sheer age? Mary had never understood why Juliet refused to marry Count Paris. He was a far better match than that silly young Romeo. And then to drink poison…well, there was just no accounting for some people. Mary would have taken Count Paris and his Veronese palazzo in a heartbeat.

The walls of the upper gallery had been paneled in dark wood, each square carved with a portrait head in profile. Wattle-necked women in stiff headdresses and long-nosed men glowered at Mary from their coffered prisons. The fabric of Sibley Court hadn't changed much since the Armada. It suited Letty brilliantly. She looked right against the finicky paneling and the musty old tapestries, right in a way that Mary never would have. If Mary had had her way, she would have torn the whole monstrosity down and started all over again in good clean marble.

Lucky for Sibley Court, then, that Geoffrey hadn't married her. Lucky for Geoffrey, lucky for Letty, lucky for everyone.

If she was being honest, lucky for herself as well. All through the era of his adoration, Pinchingdale had been a crashing bore.

Even a boring husband was better than being left on the shelf, forced to rely on the charity of her relations, pointed at and whispered about by giggling girls fresh in their first Season.

Reaching the end of the upper gallery, Mary slipped beneath an elaborately carved lintel, no proper destination in her head except away. She found herself in a seemingly endless corridor, where the plastered ceiling stabbed down in regular points like pawns suspended upside down. After a moment of disorientation, she realized where she was. Originally constructed during the reign of Henry, before being "improved" during the tenure of his daughter, the house had been built in the shape of an H, in a rather obvious compliment to the monarch. She was in the crossbar of the H, a long and narrow gallery that connected one wing of the house with the other.

On either side of her, narrow-faced Pinchingdales gazed superciliously down on her, their gilded frames spotted with age. There was at least half a mile between the two wings of the house, long enough to display three centuries' worth of relations and even one or two particularly prized pets. Mary wandered aimlessly among them, absently noting the dull sheen of painted jewels, repeated over and over. There was the large pearl that hung from the waist of an Elizabethan Pinchingdale; the three matched sapphires set into the collar of Spotte, A Faithfull and Lovinge Companyon (there was something decidedly smug about the set of Spotte's paws); the emeralds that adorned the neckline of a woman with tight curls and a simpering mouth, holding tight to the hand of a cavalier in a plumed hat (one assumed from her grip that he must be the donor of the emeralds); and the famous diamond parure worn by Geoffrey's grandmother to the coronation of George II, impressive even rendered in oil and dim with dust.

Those diamonds made up for a great deal of boredom.

At the time, it seemed like a fair trade. She got the diamonds and Pinchingdale got her, an ornament for an ornament, each with its price. She knew her price and she set it high.

What else, after all, was there to do? She didn't have it in her to be a bluestocking and write dour tracts. She had no interest in educating other peoples' brats. The days when a woman could make a career as a royal mistress had long since passed. Mary had always thought she would make an excellent monarch — the skills required for international diplomacy were much the same as those that Mary used to keep the various members of her entourage in check — but no one had had the consideration to provide her with a kingdom. There was only one game to be played, so Mary played it and, she had always thought, played it well.

Obviously, she had been wrong. Because, in the end, she had lost the game.

She had also come to the end of the gallery. Ahead of her, an immense, mullioned window looked out onto blackness. In the daytime, it was no doubt a pleasant prospect, looking out over the vast sweep of gardens and park that stretched out from the back of the house. At night, the leaded panels glistened like a hundred obsidian eyes. On either side of the window, doorways led off to realms unknown, unlit by either candle or moonlight. A sweeping curtain of red velvet shielded each opening, dragged back on one side like a cavalier's cloak.

Mary lowered herself slowly onto the matching red velvet that cushioned the window seat. Ordinarily, she never sat at parties. It wrinkled one's dress. Tonight, she couldn't bring herself to care. It felt good to relax into the well-worn velvet of the ancient cushion, good to stare into nothingness and not have to smile and pretend that she didn't mind that her sister had married her best chance at matrimony. Her short, plump, practical, managing little sister. Who had nonetheless learned the secret to catching a man's heart and holding it. Mary had failed to master the holding bit.

With the moon obscured by clouds, the prospect in front of her loomed as blank as her future. It didn't matter that she had been voted Most Likely to Marry an Earl three years running in the betting books at White's. No earl had proposed. Not marriage, at any rate.

What was she to do with herself? For the first time in her life, Mary simply didn't know. Her beauty had always provided both means and goal, ever since her nurse had first leaned over her cradle and clucked, "Eh, she'll marry a prince, that one, see if she doesn't!" But she hadn't. She wasn't going to. The results of three Seasons didn't lie.

Mary rested her elbows on the stone of the windowsill, staring sightlessly through the phantom tracery of her own face. What did it matter if her elbows wrinkled? She had three sonnets to them already. Four would be superfluous.

Behind her, the worn boards of the gallery creaked. Not ghosts, as Geoffrey had promised all those months ago, but a human tread. Someone else had escaped to the quiet of the Long Gallery.

Mary would have preferred a ghost. A specter might be ignored, while a fellow guest would expect conversation, might even try to persuade her back into the discomfort of the Great Chamber. Hadn't she smiled enough for one evening?

Holding herself very still on her bench, Mary hoped her presence might go unnoticed in the uncertain light. Torches had been lit at intervals along the walls, set into iron brackets placed well away from the more important portraits and flammable items like velvet swags. Her window seat was safely in shadow, aside from the dim reflection of light on glass.

Oh, go away, Mary thought irritably. Was it too much to ask to be allowed to brood unmolested?

Apparently, it was. The measured tread continued inexorably onwards, one creak following another with the rhythmic beat of an executioner's drum. Whoever it was must have seen her. Her dress was too painfully pale to do anything but stand out against the grim crimson of the cushions. The footsteps stopped a scant distance behind her — and showed no sign of reversing themselves.

Mary could feel the prickle of scrutiny scuttle across the bare skin of her shoulder blades as she sat resolutely deaf and dumb, willing the intruder away.

"Admiring the view?" inquired a masculine voice.

Mary rose reluctantly from her cocoon among the cushions. She drew it out as long as she could, unfolding limb by limb, waiting until the very last moment to turn her head and face the intruder. The longer she avoided looking at him, the longer she had to compose her face along appropriate lines. She didn't want this man — this man in particular — to see her at a disadvantage.