“Too much,” Gwen moans, her shoulders curling as bile rises up her throat.
She slams her hand against the top of the carriage and they have just enough time to stop and for Father to throw open the door before she’s on the carriage floor, vomiting onto the street. She hopes they’re far enough away from the Johnson estate for only the coach hands to see her.
“Gwennie,” Father sighs, sinking to one knee to rub her back as she heaves.
Sadness, and whisky, and self-loathing spatter onto the cobblestones beneath the carriage. Some triumphant evening.
Chapter Twenty-One
Beth
Beth shifts uncomfortably, wiggling in her damp corset to try and coax a bead of sweat away from the itching on her back. The air is staid and humid, and the smell of horse manure doesn’t help. They can heap all the flowers they like along the railings of the royal enclosure behind them; it doesn’t do a damn thing.
“Stop twitching,” Mother mutters.
Beth looks over at her and then jerks back as their lacey broad-brimmed bonnets knock together. The third day of the Ascot races is no laughing matter. Beth feels like she’s weighted down by petticoats again with how many layers of lace and silk they’ve piled onto her hoop. Never mind the itching at her ankles from what she thinks might be ants. No hope of checking, the way they’re all packed in, hoops bumping awkwardly as they continue to wait for the opening shot. There was a lot of laughter and shrieking at the start. Now they’re all too tired and trying desperately to keep up the ruse that anyone wants to be under the hot sun waiting to watch a horse race they’ll only be able to see for moments each lap.
Lord Montson’s consumed with talk of betting beside her. She tried to join in, at the start, but one look from her mother and another from Lord Ashmond quelled any interest ininserting herself into Lord Montson’s conversations. She’s here to look like a trussed-up, melting dessert, nothing more. She glances to her right and left, but she’s trapped where she is, no friendly faces.
She’s long since finished the drink Lord Montson braved the crowds to get for her. She can’t bring herself to ask him to go again, not when he tripped and almost ruined his new pressed white trousers. He nearly lost his top hat too.
“Do you think they plan to start the races, or is there some sort of hat competition of which I wasn’t made aware,” Beth wonders, glancing at Mother.
Mother goes to scold her, but the woman on her other side steps closer, bumping Mother’s hoop into Beth’s. Beth watches in dismay as some of Mother’s last sip of champagne sloshes from her glass and onto the packed dirt ground.
“I dearly hope so,” Mother says, wiping her dripping glove onto her lavender skirts. No one will notice, just as they all politely ignore the sweat stains marring everyone’s clothing. “This is dismal.”
“It really is,” Beth agrees.
She glances across the track and starts, bumping her mother again. Mother doesn’t even huff, just grabs her arm to steady them both and then knocks back the last of her champagne.
“I’m going to get us something to drink, damn the skirts,” Mother says.
Beth’s too distracted looking over at the inner track lawn to care, even as Mother’s effort to turn around jostles her, creating a domino effect around them as hoops bump and clash.
Beth stares across the track at the crowd of onlookers making raucous merry on the other side. They’ve space, and ampledrink and food from their personal picnics. And in the center of the crowd, right against the railing, she sees Gwen, Meredith, Lord Havenfort, and Gwen’s cousins having a wonderfully good time.
Gwen looks enchanting in her bonnet, which only has a demure lace lip, nothing like the heavy monstrosity on Beth’s head. Gold ringlets cascade out of it, and Beth can see her green dress has a much more practical hoop below it, allowing Gwen movement, and air, and the freedom to enjoy a glass of champagne and the sandwich Meredith hands her.
Beth watches as Gwen carries on two conversations, chatting with Meredith while clearly placing bets with her father and cousins, turning at intervals to bark numbers at them without missing a step with Meredith. No one seems to care that they all look a bit undone. No one seems to care that they’re being loud and rowdy. There across the track, Ascot is fun, social, and exciting.
And instead of being there with them, as they planned, picnicking and getting their parents to fall in love, Beth is stuck here in the royal lawn enclosure, listening to Lord Montson blather on and on about the horses and the odds.
That feeling of hopelessness that’s been sitting on her chest for a week constricts further and Beth sighs, trying to breathe through it. So Ascot won’t be fun; they won’t have to attend every year. And at the least the inn Lord Ashmond has put them all up in is lovely. The meat pies in the pub are good, and she and Mother have been taking advantage, eating to their heart’s content. Her stomach’s full, which is something. And once they’re no longer trapped like livestock for this race, she might even get to wander the grounds a bit, see the gardens they’re cultivating on the other side of the grandstand.
It won’t all be a total loss.
“Be grateful, I nearly took down a countess, I think,” Mother says, bumping Beth’s hoop as she shuffles back to her side and extends a flute of champagne.
“At least that would have been some excitement,” Beth mutters, smiling a little as Mother snickers quietly.
“It’s distasteful,” says a voice to Beth’s right.
Beth turns, glancing at the couple standing just beyond Lord Montson and his schoolmates, who have taken up a post behind Beth and Mother.
“It’s supposed to be an event. Really, it’s not that untoward.”
“He’s got that girl as drunk as he is. And as loud. I can hear her from here.”
