and that also cannot be excused. If a man’s oath does not bind him, then he cannot be a part of any civilized society.”
Twyford went white. He glanced around the table. No one smiled at him. Lord Salchester nodded in agreement. “Quite so,” he said. “Quite so.”
“Are we agreed?” Omegus inquired softly.
“We are,” came the answer from everyone except Isobel.
Omegus turned to her and waited.
“What journey?” she said huskily.
Omegus explained. “Gwendolen left a letter addressed to her mother, Mrs. Naylor. I have not opened it, nor will you. It’s obviously private. You will take it to Mrs. Naylor and explain to her that Gwendolen has taken her own life, and your part in it. If Mrs. Naylor wishes to come to London, or to Applecross, you will accompany her, unless she will not permit you to. But you will do all in your power to succeed. She lives near Inverness, in the Highlands of Scotland. Her address is on the envelope.”
The silence in the room was broken by the sound of a sudden shower lashing the windows.
“I won’t!” Isobel said in a rush of outrage. “The north of Scotland! At this time of year? And to … to face … absolutely not.” She stood up, her body shaking, her face burning with hectic color. “I will not do it.” For a moment she stared at them, and then left the room, grasping the door until it slammed against the farther wall, then swinging it shut after her.
Vespasia half rose also, then realized the futility of it and sat down again.
“I thought she wouldn’t,” Lady Warburton said with a smile of satisfaction.
Vespasia thought for an instant of a crocodile who fears it is robbed of its prey, and then feels its teeth sink into flesh after all. “You must be pleased,” she said aloud. “I imagine you would have found it nigh on impossible to know something unkind about someone and be unable to repeat it to others.”
Lady Warburton looked at her coldly, her face suddenly bloodless, eyes glittering. “I would be more careful in my choice of friends, if I were you, Lady Vespasia. Your father’s title will not protect you forever. There is a degree of foolishness beyond which even you will have to pay.”
“You are suggesting I desert my friends the moment it becomes inconvenient to me?” Vespasia inquired, although there was barely an inflection in her tone, only heavy disgust. “Why does it not astound me that you should say so?” She also rose to her feet. “Excuse me,” she said to no one in particular, and left the room.
Outside in the hall she was completely alone. There was no servant in sight, no footman waiting to be called. They had taken Omegus’s request for privacy as an absolute order. There was something strangely judicial about it, as if everything, even domestic detail, might be different from now on.
She crossed the wooden parquet and climbed slowly up the great staircase. A few words had changed everything. But they were not merely words: They sprang from thoughts and passions, deep tides that had been there all the time; it was only the knowledge of them that was new.
Vespasia found it difficult to concentrate on dressing for dinner. Her maid suggested one gown after another, but nothing seemed appropriate, nor for once did she really care. The silks, laces, embroidery, the whole palette of subtle and gorgeous colors seemed an empty pleasure. Gwendolen was dead, from whatever despair real or imagined that had gripped her, and Isobel was on the brink of suffering more than she yet understood.
She thought everyone else would be dressing soberly, in grief for Gwendolen, and in parade of their sense of social triumph, somber but victorious. She decided to wear purple. It suited her porcelain skin and the shimmering glory of her hair. It would be beautiful, appropriate for half mourning, and outrageous for a woman of her youth. Altogether it would serve every purpose.
She swept down the stairs again, as she had only an evening ago, to gasps of surprise, and either admiration or envy, depending upon whether it was Lord Salchester or Lady Warburton. The merest glance told her that Isobel was not yet there. Would she have the courage to come?
Omegus was at her elbow, his face carefully smoothed of expression, but she could not mistake the anxiety in his eyes.
“She is not going to run away, is she?” he said so quietly that Blanche Twyford, only a yard or two from them, could not have heard.
Vespasia had exactly the same fear. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I think she is very angry. There is a certain injustice in putting the blame entirely upon her. If Bertie was so easily put off, then he did not love Gwendolen with much depth or honor.”
“Of course not, my dear,” Omegus murmured. “Surely that is the disillusion which really hurt Gwendolen more than she could bear.”
Suddenly it made agonizing sense. It was not any suggestion Isobel made. It was the exposing of the shallowness beneath the dreams, the breaking of the thin veneer of hope with which Gwendolen had deceived herself. She had not lost the prize; she had seen that it did not exist, not as she needed it to be.
“Was that really a cruelty?” she said aloud, meeting his eyes for the first time in their whispered conversation.
Omegus did not hesitate. “Yes,” he answered. “There are some things to which we need to wake up slowly, and the weaknesses of someone we love are among them.”
“But surely she needed to see what a frail creature he is before she married him!” she protested.
He smiled. “Oh, please, think a little longer, a little more deeply, my dear.”
She was surprisingly wounded, not bluntly as by a knife, but deeply and almost without realizing it for the first few seconds, as a razor cuts. She had not been aware until this moment how much she cared what Omegus thought of her.
Perhaps he saw the change in her face. His expression softened.
She found herself pulling away, her pride offended that he should see his power to wound her.
He saw that, too, and he ignored it. “She would have accepted him,” he said, still quietly. “She had no better offer, and by the time she had realized his flaws, he might have begun to overcome them, and habit, tenderness, other promises made and kept might have blunted the edge of disappointment, and given other compensations that would have been enough.” He put his hand on her arm, so lightly she saw it rather than felt it. “Love is not perfection,” he said. “It is tolerance, dreams past, and the future shared. A great deal of it, my dear, is friendship, if it is to last. There is nothing more precious than true friendship. It is the rock upon which all other loves must stand, if they are to endure. She should have made her own decision, not have it made for her by someone else’s desperate realization of defeat.”
She did not answer. His words filled her mind and left no room for any of her own.
Ten minutes later when Isobel still had not appeared, Vespasia decided to go and fetch her. She went back up the stairs and along the west corridor to Isobel’s room. She knocked and, when there was no answer, turned the handle and went in.
Isobel was standing before the long glass, looking critically at herself. She was not beautiful, but she had a great grace, and in her bronze-and-black gown she looked magnificent, more striking, more dramatic than Gwendolen ever had. Vespasia saw for the first time that that was precisely the trouble. Bertie Rosythe did not want a dramatic wife. He might like to play with fire, but he did not wish to live with it. Isobel could never have won.
“If you do not come now, you are going to be late,” Vespasia said calmly.
Isobel swung around, startled. She had obviously been expecting the return of her maid.
“I haven’t decided if I am coming yet,” she replied. “I didn’t hear you knock!”
“I daresay you were too deep in your own thoughts.” Vespasia brushed it aside. “You must come,” she insisted. “If you don’t, you will be seen as having run away, and that would be an admission of guilt.”
“They think I am guilty anyway,” Isobel said bitterly. “Don’t pretend you cannot see that! Even you with so …”
Vespasia had been at fault. “I did not intend my remarks to give them that opening,” she answered. “I am truly sorry for that. It was far clumsier than I meant it to be.”
Isobel kept her head turned away. “I daresay they would have come to the same place anyway, just taken a little longer. But it would have been easier for me had the final blow not come from a friend.”
