Emily asked quite casually if anyone had seen Miss FitzJames, inventing some slight reason for wanting to speak to her-a friend in common, a milliner’s name.
It took her nearly an hour before she found her, and then it was by chance. She came around the corner of a large exhibit of late roses and some high-standing, very vivid yellow lilies, and saw Tallulah sitting in an arbor created out of the twined branches of a vine. She was leaning back, her feet on the chair as though it were a chaise longue, skirts draped carelessly, her long, slender throat arched. Her dark hair was beginning to fall a little out of its pins. It was a relaxed, seductive pose, graceful and inviting.
The young man beside her was plainly entranced. He leaned farther and farther forward as she regarded him lazily through half-closed eyes. Emily could completely understand the desire to behave shockingly. She herself had never done anything of the sort, but then she had so far not been severely tempted … not yet.
“Why Tallulah! How nice to see you!” she said utterly ingenuously, as if they had bumped into each other walking in the Park. “Aren’t the flowers gorgeous? I would never have thought they could find as much as this so late in the year.”
Tallulah stared at her in amazement turning to dismay. Such a breach of tact was inexcusable. Emily should have withdrawn, blushing and suitably taken aback.
Emily stood precisely where she was, a bland smile on her face.
“I always think August is a difficult season,” she went on cheerfully. “Too late for one thing and too early for another.”
“There seems to me to be plenty of flowers,” the young man said, pink-faced. He straightened his tie and collar as if he were trying to appear to be doing something else.
“I am sure there are, sir,” Emily agreed, fixing her eyes on his hands. “To men there always seem to be plenty of flowers.” She let the remark hang in the air, with its double meaning, and turned to Tallulah, her bright smile back again. “I have been thinking quite hard about the matter you discussed with me the last time we had an opportunity to talk together. I would so like to be of assistance. I am sure something could be done.”
Tallulah continued to stare at her, but gradually the lightness died out of her face. She straightened up, ignoring her gown and the angle to which it had slipped. “Are you? It is much worse, you know? It is all much worse.”
The young man realized that the conversation had proceeded beyond anything of which he was aware. He rose and excused himself, doing it with surprising flair, in the circumstances, and with a bow took his leave.
Tallulah readjusted her gown, her face now very somber.
“I saw Jago again,” she said quietly. “Not for very long. It was a charity bazaar. I knew he would be there, for his wretched church, so I went. He looked through me as if I were some naughty child he was obliged to be civil to, as one does when other people’s children misbehave and one cannot do anything because their parents won’t permit it.” She screwed up her face. “Suffering with a weary and tolerant look. I was so angry I could have slapped him!”
Emily saw the pain in Tallulah’s eyes and the struggle to know whether she should deny it or try to face and overcome it. It was so much easier to pretend it was only anger she felt, not pain.
Emily sat down where the young man had been. The scent of the flowers was heavy in the air. She was glad of the very slight breeze.
“Are you sure you don’t want him simply because he’s unattainable?” she said frankly.
Tallulah thought about it in silence. She sat down again where she had been before, only this time more decorously, her feet on the ground.
“Are you attracted to a man who adores you?” Emily would not be put off.
“No,” Tallulah said immediately. Then she smiled. “Are you?”
“Not in the slightest,” Emily confessed. “He has to be at the very least unsuitable, but better he should need to be won as well. The harder the battle, the more the prize is worth. Men are the same, of course. It is simply that we are better, on the whole, at disguising it and pretending to be uninterested, when we are actually enthralled.”
“Jago is not enthralled,” Tallulah said glumly. “At least not by me. I might have a better chance of engaging his emotions if I were a fallen woman and he thought he could save my soul!”
“Is that what you were about just now?” Emily asked with a smile. “Falling?”
But Tallulah was too hurt to be amused.
“No, of course not,” she said tartly. “I was merely bored. It was all words and ideas. If you knew Sawyer, you’d know that. Everything’s a pose with him.”
Emily sat back a little farther, making herself comfortable. It was very warm in the bower, and the perfume of so many petals a trifle clinging.
“Why don’t you simply forget Jago?” she asked without pretense at subtlety. “The thought of him is only causing you distress. A challenge is excellent, but not one you can’t win. That’s just depressing. Anyway, what would you do if you had him? You couldn’t possibly marry him. He hasn’t any money! Or do you just want your revenge on him because he despises you, or you think he does?”
“He does.”
“So you want revenge?”
Tallulah stared at her. With the sunlight dappled on her face she had a kind of beauty, one born of courage and a fierce vitality.
“No, I don’t. That would be horrible.” Her voice sharpened in frustration. “You really don’t understand at all, do you? Jago is the best person I’ve ever known! There’s an honor in him, and a gentleness unlike that in anyone else I’ve ever met. He’s honest.” She leaned forward. “I don’t just mean he doesn’t take things that aren’t his, I mean he doesn’t even want to. He doesn’t lie to other people, but he doesn’t lie to himself either. That’s rare, you know? I lie to myself all the time. All my family does, mostly about why they do things. They say they had to, when what they mean is they wanted to so they looked around for an excuse. I’ve seen it all the time.”
“So have I,” Emily admitted. “But I’m not sure I could live with anyone who always spoke the unadulterated truth. I don’t think I want to know it, and I’m quite sure I don’t want to hear it. It may be very admirable, but I would sooner admire it from a distance … quite a large distance.”
Tallulah laughed, but there was no happiness in it. “You are deliberately misunderstanding me. I don’t mean he’s tactless, or cruel. I just mean he has a sort of … light inside him. He’s … whole. His mind doesn’t have lots of different pieces, like most people’s, all wanting different things, and lying to each other so you can try to have everything, and telling yourself it’s all right.”
“How do you know?”
“What?”
“How do you know that?” Emily repeated. “How do you know what is inside him?”
Tallulah was silent. Two girls in pink and peach walked past them, deep in conversation, heads close together, the brindled light in their hair. “I don’t know why I’m explaining all this to you!” Tallulah said at last. “It doesn’t really fit into any words. I know what I mean. I know that he has a kind of courage that most people haven’t. He faces what really matters, without evasions and excuses. His beliefs are whole.” She stared at Emily. “Do you understand me at all?”
“Yes,” Emily agreed quietly, dropping the challenge from her voice. “I only wanted to see if you really care for him as much as you think. Wouldn’t you find him a little serious? After a while might not so much goodness become a trifle predictable, and then ultimately become even boring?”
Tallulah turned her head away, her profile outlined against the bank of blossoms. “It really doesn’t matter. He’s never going to look at me as anything but Finlay FitzJames’s rather shallow sister who wastes her life buying dresses that cost enough to keep one of his Whitechapel families in food and clothes for years.” She looked down at her exquisite skirt and smoothed it over the flat of her stomach. “This cost fifty-one pounds, seventeen shillings and sixpence. We pay our best maids twenty pounds a year. The scullery maids and tweenies get less than half that. I saw it in the household accounts. And I have a dozen or more dresses as good as this one.”
She shrugged and smiled. “And yet I go to church on Sundays and pray, and so does everyone else I know, all dressed in clothes like this. It isn’t that Jago would tell me I’m wrong. If no one buys them, then the people who make them have no trade. He just wouldn’t be bothered with me, because I care so much what I look like. But then for an unmarried woman that’s what matters, isn’t it.” It was not a question but a statement of fact.
Emily did not argue, nor did she bother to mention money or family influence. Tallulah knew the rules as well