Annis nodded, her gaze full of compassion. “Lucasta understands that.”
Jem looked back and forth between their faces. These women understood something about Lucasta that he didn’t, and might never. Perhaps it was a fundamental difference in the way men and women were built. He could give her a lifetime of ease and protection, his utmost fidelity and devotion, and she wanted something he couldn’t comprehend.
He looked at the women once more. The Luneberg, the daughter of a German duke, was a foreigner and an outsider on British shores. The same with Voronska, daughter of a Russiancount. Miss Humby, a mix of races like his younger siblings, at least had the benefit of married parents.
But all three of them were considered, by those of the highestton,exotic oddities. They were watched, speculated about, insulted. All the things he wanted to avoid for his own siblings, these women endured.
And rose above.
“I never meant that comment about the zebra to be a slur,” Jem said to Selina. “Those stripes were vile, and I never considered your parentage. I ought to have. I am sorry.”
She gave him a sweet smile. “I accept your apology.”
He didn’t deserve her easy forgiveness. “But I would never have chosen to subject you to shame or ridicule.”
She shrugged. “You didn’t. Not from anyone who mattered, at any rate.”
Jem blinked at this, taken aback by her indifference. To not care if she were not admired,to not be watching every moment to see if she were being accepted by people around them, conforming to those invisible but very firm lines about what wastonand what was not?—
“I named you the Gorgons,” he said slowly.
“We suspected it was you.” Annis nodded.
Again he felt the need to explain himself. “Ashley was outraged by something you’d said, and you were calling yourselves Miss Gregoire’s Girls?—”
“Ashley,” Minnie hissed.
“But none of you cared,” Jem realized. “You went to the parties anyway and made your own group and enjoyed yourselves hugely, and you never cared what others thought.”
He simply couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that it was possible to step away from that dance of courting attention and acceptance. Perhaps it was the draper in him, a shopkeeper after all; he had to win customers, he had to be liked.
So many times he’d heard his mother weeping over a slight one of his father’s acquaintances had dealt her. Eventually she stopped going to the parties and the balls and the theater and the pleasure gardens. She focused on the business and her children, and her husband went his own way, letting her hard work fill the family coffers while he enjoyed his status and her income.
Jem had courted society’s approval telling himself it was for the sake of his business. He had said as much to Lucasta. But all along, he’d wanted to show that world that his mother reallyhadbeen good enough for them. That he, as her son, was good enough for them.
He’d hidden his sister’s blindness and his illegitimate younger siblings because he was worriedhe’dno longer be approved of, and if society rejected him, they were rejecting his mother all over again. He had been exerting himself to the utmost trying to please people who were never going to find him worthy.
He’d just let the most miraculous woman he was ever going to meet refuse him—the woman made for him in every respect, the woman he wanted to spend his entire life with—because he was worried what other people might think of her wanting to sing. When Miss Gregoire’s girls, the Gorgons, didn’t care whom they pleased. They followed some inner guide, and Lucasta, especially, followed some lode star that shone from within.
What washisgreat dream? Jem wondered. What was the one thing he would give up anything else for, approval and acceptance be damned?
The girls still stood on the landing with its inset alcove and the absurd little trinket on display there. Traffic moved along Caroline Street, tousled by the wind. The girls watched him curiously.
“You are attending the concert tomorrow, I presume?” Jem rasped.
Annis gave him a broad grin. “We are performing. We always perform in the concerts Lucasta organizes. We have since our first year at Miss Gregoire’s.”
Minnie preened, and Selina, gulping, nodded.
“I have no right to ask a boon of you, and you have no reason to indulge me.” It took all his courage to say these words. “But my sister will be there. She does not move in society much, and—because she is blind and very shy, I fear she will not make friends. You seem to have taken in Bertie, and I hope—I may—introduce you?”
“We shall be very happy to make the acquaintance of your sister, Lord Payne,” Minnie said politely. She shared a look with her friends that said, whatever question they had for him, it had not yet been answered. “And now, if we might ask you to remove yourself from the stairs, we need to see Lucasta.”
“Oh. Of course.”
They’d not been waiting on the landing to offer support as he groped his way to understanding. They waited because, given how narrow the stairs were, they couldn’t get past him. His heart turned to pulp, Jem located his hat and cloak and a boy to bring round his carriage. He needed to go to Arendale House and tend to his family.
He wanted to be upstairs in the music room with Lucasta. But her friends had the right to comfort and console her and hear every detail of her captivity, the details he was certain she’d kept from him.
