Page 39 of A Game of Scandal

“Good.” Izzy’s smile was that of a conspirator. “I already told your mother I made a mistake in coming, that I have a headache and that she should stay and catch up with her friends, while we go back. I should think she’ll be hours.”

“Tell Izzy about Laing,” Ash said.

“Laing?” she asked.

“He was inside,” I explained with a wave of my hand. “He danced with me, but as I already told Ash, I don’t think he knew who I was. It’s nothing worth making a fuss over. I’m fine.”

Ash and Izzy exchanged a look that had me bristling. I was being managed again, by two people who I thought knew better.

“Felicity—” Ash began gently.

“Let’s go,” I said abruptly. “There’s no reason to stay here any longer than we have to. Goodnight, Ash.”

Without looking back, I strode back down the path towards the house. As I left, Ash’s quiet words chased me into the dark: a soft, desperate warning.

“Please. Be careful.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Three days later I was sitting at a tea party in Bloomsbury, wondering if a teaspoon might be used as an effective weapon.

“And so I said that of course if one were simply to multiply the new coefficients by the suggested figure, then the answer is quite obvious,” said the pink-faced Mr Trent from his seat beside me.

Wrong.

“Well—” I began, but he cut me off with an indulgent smile.

“I apologize. I’m getting carried away again,” he said. “You can hardly be interested in the specific details of a tricky paper. I know such problems will go over the head of a young lady like yourself, but I promise you, it’s fascinating stuff.” A note of pomposity that I was all too familiar with had entered his voice.

We were sitting side by side on a small settee in an alcove framed by feathery green palms. Quite honestly, I’d lost track of whose house we were at, but the place was grand and stuffed full of people eating tiny cakes and milling around having the same conversations they had at every single one of these interminable events.

I noticed Mother hovering nearby, chatting with a friend of hers. She flashed me an encouraging smile, and I tried to force my own lips up, even as Mr Trent waffled on.

“Mr Trent is a Cambridge man,” Mother had said when she introduced us, her words heavy with meaning. Clearly Mr Trent was on her list of appropriate suitors. She was, after all, trying to find me someone clever, as well as proper.

Mr Trent was only a year or two older than me, with the look of a pale, handsome scholar. Light brown hair brushed back from a long, slightly melancholy face, round spectacles framing shy brown eyes. When asked why he wasn’t in Cambridge at the moment, Mr Trent had answered with a nervous chuckle.

“Oh, got sent down for a couple of weeks. Harmless prank with some pals of mine.”

He was polite, blushed easily and was perfectly nice in a bland sort of way.

I hated him with a great passion.

Not only was he studying mathematics at Cambridge, but from what I’d observed so far he had no aptitude for the subject. This would have been bad enough, but that he had been foolish enough to get himself suspended for two weeks and then not care? He had the opportunity to attend lectures and to learn at the feet of great teachers, and he had neither the wit nor the good sense to appreciate the privilege. It made my blood boil. I eyed him as he continued to make small talk with no need for my input.

This was the seventh social event I had been dragged to in three days, which was at least partly responsible for my fantasy of stabbing Mr Trent with a teaspoon. I felt simultaneously squeezed and stretched, as though I were being crushed in a tiny box, and spread so thin, you’d soon be able to see straight through me, all at once.

The press of people and their expectations was unbearable. I hadn’t had a moment to myself to walk or read or think or even take a deep breath, because we seemed to move from one social event to the next. From a tea to a dinner to a party or the theatre. There were always people talking to me, poking and prodding at me. I was engulfed constantly in a wave of noise from which there was no respite.

If we weren’t socializing, then we were shopping. Madame Solange, a flamboyant woman with a dubious French accent, had measured me for an entire new wardrobe, and the obligatory white gown and veil for the debutantes’ ball, which would kick off the official start of the season in just over a week.

“You weel be zee belle of zee ball, non?” Madame Solange had said as she draped a skein of pearlescent silk across my shoulders.

“I certainly hope not,” I muttered under my breath.

After Madame Solange, there was the milliner to visit, and the hairdresser who chopped several pale blue inches off the bottom of my hair and coaxed the rest into sleek ringlets.

The more we did, the brighter my mother shone, like a diamond polished up and dazzling. She was so happy, and I… Well, I was trying. I was trying to be the daughter she wanted.