Page 67 of Trouble

‘No you won’t,’ said Meera. ‘You’ll sulk and stew on it inside your head, and be almost civil on the rare occasions you speak, as always.’

Emily felt slightly startled. She didn’t like being nailed down like this – or the idea that Meera had noticed how often there was a storm brewing below Emily’s surface, only kept from breaking over everybody else’s heads because she mostly turned it inwards and let lightning strike where nobody else could see.

‘But I don’t have anything to wear,’ Emily said, and Meera smiled.

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

What she could do, apparently, was let slip to the children that Emily didn’t have a smart enough dress for a ball, because apparently it reached Grace, who told Aster. When Emily got to the schoolroom the next day after church, thinking of doing some reading, she had barely sat down before Aster strode in with an enormous armful of fabric and dumped it unceremoniously onto the desk in front of her.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Go wild.’

‘What is this?’ said Emily, urgently moving an inkwell away from an eruption of crushed pink satin.

‘All the formal dresses I have never worn,’ said Aster. ‘Take your pick. I wouldn’t recommend the green – you’d look quite dead in it.’

‘Aster,’ Emily said, her instinct to immediately refuse. ‘I can’t—’

‘Yes you can,’ said Aster.

He was wearing clothes that clearly hadn’t yet been tailored for him – soft brown breeches, a crisp shirt, a creamy gold and carmine-red waistcoat unfastened and hanging loose – but he looked more comfortable in his own skin than Emily had ever seen before. There was still a wariness to him – a sense that any moment he might throw up his guard or duck for cover – but it didn’t seem to be weighing so heavily now. He was certainly being marginally more pleasant.

‘Look .?.?.’ he began. ‘I know I’ve been a prick, and I still thinkyou’rea bit of a prick, and I’m not .?.?.goodat talking about things. But I suppose I am sorry. And grateful. For the haircut.’

‘For the haircut,’ Emily said. ‘Right. It looks .?.?. good, by the way.’

‘It looks fine,’ said Aster. ‘Don’t get carried away, you’re not that skilled a barber. Anyway .?.?. truce?’

He held out a hand to shake, looking solemn, and Emily took it and gave it a single solid pump, trying not to look amused by the entire endeavour. It was clear that Aster was trying to do thingsproperly.

‘Anyway,’ said Aster. ‘Have a look. See which you’d like.’

‘Just tell me which you like the least and I’ll have that one.’

‘Ugh,’ said Aster. ‘No thank you. I’m not helping you choose which dress to seduce myfatherin.’

‘Toseduceyour .?.?. ?’

Emily had to get a handle on her horrified spluttering as Grace entered; her face lit up in a way that made Emily afraid for her life.

‘Are wetrying on dresses?’ she half-shrieked. Emily winced. ‘Can I help choose?’

‘Yes,’ said Emily, distracted. ‘Aster, about what you just said, I really think—’

‘Revolting,’ said Aster. ‘Transparent. Goodbye.’

‘What’s revolting and transparent?’ Grace said, as Aster exited the room looking dreadfully smug.

‘This dress,’ said Emily, plucking at something puce and unappealing. ‘Look, will you just choose one for me?’

Grace pressed a hand to her chest and looked at Emily with enormous, reverent eyes.

‘It would be mygreatesthonour.’

Grace chose a dress in palest periwinkle blue, with gathered sleeves and a spiderweb-thin covering of organza at the bodice. There were tiny flowers stitched along the neckline and at the waist, but otherwise it was mercifully simple. Emily didn’t even bother looking at herself in the mirror; she just weathered Grace’s gasps and applause and then immediately went to take it off again.

‘It matches your eyes,’ Grace said, which Emily found mildly hilarious; her eyes were the dullest possible blue, bleached of all vibrancy. The ocular equivalent of an overcast day. No dress could possibly hope to change that.

The ball was to be in a week’s time, and in the meantime the house became almost uninhabitable. It seemed that Meera was taking it as a personal challenge to see how far she could stretch the budget – and her colleagues – to pull off something quite spectacular. She kept asking Emily to do strange things at irregular intervals: one day it was running out to the garden to cut some of the late-blooming roses and great handfuls of asters so that she could experiment with floral arrangements; the next it was measuring the tablecloths to see just how far they could be stretched.