Lady Lytton would not be surprised. She would nod understandingly and pat Elma’s hand. Of course, nobody could expect better from a girl who’d been jilted, crushed, flattened, twice now.
Gwen did not feel flattened, though. For the first time in what seemed like ages, she felt positively . . . robust.
Your help would be useful, Alex had written.
With a laugh, she flopped back onto the bed and spread out her limbs. As a girl, she’d visited a museum in Oxford that had displayed a dried sea specimen called a starfish. If one of its limbs got chopped off, the curator had said, another would grow overnight. Something like that had happened to her, perhaps. She felt more cheerful, even, than she had in the days before her jilting.
On an impulse, she lifted her heels into the air. Her nightgown fell down to her thighs. She considered her bare legs with interest; the cancan dancers at the Moulin Rouge had given her material for comparison. Slim ankles, nicely rounded calves. She preferred the dimpled knees she had seen last night; her own looked sadly knobby. But she could kick as well as anyone. She pointed her toe and delivered a solid punt to an imaginary Thomas Arundell. She felt better prepared than ever to give him a bit of what-for. Lily Goodrick was the Queen of the Barbary Coast, after all. She took guff from no man, least of all a spineless toad.
Perhaps today she’d find him.
* * *
Except, of course, for the small fact that Thomas had left Paris already, making him unavailable for the what-for she’d been composing in her head all afternoon. Upon learning these tidings, Gwen nearly dropped the teapot. “Are you certain?” she asked Elma. How on earth had he come and gone so quietly?
“Completely certain,” said Elma. She sat across from Gwen in the sitting room, nearly vibrating with good spirits. “I had the news from Lady Lytton herself. He is her second cousin twice removed, you know, and he always pays her a visit before he leaves town. I suppose he thinks of her as he might his own mother, were his mother not such a dragon.” Elma paused to give a delicate shudder. “Narrow escape you had there, my dear.”
“But where has he gone?” Gwen asked. This was beyond deflating.
“Baden-Baden, says Lady Lytton, and thence to Corfu.”
Gwen nodded, now thoroughly confused. Elma had proposed a celebratory tea; were these the tidings they were meant to celebrate? If so, Gwen could not help but think it slightly mean-spirited. Elma knew that she had come here to retrieve the ring. Thomas’s absence was no cause to rejoice.
“Never fear,” said Elma, seeing the doubt on her face. “I have better news yet. But first, let’s raise our glasses.”
Wary now, Gwen held out one spindly china cup—cream with a splash of tea, per Elma’s preference. It was always possible, she supposed, that Elma was not about to propose that they toast the death of some countess on her wedding night, or the sudden expiry of an heir who’d had the audacity to be married already but whose younger brother yet languished in bachelorhood.
An anticipatory smile slipped free of Elma’s lips. “Darling,” she said, “first I must apologize for my temper this morning. I know that you’ve had a very trying time of it, and I should have realized that Paris is no place for a young woman in a troubled state of mind. What you required was rest, not this nervous, constant stimulus.”
“Oh no,” Gwen said quickly. “Please don’t apologize. I am sorry to have worried you, but I assure you, I had a grand time last night.”
“No, no, don’t forgive me; it wasn’t you whom I owed my temper. The blame rests solely with Mr. Ramsey. I confess, I expected a great deal more of him. Of course I know he is not widely considered worthy of respectable company, but I supposed our connections to his family would hold him to a better standard of behavior. I was gravely disappointed by what you told me, but as I said, rightfully it is he with whom I should quarrel.”
“But I was the one who insisted on going to Chat Noir,” Gwen said.
Elma lifted a brow. “Well,” she said, after a significant pause. “As I said, you’ve been through a trial. And one night won’t have done you any harm, provided you met no one we knew.” She frowned. “Goodness—you didn’t, did you?”
“No,” Gwen said hastily. “Nobody at all.”
Elma exhaled. “Then, as I said, no harm done. But I do think it’s time to leave, darling. To the countryside, for a bit of a constitutional, exactly as the Ramsey sisters suggested. Guernsey, we’d proposed, although Cornwall could serve nicely, too. Which do you prefer?”
Guernsey? Good heavens. “Aunt Elma,” she said carefully, “I think you misunderstand the situation. I do not feel overwrought in the slightest. Last night—”