It was not yet half past nine. The pendulum in the mahogany longcase clock on the landing was swinging steadily, measuring out the seconds of her ordeal, but neither of the fingers seemed to be moving. Not even half past nine yet, and already she felt so nauseous that she had to concentrate not to allow her knees to buckle underneath her. A film of moisture was beginning to tickle on her upper lip. A sharp pain ran through her left arm when it was pinched between long fingernails.
'Stop fidgeting, girl!' her mother hissed. 'Sir John and Lady Wells ... Lady Wells, how kind of you to find the time to follow our invitation! Sir John - oh, how well you look! Quite in the pink of health! Lady Wells, how pleased you must be to see your husband so wonderfully recovered!'
'I am indeed very well, for the time being, dear Lady Gaythorne,' Sir John replied, gratified at his hostess's interest in his invariably minor ailments. 'My visit to Baden has done me so much good. What a blessing, to finally be able to travel the continent again unhindered by war! We owe the great Duke all gratitude!'
'My feelings exactly, Wells, when I went to Paris last month!' Lord Gaythorne joined his wife in greeting their guests. 'Lady Wells, your servant... - Do you know, it'd been an age since I'd been to Paris - not since the Peace, in '02! And the strange and wonderful thing is that the place hasn't changed nearly as much as you'd expect. Excellent entertainments, and the most stimulating company! You must come, Wells, it will do you a world of good!'
'Tea!' Lady Wells decided in a dry tone of voice and steered her husband away from such immoralising influence.
Gaythorne chuckled. 'A month away from that harridan is all he requires to set him up... poor John. Well, I suppose you have everything in hand here, my dear? Then I will go and play the humble host ...'
Mother and daughter watched the retreating back of their lord and master.
'And what are you sneering at, young lady?'
Sarah cast down her eyes and bit her lip.
'Not sneering, ma'am, by no means. Merely rejoicing at the prospect of becoming a married woman, too, and being humiliated by my husband in front of my guests.'
'Insolence! I hope Brennan is going to beat you when you show such insolence towards him!'
'Insolence?' Sarah's throat was so tight with rage she thought she would gag on it. 'Is it insolence to wish that my husband won't mention his ... the 'stimulating company' he finds elsewhere, in public? Is it disrespectful of me to hope and pray that he will not flaunt his disrespect of me, his complete lack of interest in me, in his wife?'
'Wife? What's all this? I keep hearing talk of wives, and weddings, and I refuse to believe it's true!'
Both women stared at the single gentleman who had ascended the stairs. Sarah was the first to react.
'Mr Mainwearing!' she squealed and rushed towards him to grab his hand.
'Sarah!'
'Don't scold her, madam - it's a hopeless enterprise, trying to tame a kitten!' Philip Mainwaring laughed. 'Besides, how would I know that I'm welcome in your house - turning up unannounced, unbidden - if this kitten didn't maul me? Eh, little one?'
Sarah blushed down to the white lace that peeped up from the décolletage of her gown and released the arm she had been clutching.
'When did you return to England? Does Gaythorne know? My, Philip, but you look terrible!' Never one to let an opportunity pass by to make a value judgement, Lady Gaythorne crooned at his evident discomfort. Mainwaring ran his hands along the front of his dark satin coat and stretched his shoulders.
'You don't think I'm turned out spruce enough for your house, Emily?'
'Oh, it's not your dress; although you really must give away these Italian coats, Philip, they may be well enough for continentals, but London society demands a bit more of an effort. No, you're deplorably thin, and you've gone grey! I would not have recognised you!'
His hair stood on end in thick, grizzled tufts as he pushed his fingers into it.
'Someone should tell Wellington that the physical hardship undergone by the diplomatic corps is as dire as that suffered by the military,' he grinned. 'Besides, Emily, recall that your husband and I are going to be forty years old this year. I'm sure that entitles me to some grey hair - and him to a little more circumference!'
At the mention of her husband's paunch, Lady Gaythorne snorted.
'Pray don't go and encourage him, Mr Mainwaring. I take it that you've met Gaythorne since you've been back?'
'At White's, on Thursday night. But briefly - not worth mentioning at home, I daresay.'
In fact, her husband had had no opportunity to tell her of the return of his schoolfriend because she had not set eyes on him for five days before this evening. Lady Gaythorne clasped her daughter's elbow again and propelled her towards the drawing-room.
'Sarah, go and introduce Mr Mainwaring to the Brennans. And see that he has a drink!'
'Yes, Mother. Come, sir, into the sharks' pool.'
He noticed a brief moment's hesitation before she took his arm again.
'So - who's the young buck your mother wants to beat you?'
'Oh... you heard that...'
'Yes, I heard that!' he shot back, exasperated. 'I may be fast sinking into decrepitude, but I have the use of all my faculties yet!'
'Oh, that's good!' Sarah giggled and shot him a glance that he found hard to read. Mainwaring had for long minutes now been labouring under the awareness that one of his faculties, at least, was extremely keen and active; but that was not something this young girl could possibly have noticed. His sudden shotrness of breath at seeing her at the top of the stairs: a lithe, sparkling figure all in white beaded muslin, her red-golden hair - he'd called her a ginger kitten when she was little, making her growl and kick at him - an artful mass of curls intertwined with gold ribbon. She was radiant, in white and gold, an exquisitely perplexing mixture of a girl he remembered and a young woman he was meeting for the first time.
He had pretended with himself that it was not she, and she alone, whom he longed to see when he walked along Grosvenor Square towards the Gaythorne residence. And he had pretended to be curious, in an entirely avuncular fashion, at how she had turned out, the scruffy child with the wide-set green eyes and the heart-shaped face. All self-deceit. He had known all along that she would be beautiful, and that she would not grow into a statuesque woman like her mother, but remain boyish and supple like the women in her father's family. Boyish, he decided after a glance at her chest and her naked shoulders, but by no means bony; and pray God that she had not caught him staring. That she had not caught the quickening of his pulse when she slipped her arm into his, her pale, creamy skin so alluring against the dark blue cloth of his coat that his knees had weakened at the sudden bolt of lust that shot into his thighs.
'Why are they marrying you off?' he demanded, uncharacteristically harsh. 'You're not even - how old are you? You can't be a day over seventeen!'
'I was eighteen last month, sir,' she retorted, quite on her dignity. 'In fact, I must be, because you gave me a book of poems for my thirteen's birthday, just before you left for Italy, and that was five years ago!'
'So it was...,' he mused. He had succeeded in making himself forget that last birthday gift to his friend's young daughter, had deceived himself about his motives in encouraging a child to read the graphically erotic poems of John Donne and Andrew Marvell. A child then, a rebellious, stubborn child, her hair always down her back and round her ears, flouncing off in a huff at her mother's eternal scoldings; and even then Philip had known as surely as he had ever known anything that a little attention, calm, gentle fingers in her hair, behind her ears, would reduce that spiteful kitten to purring satisfaction. He had never touched her; would never allow himself to even entertain the fantasy. But it had given him deep, illicit pleasure to imagine that she would grow up with the voices of poetic seduction in her mind.
'Did you read them?' he asked, as if by the way.
Again that quick, green-eyed glance up at his face, testing the water.
'Yes ... But that Marvell is a brute! How can he think for a moment that any lady would ... would have him for her lover, when he says all these horrid things to her? About ... her lying in a tomb, and being eaten by worms! Who is going to be persuaded by that? I like John Donne much better.'
Philip's shoulders shook with laughter; his arm seemed to be tugging at hers. She tightened her grip around his sleeve and caught her breath at the hard, ribbed flesh she felt through coat and shirt. Her mother had called him thin, but he was only thin in comparison with the placid corpulence of her father. Of little more than average height, he had the body of a sportsman, lean and ready for physical action, with that indefinable air of reserve that had protected him in his various diplomatic assignments. When she raised her face to look at him, he was smiling down at her, his sunburnt skin in a dozen little creases around his clear grey eyes.
'In truth, all of these poets are wide off the mark,' he heard himself pursue this entirely unsuitable subject. 'They all maintain the polite fiction that young women need to be persuaded to drop their high principles - and their garments. Whereas the opposite is the case...'
'Don't say that,' she begged him lowly. 'I can't tell you how ... how abhorred in my imagination it is ... my gorge rises at it.'
He smiled at her quotation.
'Well, at least you haven't grown into a missish little prude but spent at least some of your time in profitable study. Or have you merely made notes on lines usefully quoted in polite conversation?'
But he received no answer. The bright head at his shoulder remained bent, and he realised that he had been deviating from the topic at hand because it was making him helpless with anguish. He clenched his jaws.
'Tell me then. Who is the pup?'
She stopped at the threshold to the drawing-room, which was crowded with chattering people.
'William Brennan. Sir Thomas Brennan's only son. Perhaps you know him? From Preston.'
Philip shook his head, scanning the room. 'Never heard of him. A merchant? Full of juice?'
