“Was,” he corrected. “She died last year.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. That must have been hard for you.” Her smile was warmly sympathetic. “Were you very close?”
He shrugged, but there was something unconvincing about the casually dismissive gesture, Fenella thought. “I wasn’t able to spend much time with her,” he said. “My father insisted I live at Tremayne Court most of the year and went to Eton with Carlton. A second-class citizen, perhaps, but no one could fault my father for his insistence on treating me the same way he treated his legitimate offspring. On the surface, at least,” he added.
Fenella absorbed this in silence. No wonder he was so moody, she reflected, having to play second fiddle to Carlton and Julia. From what she knew of them, neither could lay claim to an empathetic bone.
Again, she thought back to her first Season, when she’d been caught up in the whirlwind of the debutante dance for a husband. A dance in which she and her two oldest friends had engaged with a degree of scorn for its rituals and even more for the desired culmination of a Society wedding. She clearly remembered now seeing Edward several times during that frenzied social rigmarole. Something about his physical presence had attracted her, those amazing blue eyes for a start, and his loose-limbed, somewhat disordered appearance. Nothing you could put your finger on as out of place precisely, but an overall impression of raffish nonconformity. She had been struck by the fact that whenever she saw him, he was always on the outskirts of any gathering: aloof, not given to conversation, and definitely not one for the dance floor. She had noticed him, registered that it was clearly not his first Season because he seemed rather older than her own set of friends, and then as quickly, she had put him out of her mind. He made no effort to participate in the social proceedings and she was far too busy to cultivate someone who made it clear he’d rather be anywhere else.
“During my first Season, I saw you at several of the events. But you didn’t seem to be enjoying yourself,” she added, lifting an eyebrow.
He laughed a little. “No, I wasn’t. Nothing but empty-headed girls and equally empty-headed men prancing around in some matrimonial game.”
“Harsh,” Fenella observed wryly.
“Perhaps,” he agreed, “but, forgive me if I’m wrong, I rather had the impression that you and your two friends—inseparable friends, as I recall—didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about any of it either.”
She laughed. “How did you guess? I didn’t think we made it that obvious.”
“Maybe it takes one to know one.”
“Well, you’re certainly right. Diana, Petra and I heartily despised the whole business and we ended our Season triumphantly single . . . actually, that’s not strictly true,” she amended, pursing her lips. “Diana was secretly engaged to a childhood friend, but that would have happened with or without the Season.”
“And you are still triumphantly single,” he remarked with a slight questioning inflection.
“I’m certainly not married,” Fenella replied somewhat evasively.
Edward merely raised an eyebrow and left it at that. “More chocolate?”
“No, thank you. I must go.” Fenella buttoned her coat, getting to her feet as she drew on her gloves.
“When can we talk about the play?” he asked on a note of urgency. “I have to convince you that you’re perfect for the part.”
She hesitated, smoothing her kid gloves over her fingers. “If you have a copy with you, I’ll read it at home and see what I think.”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t want you to read it alone. We need to read it together. I have to explain Rose to you or you might not understand her at first.”
“If the character’s that impenetrable, how do you expect an audience to understand her?” Fenella demanded, remembering how flat she had found the character on paper.
“I expect you to make Rose understandable to the most unsympathetic audience,” he said simply.
Fenella stared at him. “You don’t know anything about my acting abilities. I’m just an amateur who enjoys playreading in a group. It’s a hobby.”
“Cedric said you would be perfect for the part.”
“Cedric said that?” She was incredulous. Cedric Hardcastle never complimented or praised anyone. Mostly he dismissed them all as rank amateurs, really beneath his attention except for the fees they paid.
Edward nodded. “When can we meet to read it together?”
Fenella wanted to resist the sense of being bulldozed into something she didn’t want to do but found she couldn’t, simply because, if she was totally honest with herself, she was interested. “Friday afternoon,” she suggested.
“Come to my lodgings around three o’clock.” He opened his wallet and took out a visiting card. “Praed Street.”
She took the card, slipping it into her coat pocket. It was not a particularly fashionable address, on the fringes of Mayfair, but perfectly respectable. “Very well. Until then. Thank you for the chocolate.” She raised a hand in farewell and left the tea shop on a blast of cold air.
Edward beckoned the waitress and asked for more coffee. He sat tapping his mouth with his fingertips, frowning. Ever since he’d first seen Fenella Grantley and her friends four years earlier, he had been struck by her perfect English Rose appearance, hair the color of summer wheat, clear gray eyes, perfect creamy complexion. He’d thought himself immune to physical appearances, particularly when it came to the spoiled, entitled debutantes who peopled the Society world, but something about Fenella and her friends had attracted him. They were different from their peers in some way, and Fenella’s fair beauty stood out in any company. He was drawn first to her voice, clear and melodious, slightly deeper than customary, and her chiming laugh. She laughed frequently; she and her friends seemed to find much to amuse them in their lives. In contrast to his own, which at that point he had found dreary and unsatisfying.
He had found himself surreptitiously following her if he saw her on the street, not really knowing why he did so, but it had become a compulsion. She seemed to embody sunshine, a fanciful thought but one he found hard to dismiss. He had almost finished writing Sapphire and found, as he wrote, that now the image of Fenella was superimposed on Rose. It had puzzled him because Rose was not all sunshine, not by any means; she had a much darker side. When he’d discovered Fenella’s participation in Cedric’s little drama school in Bloomsbury, his interest really had been piqued. The woman he had encountered today was not the unadulterated ray of sunshine she had been four years ago. He could sense unhappiness, or at least discontent, or was it disappointment, beneath her exquisite exterior, and now he was eager to see if Fenella as an actor could bring her own dark side to bear on that aspect of Rose.
He finished his coffee and went out into the cold, making his way to King’s College, and his work as research assistant to a professor of literature. It was work he enjoyed, as much as he enjoyed the intellectual company of the professor and his academic colleagues. It was a world he understood and that fitted Edward Tremayne like a glove.
* * *
Fenella hailed a passing hackney on the corner of the square. “Albemarle Street,” she called to the cabbie as she climbed inside, relieved to get out of the cold wind. She needed to think, or rather to clear her thoughts. Her mind was full of conflicting ideas, impressions. She couldn’t even decide if she liked Edward Tremayne enough to spend another minute in his company. But the thought of not seeing him again, of putting Rose and the play out of her mind for good was not possible. Its promise of creative stimulation, of the excitement of exploring new, imaginative territory was too heady to ignore.