Pentecost Alley by Anne Perry Page B

said last time!” the young woman replied with a smile. “Oscar Wilde says it is the artist’s duty always to be surprising.”
    “Then it must be the politician’s duty always to say and do precisely what is expected of him,” Emily returned. “That way no one is ever caught off guard.”
    “And nothing is ever interesting, or funny! My name is Tallulah FitzJames. I know we haven’t been introduced, but we obviously know each other in spirit.”
    “Emily Radley,” Emily replied.
    “Oh, is Jack Radley your husband?” There was a spark of appreciation in her eye.
    “Yes,” Emily acknowledged with satisfaction, then added honestly, “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
    They walked over to a sofa just large enough for the two of them to sit side by side and be perfectly polite in including no one else.
    “I can’t think why I’m here!” Tallulah sighed. “I am with my cousin, Gerald Allenby, because he wanted me to, so he could pay court to Miss … I forget the name. Her father’s got a huge place up in Yorkshire or somewhere.Glorious in the summer, and like the North Pole in winter.”
    “I’m here to be decorative and smile at the right people,” Emily said ruefully.
    Tallulah’s eyes brightened. “Are you allowed to glare and make faces at the wrong people?” she said hopefully.
    Emily laughed. “Possibly, if I could only be sure who they were. The trouble is one day’s wrong people are another day’s right ones. And you can’t take back a glare.”
    “No, you can’t, can you.” Tallulah was suddenly serious. “In fact, you can’t take back anything much. People remember, even if you don’t.”
    Emily caught the note of pain underneath the light voice. Without warning, there was reality in the emotion. The rest of the room fell away from Emily’s consciousness, the polite chatter, the tinkle of appropriate laughter.
    “Some people forget,” she said quietly. “It’s an art. If you want to go on loving someone, you have to learn it.”
    “I don’t want to go on,” Tallulah said with a tight little smile of self-mockery. “I’d give a great deal to know how to stop.”
    Emily asked the next and obvious question. “Is he married?”
    That seemed to Tallulah to be funny, in a bitter way.
    Emily did not want to pry, but she sensed that the other woman had a need to share something which obviously hurt her and which perhaps she could not speak of to her family. They might not know … or if they did, maybe they disapproved. If he were married, they could hardly do anything else.
    “No, he’s not married,” Tallulah answered. “At least he wasn’t the last time I saw him. I don’t imagine he’ll ever marry. And if he does, it will be someone earnest and beautiful, with innocent eyes and hair which curls naturally, and a permanently sweet disposition.”
    Emily thought about it for a moment. She did not want to make a clumsy remark, and it was not easy to readthrough the flippant words the true nature of Tallulah’s pain. She did not know whether to be witty in return, or to be noncommittal, or to show that she saw the depth if not the totality of the wound.
    Over on the far side of the room a large woman with fair hair and magnolia skin tilted her head back and laughed daintily. The gaslight shone in a riot of beautiful colors, silk skirts spread out like poppy petals, oranges and plums and shot lavenders, a glory of gleam and shade. Beyond the windows the summer evening was barely dark, an afterglow still shooting shreds of apricot between the branches of the trees above the garden wall.
    “I don’t think I should like to be married to someone with a permanently sweet disposition,” Emily said candidly. “I should feel intensely inferior. And I should also never be quite sure if they meant what they said.”
    Tallulah stared at her long, slender hands resting on her skirt.
    “Jago wouldn’t feel inferior,” she replied. “He’s the best man I’ve ever