A Lady Never Tells(29)

There seemed to be an order to the seating as well, Mary noted, and again, everyone else went unerringly to the correct seats. After seating Mary, Royce took the place next to her. Servants jumped to pull out chairs for the other three girls. Lily sat down beside Mary and Camellia and Rose were seated across from them, spoiling the careful man/woman arrangement about the rest of the table.

Mary looked down at the table before her. There were plates of varying sizes and bowls and glasses, not to mention a plethora of forks, knives, and spoons. She realized that she hadn’t any idea what three-fourths of the utensils were for. Down the table, she heard Aunt Phyllida begin to describe the opera she had attended the evening before. Mary sighed inwardly. It was going to be a long and excruciating evening.





Chapter 7




Servants moved around their table, carefully filling glasses or dishing food onto plates. Rose thanked the footman with a smile and received a sharp glance from Aunt Phyllida. Mary suspected that Rose had made some sort of faux pas, but Mary could not worry about that. She was far too involved in determining which utensil to use to eat her fish.

She cast a furtive glance at Sir Royce on her right, and when he picked up a knife and a fork, she chose the same utensils beside her plate. As they ate, she began to notice that Royce reached for his utensils each time with great deliberation, lingering over the right one before slowly picking it up, and she realized that he knew what she was doing and was trying to ease her task. Mary let out a giggle, cutting her eyes over to him.

He shot her a playful wink and returned to his food.

Conversation at the table was slow and erratic. Most of the early conversation consisted of polite general remarks about such things as the weather. Fitz, however, seemed determined to get the group talking. Over the soup course, he smiled down the table at Rose and Camellia and asked where they hailed from in America.

“Pennsylvania,” Rose answered softly. Mary knew that Rose did not like talking to strangers, and she was sure that this situation inhibited her even more.

“Ah.” Fitz smiled. “Philadelphia, yes? That is in Pennsylvania, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Mary put in, coming to Rose’s rescue. “But that isn’t where we are from. We are from a much smaller town—Three Corners.”

“But we’ve lived in quite a few places,” Camellia spoke up.

“Oh, yes,” Lily added. “Maryland for a while. Then there was the farm.”

“Your father farmed?” Aunt Cynthia asked. “How nice. Did he have many tenants?”#p#分页标题#e#

“Tenants?” Lily replied blankly.

“Yes. Perhaps you use a different word. The people who worked the land.”

“He didn’t have any workers,” Mary assured her. “Except us, of course. He did the work himself.”

All the rest of the table froze, staring at the girls.

Mary gazed back at them, annoyed. What was the matter with these people? They seemed appalled by the simplest things.

“It was on the frontier,” Mary went on. “The farms were small, worked just by a family. We all helped with the planting and the harvesting.”

“I see.” Aunt Euphronia raised her brows disdainfully.

Some imp in Mary made her add, “Except, of course, that one of us had to carry the rifles and stand guard.”

All the heads swiveled back to her.

“To warn everybody if we saw Indians coming,” Mary explained.

Aunt Cynthia gasped. Across the table, Rose made a strangled noise and raised her napkin to her mouth, coughing.

“Indians?” Lord Kent asked, his eyes going round. “You mean wild Indians?”

“Very wild. It was the edge of civilization, you see.” It was wrong of her to goad them this way, but Mary could not seem to stop herself. Her aristocratic relatives’ attitude was simply too annoying.

“And you—you girls carried a gun?” Aunt Phyllida looked even more appalled at this than at the idea of marauding Indians.

“A knife as well,” Camellia added.

“We had to be able to fight,” Mary explained calmly.

This statement elicited a gasp from one of the aunts, and Mary heard a muffled noise from Royce beside her. She slid her eyes over to him and saw that he was studying his plate with great interest, his lips pressed tightly together.

“It came in very handy later, too, when Papa bought the tavern,” Rose piped up.

Mary shot a surprised glance at her sister. Apparently even gentle Rose had become tired of their aunts’ quiet condescension.

“The tavern? Your father owned a tavern!” Aunt Euphronia’s eyebrows appeared in danger of climbing into her hairline.