Page 31 of A Sorceress Comes to Call
She obliged, and topped hers off as well, before shuffling the cards with hand-blurring skill and dealing out a solitaire spread on the table. Her hands were old and gnarled and the lace at her cuffs did not quite cover the thick blue veins, but she flipped cards as cleanly as any riverboat gambler. “I gathered by the way you worded the invitation that you’ve an ulterior motive for this little get-together?”
“Whatever makes you say that?”
“You underlined the please in please attend three times. You’ve never been an underliner, Hester, not even when we were at school.”
“Yes, well. It seemed the easiest way to handle things. And I am very, very grateful to you for coming, you know.”
Imogene put the ace of spades on the top row and followed it with a two. “The easiest way to handle this ever-so-charming woman staying with you, I take it?”
Hester grunted. She was not about to confide her premonition of doom, not even to Imogene, but the truth of the situation was damning enough. “She’s setting her claws into Sam. He’s fended off fortune hunters before, but she’s a good deal sharper.”
The ace of diamonds made an appearance and was duly placed in the top row. “Hmm,” said Imogene noncommittally.
“You met her at dinner last night.”
Imogene did not take her eyes off the cards. “Yes. It was plain within the first five minutes that the woman is out for marriage, and I suspect it’s not the first time. Do you know anything about her?”
“Not a damn thing. Everything she lets slip sounds perfectly reasonable and I haven’t been able to verify any of it. Her daughter’s dropped a few hints, but not intentionally.”
“Nervous little thing, isn’t she?”
“Very. Clever enough, but ignorant as a newborn chick and knows it.” Hester thought about mentioning Cordelia’s behavior at that very strange dinner, but decided against it. There had not been a repeat, and all of Hester’s suspicions were too vague and too bizarre to say out loud. “She’d do well enough if she was out from under her mother, I think.”
“Hmm.” Imogene studied her cards. “Perhaps. Do you want to know what I think?”
“No,” said Hester. “I invited you to a house party and began discussing the alarming woman currently pursuing my brother simply so I could watch you cheat at solitaire.”
Her old friend snorted. “Is that why you invited Lord Evermore? To try and persuade her to turn her attentions elsewhere?”
Hester froze with the teacup halfway to her lips.
Evangeline and… Richard?
Sharp green eyes searched her face. “Ah. Not your plan after all, I see.” Imogene swept up the cards and began to shuffle them. “Pity, it would have been quite a clever one. Evermore is wealthy and unattached.”
“Yes,” said Hester faintly. Unattached. Yes. He was unattached. She could have attached him years earlier and had not, for reasons that seemed increasingly foolish now. Because a woman with her own inheritance has a little power, a wife has none at all. Because I made my own life after my betrothal ended in disaster, and I was too proud of that to give it up.
Because I could not bear to become old where he could see me.
She did not say any of these things to Imogene, because her friend would have cut them apart as neatly as she cut a deck of cards.
“It’s not too late, you know,” Lady Strauss said quietly.
“I’m old,” said Hester.
“So’s he.”
“Yes, but fifty-year-old men still marry debutantes, not fifty-year-old women with bad knees.” She gestured self-deprecatingly to herself.
“I think you do him a disservice,” said Imogene. “And yourself as well. Still. Who else is coming?”
“The Green woman.”
“Oh, her.”
Hester raised her eyebrows. “Do you dislike her so much?”
“I adore her, as you very well know. It’s impossible not to. The problem is that she will throw all the rest of us in the shade. No one so plain should be so gorgeous. It sets a bad example for the rest of us plain people.”
