Then she had found him in the garden with her cousin Lydia. Pretty, prosperous Lydia, who spoke no Italian at all, but whose dowry was substantial and whose face possessed everything Eleanor’s did not.
“You did not truly imagine—?”Edmund had said, when she confronted him. His smile had not faltered. That had been the worst of it. He had not even attempted shame.“You are pleasant enough, Eleanor, but pleasant does not maintain a household.”
She had not cried. She had not railed. She had simply nodded once, returned to the library, and finished translating the poem he had asked about.
She had never trusted admiration since.
“Eleanor?” Honoria was studying her now, with something that might have been concern. “You look pale. Are you unwell?”
“Merely fatigued.” Eleanor summoned her practised smile—the one that revealed nothing. “Several hours of trade summaries will have that effect.”
“Then you must rest before dinner. Mama will not thank you for appearing haggard before the guests.”
Haggard.Another word forold. Another reminder that Eleanor was nine-and-twenty, unmarried, and useful in ways that did not signify.
“I shall do my best to refresh my appearance,” she said mildly.
Honoria nodded, content, and departed in another cloud of perfume.
Eleanor remained alone in the softening afternoon light and thought of her mother.
Arabella Finch had been, by all accounts, extraordinary.
Eleanor had seen the portraits. She had heard the stories. She knew that her mother had possessed the sort of beauty that silenced conversation, that drove poets to reach for inadequate metaphors, that compelled otherwise sensible men to behave with remarkable foolishness for the sake of a single smile.
And she knew what that beauty had earned her mother in the end: a husband who displayed her like a prized painting, praised her as one might praise a possession, and gradually—inevitably—lost interest once the novelty waned. By the time Eleanor was old enough to form clear memories, her mother had already begun to recede—not physically, not yet, but in every way that truly mattered. She spoke less. She smiled less. She spent long hours gazing from windows at a world she no longer seemed permitted to inhabit fully.
Beautiful, everyone said, even as she faded.Such a beautiful woman.
As though beauty were sufficient. As though beauty, in the end, were anything but a gilded cage that promised value and delivered confinement.
Eleanor possessed her mother’s face—the bones, as Aunt Georgiana had observed, if not quite the radiance. But she had learnt, early and thoroughly, to regard that inheritance as a liability rather than a gift. Beauty attracted attention. Attention bred expectation. Expectation led to men such as Edmund Hale, who would smile at her translations and mean none of it.
Usefulness, Eleanor had decided, long before she possessed the language to express it. Usefulness was the only safe currency. It did not fade. It could not be taken. It could only be earned, again and again, through labour no one else cared to undertake.
It was not, perhaps, the most romantic philosophy. But Eleanor had ceased believing in romance on the same afternoon she had ceased believing in Edmund Hale’s smile.
She picked up her pen and returned to the Venetian glass merchant.
***
Dinner proved precisely as tedious as Eleanor had anticipated.
Sir Edward Holloway was a florid gentleman with strong opinions regarding hunting and weak ones regarding everything else. His wife was pleasant but indistinct, the sort of woman who had mastered the art of nodding at appropriate intervals while contributing nothing of consequence. Lady Tremaine’s nephew—the middling baronet—was handsome enough, Eleanor supposed, if one admired the sort of man who laughed too heartily at his own wit and allowed his gaze to linger upon Honoria’s bodice rather longer than propriety sanctioned.
Eleanor sat at the far end of the table, as custom dictated, and spoke only when addressed directly.
“I understand you possess a talent for languages, Miss Finch,” Lady Tremaine said midway through the fish course, in a tone suggesting that a talent for languages ranked somewhere alongside a talent for juggling—diverting, perhaps, but hardly consequential.
“I am tolerably proficient in French and Italian,” Eleanor replied. “And moderately capable in German.”
“How charming. Quite a drawing-room accomplishment.”
Eleanor smiled—the practised smile, which conceded nothing and revealed less.
“Do favour us with a demonstration,” the baronet said, leaning forward with the eager air of a man anticipating entertainment. “Say something in Italian. Something romantic.”
Something romantic. As though her languages were party diversions, meant to be dispensed at command for the amusement of gentlemen who would forget her name by morning.
