William’s color turned even paler in the spill of moonlight falling on the manicured gardens of the Bayard estate. He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time that evening. “Really, Amy, what sort of nonsense is this?”
He hadn’t looked at her... all night. She’d noticed that for the first time tonight, then wondered if it had always been like that and she had just been too lost in an imaginary world where she was loved and accepted to see the truth: that the man she thought was in love with her couldn’t even bear to look her in the eye. “Take the ring. Please.”
He stood there like stone.
“I understand now, William. You can stop pretending. I know.”
“What do you know?” His voice held amusement, which was almost more insulting to her than the things she had overheard his friends and him saying: the jokes, the rhymes.
She raised her chin and hoped to God in Heaven that it wasn’t quivering. “December is the doom and devastation of the De Pysters. You can marry for money and still have love. Spend her money, spend her body...” She could feel her voice growing weaker. “And love every minute of it.”
His face colored. He began to stammer and started to step toward her, his hands out in supplication.
“Please. Don’t. Don’t even try.” She held up her hand so he wouldn’t touch her and to keep him from seeing the glimmer of tears that flooded into her eyes the moment she had repeated those cruel sentences.
She didn’t want to cry in front of him. She didn’t. But those words she had repeated hurt. They hurt so much.
A second later she was crying, sobbing hard enough that people began to turn around and look at them. She just stood there, frozen in shame and hurt and unable to will her feet to move, unable to do anything but hold out the engagement ring and sob.
William’s expression changed. He wasn’t looking to placate her anymore. He looked around quickly and uneasily, his gaze going from face to face as if standing with her was humiliating to him.
His friends, the same people who never welcomed her, prowled closer like jungle cats moving in to view a kill. She was shaking so hard the ring fell from her hand and hit the stone walkway. The sound was small, just a ping, which seemed impossible when the ache she felt was so huge.
William took a step, bent down, and picked up the ring. He looked at it, then began to laugh, laugh loudly, exaggeratedly and more cruelly than he had that afternoon.
“She’s breaking our engagement,” he told everyone and held up the ring like a trophy to be proud of. “Can you imagine?Sheis breakingourengagement.” He laughed as if she had done the most amusing thing.
She heard titters, then giggles, and snickers.
“Did you hear that?” William raised his arms out and shouted. “Amy Emerson is breaking an engagement, to me...” He thumped his chest with a fist. “A De Pyster.”
The laughter grew, both his and theirs; it became sharp and stinging like slaps in the face.
“Looks like the little bourgeois heiress doesn’t want to buy her way into society, and after those sharp-eyed lawyers purposely sent her down here to marry her off.” He looked at her then with the meanest glare of contempt she had ever witnessed. “They used her money and their loan power to make certain she was accepted.” He scanned the crowd again. “See the joke?”
She cried openly, unable not to, and she looked at all those faces, laughing at her as the meaning of his words registered. The lawyers had bought her society entree. “But I didn’t know,” she whispered half to them and half to herself. She looked at each person, one at a time, at each and every face, unable to believe that human beings could treat another person as they were.
Her blurred gaze flicked up to her William, and the sneer and the contempt on his face showed through clearly, as if she weren’t seeing it through a sea of tears. “I thought,” she choked over the words, “I thought you loved me.”
There was anger in his eyes, but he laughed harder and more cruelly. She turned and ran, ran faster, her shoes tapping across the flagstones in a rhythm that echoed behind her like clapping hands.
She saw nothing in front of her but a blur of shame. Her head down now, she shoved past a small chattering group gathered near the champagne table. Her skirt caught and she heard a tearing sound and felt a pull. She didn’t look back, but clutched a handful of silk and lace and jerked it with her as she rushed on.
She heard a shout, then the breaking of glass, but she wouldn’t stop. She ran down some stone steps and away, away to the very back of the estate, where a tall stone wall and the darkness were more welcoming than where she had just been.
Her breath catching, she leaned against the wall, her damp cheek pressed against the cold wet ivy. When her chest stopped heaving, she flattened back against the stones and stared up into the night sky through eyes that burned.
Above her were the stars and the moon, those elusive, shining things people were supposed to wish upon. Wishes, hopes, and dreams. What were they really? Just foolish ideas? Like love? Like acceptance? Like kindness?
Those things didn’t seem to exist. Or had died like her parents. She couldn’t believe that her father had lied when he taught her to believe in them. She kept staring up, searching for answers, for something to cling to.
The scents of roses and honeysuckle were around her, smelling sickeningly sweet. In the distance she could hear the party: the voices that never welcomed her, the music she seldom danced to, the clinking of glass that sounded just like stars falling.
She was nothing to them. An echo in a room full of deaf people. Slowly she sank to the ground as if her legs couldn’t bear the weight of her shame. She drew up her knees and buried her head in them, locking her arms around her legs and pulling them tightly against her chest. She rested her cheek on one knee and closed her eyes tightly so no more tears could squeeze through.
With the stars shining brightly overhead, she sat there on the damp ground in the fall of moonlight and listened to the sounds of laughter, of the chatter and the music all going on without her. She held herself a little bit tighter, like someone who is freezing and can’t get warm enough, then she cried. Because her tears were all she had left.
Chapter Ten
