Page 10 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

Winston was hovering in the hall with the stricken expression of a man who had been outmaneuvered on his own ground.

“Sir. A Miss Beaumont called for—for our guest. She was most insistent, and she gave the name of the family, and I couldn’t well leave her standing in the street—”

Remy handed over his hat and coat. “How long?”

“Ten minutes, sir.”

“Bring tea,” Remy said. “Slowly.”

He crossed the hall to the parlor door, which stood ajar, and something in the pitch of the voices stopped him with his hand raised.

“—positively wild, Laurell. Mother took to her bed for a week. Do you know what it has been like for me?”

“I can imagine.”

“You cannot. Everyone knows. The Bergerons didn’t invite us at Christmas. Marie-Claire says her mother won’t have my name on a card until it all dies down, and it will not die down while you are living in the mayor’s house in a green wool dress.”

Through the gap in the door Remy could see a slice of the room: Laurell on her feet by the mantel, very straight, and a young woman in blue perched on the edge of the settee. Golden ringlets. A pretty, pointed face. Not much past seventeen, and already possessed of a voice that could take the paint off a wall.

“Papa has said he’ll take you back.”

There was a silence.

“He hasn’t,” Laurell said.

“He has. I begged him and he has, and you might at least sound grateful.” Fabric rustled. “There are conditions, naturally. You can’t come home like—like that. Mrs. Aucoin knows a woman on Rampart Street. It’s perfectly common; the Fontenot girl did it two summers ago and she was married by the following spring and no one says a word.”

Remy’s hand closed on the doorframe.

“No,” Laurell said.

“Or the other way, if you insist on being squeamish. Papa would send you to Aunt Odile’s at Bayou Lafourche until it’s over, and there are people who take them, Laurell, there are places, and afterward you would simply have been in the country for your health and it would be as though none of it ever—”

“Rachel. No.”

“Then what do you imagine is to become of you?” Rachel’s voice rose, and lost every scrap of its coaxing sweetness. “Do you think he’ll keep you? Do you think a man like that keeps a woman who’s already spoiled and swelling with another man’s brat? He’ll have his amusement and put you out by summer, and then where will you go? Back to Giselle’s, and this time Papa won’t even get paid for it.”

“Perhaps.”

“You always did this. Always so quiet and so good and so pitiable, and everyone forever asking after poor patient Laurell—well, look at you now.” A laugh, high and unlovely. “You may as well have handed me the whole city. Do you know Philip’s mother stopped me in the street to say how sorry she was for our family? Sorry for us. And I stood there and I let her, and I smiled, because that is what one does when one’s sister has ruined everything.”

“You smiled when Papa signed the paper, too,” Laurell said quietly.

The silence went on a beat too long.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I was standing in the doorway of the front room. Madam Giselle had her back to me and Papa was writing, and you were by the window, and you smiled, Rachel. You looked at me and you smiled, because it wasn’t going to be you.”

“You had ruined yourself,” Rachel hissed. “Why should it have been me?”

Remy pushed the door open.

Both women turned. Laurell’s face was white to the lips; the girl on the settee sprang up, and in the space of a breath rearranged herself into something charming and distressed.

“Mayor Vincent. Forgive me—I’ve come about my poor sister; the family is frantic—”

“Winston,” Remy said, without raising his voice. “Miss Beaumont’s carriage.”