‘Oh, Marietta, you have no sense of humour at all,’ said Sophie, dismissively, ‘you are so solemn. Now Jack has the most enormous sense of the ridiculous.’
‘Then he should get along with me, should he not?’ said Marietta savagely. ‘Seeing that you all consider me to be the most ridiculous thing in Washington.’
She swept out of the room, leaving Sophie behind with her mouth open, since Marietta rarely bit back, however much she was provoked. It was one of her collection of amazing and boring virtues.
Goodness me, she thought, whatever had caused that? Well, she would tease Jack about his misfortune in being exposed to Marietta’s earnest and learned conversation at tea.
Explosives and marine engineering at four o’clock in the afternoon. What next?
Marietta thought that her father looked tired when he came in later. He was overwhelmed, he said, with work and with place-men. His senses, however, were as acute as ever, and while they waited in the hall for Sophie, before leaving for the reception, he said, ‘I shall be glad when my brother and sister-in-law arrive in Washington to take her over, even if I have to endure their presence here. She really is most excessively spoiled. Whatever can have caused her tantrums this evening?’
Sophie had been making her displeasure at missing Jack quite plain to all and sundry, and so Marietta explained to the Senator.
‘Hmm, Dilhorne. An odd name, and the second time that I have encountered it today. An Australian, you said, so they can scarcely be related.’
This was cryptic, even for the Senator, who frequently left out the connections in his chains of thought, expecting his daughter to pick them up, which she usually did—as today.
‘You mean that you have met another Dilhorne?’
‘Yes, an English MP and his aide. Alan Dilhorne and Charles Stanton. Dilhorne says that he does not represent the British Government, but you may be sure that he does. A handsome and devious fellow: one must listen carefully to what he says, or be misled.’
‘A little like mine,’ said Marietta.
‘His friend, though, is quite different,’ pursued her father. ‘A quiet dark man, a marine engineer, but a gentleman, patently.’
‘And that is another coincidence,’ said Marietta. ‘For my Dilhorne is a marine engineer.’
‘I do not like coincidences,’ said her father peevishly. ‘Coincidences make life difficult to control.’
‘But exciting,’ said Marietta, who had lately found this ingredient sadly lacking in her life. ‘Will they be at President Lincoln’s reception tonight?’
‘Of course,’ said her father, ‘and yours?’
‘Mine, too. Ezra Butler is taking him.’
‘That figures,’ said her father. ‘Butler has shipping interests in Australia. It will be stimulating to meet your man, and you must meet mine—although he is happily married, I understand.’
So her father was determined to matchmake. But she would not be pushed into anything, and, if she married, it must be someone whom she respected. Plain and twenty-seven as she was, love was too much to ask for.
Chapter Two
T he drive outside the White House was thronged with carriages and bobbing flambeaux there to light the way for Mr Lincoln’s guests. Marietta, who was used to such events to the point that they bored her, was handed down from the Hopes’ carriage, Sophie following her. Sophie was looking particularly charming in young girl’s white. A wealth of gauze rosebuds decorated her hair and her pink sash emphasised her tiny waist. She was carrying a bouquet of crimson and white hothouse carnations from which trailed filmy lace.
Marietta, for once not in a dark dress, was wearing lavender and was becoming increasingly conscious that it did even less for her than her usual colours, whatever her maid had said when she had helped her into it. She looked extinguished and knew it. The pale mauve gave her creamy complexion, one of her better points, a bilious cast.
Sophie, coming into the hall just before they had left, and still resentful of Marietta for having entertained Jack that afternoon, had said, sweetly unpleasant, ‘Are you well, Marietta? Your colour is poor tonight.’
Even the Senator—usually unaware of Sophie’s frequent brutality towards her cousin, whose lack of looks she thought was a good foil for her own delicate beauty—was alert to the insult, so pointed had it been.
‘I think that you look very well, my dear,’ he’d said, frowning at Sophie whom he disliked. His praise had done little to comfort Marietta. Her glass had told her only too clearly the truth about her appearance.
Before her father’s words that morning she would have shrugged off Sophie’s unkind remarks, but the armour which she had worn for the seven years since Avory Grant’s proposal had suddenly disappeared, and she was as vulnerable as she had been as a girl. Yesterday she would have ignored, or even been amused by, Sophie’s spite. Today, though, the words had stung—but she did not allow her distress to be visible.
Once inside the White House, Sophie was less interested in her short meeting with the President and Mrs Lincoln than in looking around her for Jack Dilhorne. Marietta thought that Mr Lincoln looked tired, which was not surprising in view of his country’s desperate situation: civil war was almost upon them.
Mary Todd Lincoln was, as usual, overdressed, and Marietta wondered how he had come to marry her: they seemed a most unlikely pair. This thought worried her, for she suddenly seemed to have marriage on the brain, and before tonight such a thing would not have occurred to her.
Senator Hope’s party walked on through the crowds of eagerly chattering people, most of whom Marietta knew through her father’s work—but she was suddenly aware that none of them knew her because she was Marietta Hope, but only because she was her father’s daughter. This was another new thought, and not a pleasant one.
A long mirror presented her with her ill-dressed self. I look forty, she thought, I really must take more interest in dress. No wonder Sophie laughs at me. I hope that she finds Jack soon; I cannot bear much more of her tantrums. I shall slap her, or scream, if she complains again.
Marietta betrayed none of this while bowing and smiling at those around her. The foreign diplomats who filled Washington were all present and she spoke pleasantly to them in her schoolgirl French. The elegant representative from Paris inwardly regretted that Miss Hope’s looks and general appearance were not so good as her brains.
A subdued scream from Sophie suddenly announced that she had seen Jack Dilhorne, and she began wildly semaphoring in his direction.
‘A little more decorum would be fitting, Sophie,’ said Marietta repressively, unable to resist, for once, the temptation to pay her cousin back for her earlier unkind remark, ‘or the world will think you a hoyden.’
‘Oh, pooh, we are not all old maids,’ said Sophie spitefully. ‘I particularly wish to speak to Jack, having missed him this afternoon.’ She waved her little bouquet again, narrowly missing a footman who was carrying a tray of drinks.
Jack had seen her and was threading his way through the packed room to her side. He looked even more handsome in his elegant evening dress, and even more in command of himself, if that were possible, than he had done that afternoon. He bowed to both Marietta and Sophie and was presented to the Senator.
Before the Senator could speak to him about his unusual name, twice encountered that day, Sophie took command of the situation.
‘Oh, Jack, what a bore that I was out this afternoon. I do hope that you were suitably distressed by my absence!’
What could the poor man say but ‘Oh, yes, indeed, Miss Sophie,’ thought Marietta satirically, as Jack promptly did so, with an