“Jemima!” Charlotte said sharply. “That was quite uncalled for. He was being perfectly sensible, and pale green would look very nice-”
“I don’t want to be ‘nice’!” Jemima said furiously. “I want to be interesting, different, grown up.” The tears spilled from her eyes onto her cheeks. “I want to look lovely. Why can’t you understand?” Without waiting for an answer she swung round and stormed out. They heard her feet banging on the treads up the stairs and then a door on the landing slam.
“What did I do?” Daniel asked incredulously.
“Nothing,” Charlotte assured him.
“Then why is she like that?”
“Because she’s fourteen,” Charlotte replied. “She wants to look nice at the supper party she’s going to.”
“She always looks nice.” Pitt was reasonable, and confused. “She’s very pretty. In fact she looks more like you every day.”
Charlotte smiled ruefully. “I’m not sure she’d appreciate your saying so, my dear.”
“She did the other day,” he argued.
“That was then, this is now,” she answered. There was no use trying to explain it to him. He had grown up without sisters. Girls of Jemima’s age were as incomprehensible to him as mermaids or unicorns.
Daniel shrugged and turned the next page of his
“It would have been easier,” Charlotte corrected him. “Not better.”
Pitt and Daniel exchanged glances, but both were wise enough not to take issue with her.
An hour later Charlotte went upstairs to Jemima’s room and knocked on the door. When there was no answer she rapped sharply, then went in anyway. Jemima was sitting on the bed, her hair loose and tangled, her cheeks tearstained. She glared defiantly at her mother.
“I suppose you’ve come to tell me off,” she said belligerently. “That I have to wear blue, and be glad of it. And that if I smile I’ll look charming anyway … and about as interesting as a jug of milk!”
Charlotte did not ask whose interest Jemima was working to awaken; she already knew. His name was Robert Durbridge and he was eighteen. He was far too old for Jemima at the moment, but otherwise was a pleasant-seeming young man, the son of the local rector and bent on every kind of rebellion against the path in the Church that his parents had planned for him.
“Wear a green sash around your waist and you will be quite different from other girls,” she suggested helpfully.
“What?” Jemima’s eyes flew wide open. “Mama, you can’t wear blue and green together! Nobody does that!”
Charlotte smiled at her. “Then you will be the first. I thought you wanted to be different. Have you changed your mind?”
“Blue and green?”
“Why not? Blue sky and green trees. You see it all the time.”
“I don’t want to look like a field,” Jemima said in disgust.
“A willow tree against the sky,” Charlotte corrected her. “Stop being so obstructive. There is nothing less attractive than bad temper, I promise you. Now wash your face and pull yourself together. It is not your father’s fault, or your brother’s, that you are full of emotion and indecision. It’s part of growing up and we all experience it. You are behaving as if you are the center of the world, and you aren’t.”
“You don’t understand!” Jemima wailed, her face crumpling.
“Of course not,” Charlotte agreed with a smile. “I was never fourteen, I went straight from being twelve to being twenty. So did both of my sisters.”
“Twenty!” Jemima was horrified. “You mean I’m going to feel like this for another six years?”
“Please heaven, I hope not!” Charlotte said with feeling.
In spite of herself, Jemima smiled, and then started to giggle. “Can I really wear a green sash on my dress?”
“Of course. So you had better walk with your head up, and smile to everyone, because they will all be looking at you, including young Robert Durbridge.”
“Do you think so?” Jemima blushed. “But then maybe I should wear …”
“Jemima!” Charlotte interrupted.
“Yes, Mama.”
“The subject is closed.”
Charlotte and Pitt attended yet another reception that duty obliged them to, but Charlotte admitted to herself that there were elements of it she thoroughly enjoyed, not the least being that she was nobody’s guest. She was here because Pitt was invited.
In the swirl of greetings, polite conversations, and the swapping of suitably trivial inquiries and answers, they began to move among the throng of people. Charlotte noticed Vespasia, strikingly elegant as usual. Pitt looked for those with whom he needed to speak.
Charlotte met various women she had encountered before, but found her attention wandering. They were discussing family matters: who was engaged to marry whom; love affairs and misfortunes she was thankful did not concern her. She realized that all too soon she would have to consider Jemima finding a suitable husband, but she had three or four years’ grace yet before that needed to be a preoccupation. When she was young and single she had loathed being presented to various people in the hope that some young man might please her, and she him. Now she felt an embarrassing wave of sympathy for her own mother. She knew perfectly well that she had been extraordinarily difficult, and in the end decided to marry a policeman and virtually disappear from Society.
By that time her mother had been relieved to accept any settled life for her middle daughter and had put up barely any resistance.
She was still smiling at the memory when she saw Angeles Castelbranco with some other young women. They all appeared to be laughing with two young men, both of whom were quite openly admiring Angeles. Charlotte could not blame them or find it surprising. She was a beautiful young woman, and at the moment her face was flushed and her eyes brilliant.
Then Neville Forsbrook approached the group, smiling.
Seeing him, Angeles’s face fell and she backed away sharply. It was an awkward movement, completely without grace.
One of the other young men laughed.
Angeles did not even look at him. Her eyes were fixed on Forsbrook. No one else in the room seemed to notice.
Forsbrook said something to Angeles and gave a slight bow. He was still smiling.
Angeles blushed hotly. She started to speak, but seemed unable to find the words she needed. She ended by apparently saying something angry in Portuguese, and the other young women moved away uncomfortably.
The young men looked at each other and laughed again, but weakly; it seemed more out of confusion than amusement.
Forsbrook took another step toward Angeles, this time with one hand forward as if he would touch her arm.
She snatched it away, and in stepping backward lost her footing a little. Forsbrook lunged forward and grasped her, preventing her from falling. She gasped, and then cried out.
Forsbrook held her more firmly. It could have been because he feared she might fall.
Angeles tried to wrench her arm away from Forsbrook but he held on to her. She swung her other arm and slapped him across the face as hard as she could. One of the young men let out a cry of surprise.
Forsbrook let go of her with a very slight push and she staggered backward, tripping on her skirt and
