We weren’t the only ones who had spotted him. Joan’s carefully highlighted head turned and, with just the right words of good-bye, she excused herself and maneuvered her way through the crowd, her black dress narrow enough not to make so much as a whisper as she passed. Her heels were a modest inch and a half. Sling-backs. Unlike me, she wasn’t relying on the shoemaker’s art for lengthening and slimming.
Toad.
How did she know Dempster? The Vaughn Collection, I guessed. It made sense that the editor of a fine-arts magazine would be on more than nodding terms with the archivist of London’s answer to the Frick Collection.
But this looked like a hell of a lot more than nodding terms. Holding her champagne glass out to the side, Joan leaned in, not for the traditional air kiss but for a solid peck on the lips. As she leaned back, Dempster’s hand settled in a proprietary way just above her waist.
What?
I looked at Colin, gawping like a child catching Mommy with Santa Claus. If Santa Claus was evil, that is. And if Mommy were the wicked stepmother. “Did you—?” I said.
Colin shook his head, looking just as befuddled as I felt. “No. I—No.” He looked down at them, a man at sea. “They are colleagues.…”
“His hand is still on her ass,” I pointed out. “That’s not collegial behavior.” A little lightbulb went on in my brain. “Do you know what this means? Serena didn’t invite Dempster. Joan did.”
Colin seemed insufficiently excited by this revelation.
I tugged on his sleeve. “Don’t you get it? Serena isn’t back together with Dempster!”
Not to mention that now Joan was safely off the market, so maybe she’d stay out of our hair for five minutes. And by ours, I meant mine. It would be nice to go to the pub without Joan throwing darts at me instead of the board.
“I got that,” said Colin slowly. I followed his gaze and saw what had caught his attention. Oh, damn. There was another corollary to Serena not being back together with Dempster, one I hadn’t quite thought through.
Serena stood in the shadow of the front door, looking like someone had just run a knife straight through her heart.
Dempster had been using Serena, and the odds were that he was probably using Joan, too. He had even made a play for me. I didn’t think the man was capable of decent, disinterested affection. But I doubted that would make much of a difference to Serena right now. All that mattered was that the man who had broken her heart was in her home in the company of another woman.
I had spent months privately griping about Colin cosseting Serena, about our relationship being crowded with three when it ought to have been cozy with two. And let’s just say I hadn’t been too happy with her when she had sided with Jeremy, flinging Colin to the wolves. But now…
“Go to her.” I gave Colin a little push. “She needs you.”
Colin did his best imitation of an Easter Island statue, nothing but the finest granite.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go.”
I started down, slipping and skidding in my inappropriate heels, only to find myself checked four steps up by Dempster.
“Eloise!” he said volubly, for all the world as though he were the host. I could see Serena over his shoulder, looking shadowed and fragile. It wasn’t lost on me that even though she had grown up in this house, it was Serena who was coming in from outside. Some people, it seemed, were doomed to be perpetual outsiders, like a moth at the far side of a lighted patio, always hovering just out of reach of the light.
I was too generally pissed off to bother with the amenities. “I see you’ve found another way of getting into Selwick Hall.”
Dempster’s chest expanded. “I’m the historical consultant for the film,” he said.
From what I’d seen, calling it a film seemed like a stretch. “I wasn’t talking about the movie. Excuse me.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” Dempster said suavely, ignoring my attempt to get around him.
“Why? So you can steal my notes?”
I had to give him this much. He put on a good show of confusion.
“What’s this?” Colin had come down behind me. We might be having our own tiff, but it was a solid front when it came to barbarians at the gate. Colin’s fingers fumbled for mine.
I slid my hand gratefully into his.
“Ask Dempster,” I said, nodding at the other man. “Ask him just what he’s looking for at Selwick Hall.”
Chapter 21
What use is compass, map or chart,
Or any of the mariner’s art?
My mast is broke, my rudder gone,
Darkling I drift, and all alone.
He couldn’t shake the image of her face.
Augustus slipped away around the side of the house, moving with a stealth that had been ingrained by time and brutal training. He had good cause to be grateful for that training. It was all that was keeping him from barreling headfirst over the nearest shrub. He felt entirely disoriented, adrift, at sea. Gravel crunched beneath his feet, the only sign he was still on a path. The curtains had been drawn in the house, but enough light leached through them to provide a vague illumination, a strange echo of light, worse than no light at all.
What in the hell had just happened in there?
To his left lay Bonaparte’s dollhouse of a theatre, smug on its own patch of ground. Dark now, all dark, entirely dark, no Emma inside playing with props or rocking back on her heels to look up at him with her hair all any which way and a smudge on her face.
He could still feel the texture of her hair beneath his fingers, thicker than he would have thought, thick and sleek and straight, blunt at the ends where it had been cut short, frizzled in bits where her maid must have experimented with the curling iron and failed. He could feel the silk of her hair and the delicate shape of the scalp beneath. She had a mole behind one ear, just a little bump in the skin, but his fingers remembered it, mapping it onto the landscape of her body, familiar terrain made unfamiliar, discovered and rediscovered.
Weeks they had spent together, bent over a desk, passing at a party, sending notes back and forth with a speed that made the messengers drag their feet and ask with palpable reluctance, “Is there a reply?” in a way that suggested they knew the answer would be yes but hoped for no.
No, no reply. Augustus had nothing to say. He was muddled, befuddled, baffled, perplexed, kerflummoxed. Confusion robbed him of the facile phrases that rose so easily to his lips, left him only with a cacophony of image and emotion, none of it reducible to the simple parameters of prose or even the lying truths of poetry.
No matter, she had told him, or something to that effect. She understood. Augustus was bloody glad someone did. Perhaps Emma might deign to explain it to him.
This was Emma. Emma! Emma of the too-low dresses and too-shiny jewels and too-bright smile and too-late parties. Emma who flitted and frolicked and sent him tea cakes and made sure he wore his cloak. Emma, who had somehow wiggled her way into his life, tucked securely next to his heart like a talisman in his coat pocket, a comfortable presence only to be noticed in its absence. One didn’t take it out and play with it or consider the purpose of its existence; it was simply there.
He couldn’t fancy Emma. She was just…Emma. Always there, always in motion, always running half an hour late. He admired the statuesque, the stately, the serene, Grecian goddesses made flesh, alabaster without the pedestal.
Then why couldn’t he stop thinking about Emma? And why in hell wouldn’t she stop to talk? She had certainly
