Лорен Уиллиг: The Deception of the Emerald Ring

"You don't have to say that," remonstrated Letty, putting a hand against his chest to ward off further words. "I know you're trying to be kind, but—" How could she explain that it was far crueler to raise hopes that couldn't possibly be realized?

"Kind?" Comprehension kindled in Geoff's gray eyes. His lips twisted in exasperated fondness. "I'm not being kind. Mary was—" Pausing, Geoff groped for an explanation, his expression abstracted. "Mary was a young man's dream."

That was supposed to make her feel better?

Looking back down at Letty, Geoff searched for the correct words to make her understand. "Mary was a storybook illustration, a stained-glass window, an Orthodox icon. She was never real. Not like you."

"Imperfect, you mean," translated Letty.

A sudden smile transformed Geoff's thin face. "In the best of all possible ways."

Letty's nose wrinkled skeptically. "I don't think 'best' and 'imperfect' keep much company together."

"That's where you're wrong. Perfection may be admirable, but it's not very lovable."

Letty's disbelief must have shown on her face, because Geoff repeated, "Yes, lovable. I love the way all your thoughts show on your face—yes, just like that one. I love the way your hair won't stay where it's put. I love the way you wrinkle your nose when you're trying to think of something to say. I love your habit of plain speaking." He touched a finger to her nose. "And, yes, I even love your freckles. I wouldn't eliminate a single one of them, not for all the lemons in the world. There. Does that convince you?"

"You're mad," said Letty, exhibiting that laudable habit of plain speaking he so admired. "You must have hit your head. No, wait, I hit my head. That must be it. This can't be real. Not me. Not you. Not—" Letty shook her head. "No."

"Why?"

"It's too ridiculous to even contemplate. Like a fairy tale. Everyone knows the prince would never really fall in love with the beggar girl. Not in real life. The prince falls in love with the princess, and they go on living in their gilded hall, with their gilded children, in their gilded chairs."

Geoff held up his hands, spreading open his fingers. "I seem to be entirely out of gold leaf at present."

Letty shook her head, brushing away his remark.

"I used to watch you with Mary," she confessed. "I used to watch you with Mary and wish it were me."

She had never admitted it, even to herself, but it was horribly, miserably true. She had hidden it behind a screen of self-righteous judgment, telling herself it was merely that they weren't suited, or that she disapproved of Mary's methods, but that wasn't the real reason. That had never been the real reason.

She had no right to judge anyone, not her sister, not Geoff, not anyone. Not when she had channeled jealousy into spite and pretended it was for their own good. She couldn't even say with any surety that her motives for barging into their elopement were entirely pure. Guilt rose in her, like bile at the back of her throat, tainting everything it touched. That night, if she had left them alone, if she had stayed in her room, Mary would have gone off with Geoff and they would have lived happily ever after. The family reputation certainly couldn't have been more tarnished than it had been by her.

But she had interfered—not out of a pure, disinterested desire for the good of the family, but because, in a hidden little recess in the back of her heart, she had wanted Lord Pinchingdale for herself. And she had known she could never have him.

It wasn't a pleasant realization, any of it. Those people who lauded self-knowledge had clearly never tried it.

"I knew that even if she weren't there—" Letty broke off with an unhappy little laugh. "It was useless. I might as well cry for the moon. You were that far above my touch."

Geoff's brows drew together in confusion.

"Because of the title?" he asked incredulously.

For a smart man, at times he really could be very slow. The thought almost made Letty smile. Almost.

"No. Because you're you. Clever and subtle and cultured…" Letty waved her hands about in wordless illustration. "And I'm just plain old Letty from Hertfordshire."

Geoff's lips quirked. "Nineteen is hardly old. And if you're from Hertfordshire, so is your sister."

"Yes, but with Mary, it didn't stick . She looks right in a London ballroom; I don't. Your house makes me feel like King Cophetua's beggar maid."

Geoff tucked a flyaway wisp of hair back behind her ear. "You can redecorate."

"No," Letty protested, pushing irritably away. "That's not it at all."

It might be rather self-defeating to list for him all the reasons he shouldn't love her, but better that than to have him profess sentiments he couldn't really mean, that couldn't possibly survive once they left the enchanted green world of Ireland and returned to the overheated drawing rooms of London, where the spiteful whispers of their so-called friends would peck holes into any pretensions of affection he might have for her. They would return, and he would realize that she was nothing but a dowdy duckling, a glorified goose girl, stout and sturdy and utterly mundane.

Letty redoubled her efforts. "You don't understand. I'll never be sophisticated or graceful or have poems written to me. I'm not the sort of person you want at all."

Looking down into Letty's flushed face, Geoff said matter- of-factly, "Don't you think I should be the judge of that? As clever and sophisticated and whatnot as I am? Besides," he added, when Letty looked like she was about to remonstrate, "I'm not all that comfortable in a ballroom myself. And I've never had a single poem written to me. Unless you want to volunteer. Your poetic efforts could hardly be worse than mine."

Letty narrowed her eyes at him. "But you always seem so assured. So polished."

"You mean, so quiet," Geoff countered.

He waited a moment, watching her, allowing time for his words to sink in. Letty cast her memory back over the hundreds of times she had encountered him over the course of the Season, since his return from France. Her memory conjured him standing with his friends at the side of the room, leaning over Mary's chair, propping up the wall at a musicale. In every image, he was watching, observing, somewhere off on the fringes while other people laughed and danced.

"Oh," said Letty stupidly.

"I've always been more comfortable with books than people. Running off to France for years made the problem easy to avoid."

Letty felt a bit as though she had spent hours squinting at a book, trying desperately to read it, and someone had just come along and turned it right-side up. She knew, logically, this was the proper way to look at it, but her unfocused eyes were having trouble registering the words.

"So, when you came back…"

"I felt just as out of place as you did. So I attached myself to your sister. She made a convenient altar at which to worship. It gave me a place and a purpose, where I otherwise had none." Remembering, Geoff stared off into the air above Letty's left shoulder, lips pressed together in an uncompromising line. "I misused her badly, although that was never my intention at the time."

"No," said Letty slowly. "Of course not."

Was he saying—he did seem to be saying—that he had never really loved Mary? He couldn't mean that. His devotion to Mary had become a commonplace, like Petrarch's love for Laura or Dante's for Beatrice, a yardstick by which devotion was measured.

But it was all, Letty realized, devotion from a distance, worship from afar. She had always had her doubts as to whether Petrarch loved Laura. How could he, when he didn't know what Laura liked for breakfast, or whether she broke out in spots once a month, or had an unfortunate tendency to giggle at awkward moments?