“Yes.” Temperance kept her voice low until they had rounded the hedge and the sound of the party faded behind them. “Winning would be not giving them anything to laugh at in the first place.”
“Where is the fun in that?” Albina made a dismissive sound.
“Mother….”
“They started it.”
“They alwaysstart it. That is rather the point.” Temperance stopped walking and turned to face her. Up close, her mother was flushed and bright-eyed. She was, objectively, a very beautiful woman. She was also, objectively, at least three glassespast the point at which Temperance would have preferred to find her. “How much have you had?”
Albina held up two fingers.
“You’ve had more than two,” Temperance resisted the urge to roll her eyes.
“It is approximately two.”
“Mother.”
“Look. The glasses were very small, so I must have lost count. Why are you so upset with me for?”
Temperance took a slow breath. She was not angry, as she was never truly angry with her mother, no matter how many times they had this conversation.
How could she be? She had known her mother for three years now. But it was three years, after a lifetime of not knowing her at all.
Three years of learning that the woman she had spent half her life imagining was more extraordinary and more maddening and more genuinely wonderful than anything she could have invented.
She was not embarrassed by her. What she felt, when she watched those women circle her mother with their polished smiles and their little knives disguised as compliments, was something far closer to fury.
She just preferred not to let it show.
“You know they are not laughing with you,” Temperance said, “Those women are not your friends.”
“I know that.” Albina waved a hand, but the brightness in her expression had softened into something tired. “I have always known that but simply find it more enjoyable to pretend otherwise. It gives me something to do.” She looked at her daughter with the particular directness she deployed when she wanted to say something true. “I spent thirty years doing exactly what I was told, Temperance. Smiling at exactly the right people and saying exactly the right things and none of it made one bit of difference in the end. At least this way I am amusing myself.”
Temperance looked at her for a moment. Then she tucked her mother’s arm more securely through her own and began walking again, slowly, toward the quieter end of the garden.
“All the same,” she said, “perhaps we limit it to two glasses, just for my peace of mind?”
Albina leaned her head briefly against her daughter’s shoulder.
“You are very bossy for someone who claims not to want any power.”
“I want peace for us, I believe that is different.”
“Is it?” Her mother straightened and gave her a sidelong look, the familiar glint of mischief already returning to her eyes. “Speaking of which… Lord Aubrey was asking after you earlier. Perfectly respectable man. Very earnest and dreadfully handsome, if only in a forgettable sort of way.”
“Mother,” Temperance groaned, as if to saynot this again.
“I am simply reporting what I observed and I only wonder,” Albina said lightly, “whether you might consider… just consider, mind you, no obligations attached…. allowing one of these perfectly respectable, very earnest, dreadfully handsome gentlemen to pay you some attention. You are twenty-five, my darling, not ninety.”
Temperance was quiet for a moment. Above them, the afternoon sky was going pale gold at the edges and it felt like it was the kind of moment that invited honesty, and she supposed she had never been very good at lying to her mother anyway.
“I do not want a husband,” she said.
“At all?”
“At all.” She said it without apology, because there was none to give.
It was simply true. She had spent twenty-two years in a place that ran on rules and obligation and she had come out the other side with a very clear sense of what she valued.
