Anna Godbersen: Envy

As Carolina stepped inside, she couldn’t help but think how meager and scuffed the rooms here were. The stairs at the end of the foyer moved straight up to the second floor without any grand, looping pretenses, and the pictures that decorated the wall on the way up were really not as fine as the ones the Hollands had had to sell last fall for ready cash. Her gaze drifted to her left, into the lesser parlor, which had not been in much use when she was last in the house, but was now populated with round tables covered in white damask and crowned with silver loving cups filled with red berry — dotted branches. There was a time when she would have steamed those cloths and arranged those cups, she was thinking, when her reflections were interrupted by a fearsome and familiar voice. Both Broud sisters froze.

“Penelope,” said Mrs. Holland as she entered the foyer from the back of the house. She was wearing all black, and her dark, white-streaked hair was arranged without the covering of a widow’s cap, as it had been for most of the previous year. The hostess approached the younger women and paused. If she smiled, it was only a flicker at the corner of her mouth. She drew out the interlude long enough that even Penelope seemed a little befuddled, and then she bestowed a simple, “Congratulations,” on her daughter’s onetime friend. “And you are?” she asked, turning her cusped chin at the girl in gray and fur.

For a moment, all of Carolina’s nerves reverberated. Then she met Mrs. Holland’s eyes, dark as a pool in a forest, and realized that there was not even the slightest cloud of recognition. They were eyes so blank and imperious that Carolina wondered how she had ever had the courage to meet them before, and a second later she realized that she never had. Her former employer hadn’t ever so much as looked her in the face, even as she issued thousands of orders, and she did so now with such artful indifference that Carolina wondered — briefly, but nonetheless — if she had really risen from her place in the Holland house at all.

“This is Miss Carolina Broad.” Penelope seemed not to have noticed or cared that a confrontation with the hostess had not materialized, and was already looking into the lesser parlor, to see who else was there. Then she added a rather cursory explanation: “She is new to the city, but already beloved.”

“It is such a pleasure to be among your guests,” Carolina managed to say through her disappointment. It was only after the opportunity had passed that she realized how much she’d wanted to be recognized, that she had in fact been nursing the desire for Mrs. Holland to recognize her nascent grandeur and quaver at how far she had come.

Claire, who must have been petrified with fear during this exchange, gave her sister a warning glance and retreated toward the closet underneath the stairs laden with the two new guests’ many cold-weather trappings. Penelope had now moved, along with Mrs. Holland, into the mahogany-framed entryway, where people whose every waking hour was occupied by one delightful leisure activity after another filled the room.

“You see, we have restored some of our old paintings, and done away with those pieces that really weren’t the style anymore…” Mrs. Holland was saying.

Behind her in the foyer, where the draft was most chilling, Carolina paused awkwardly. She was aware of every hair on the back of her neck, as she often was when she suffered from the condition of not knowing quite where she was supposed to be or quite how she was supposed to stand. Her sister had disappeared, and was no doubt wishing that she had been born an only child so that she could at least depend on steady employment. Already Carolina’s connection to this event had stepped into the adjacent room, leaving her behind with a suffocating need for attention and approval. She took a step forward, but faltered. Suddenly, her surroundings had stopped seeming quite so small and shabby.

“Lina.”

The name was like some ill-fitting old garment that scratches the skin even as one tries to hand it down. The sound was humble and plain. It was her own name, Carolina knew, or at least the one that she had been most often called in her seventeen years. But it gave her no pleasure to hear it out loud. Instead it brought heat up into her wide cheeks, the same heat that the speaker’s very presence used to cause. She turned her eyes — now intensely green against her reddening skin — and saw Elizabeth, alive after all, and not nearly as lovely as she used to be.

“Hello.” Though she had not intended one tone over another, the sound of that single word hung in the air with certain satisfaction. The last time she had seen Elizabeth she had spilled hot tea all over her white skirt, an act that had swiftly resulted in her being let go. Her former mistress’s face was gaunt now, and that blond hair, which Carolina had once arranged, was stringy and pulled into a tight, unpretty bun. There was nothing to indicate that any of the intervening months had softened Elizabeth to the girl who had once tied her corsets.

“What are you doing here?” Elizabeth asked as she drew close. Her voice and movements lacked energy, but that did not preclude hostility, which was evident all over but especially in her darting brown eyes.

“I might ask you that very question. I thought you drowned.” Carolina shifted to a cockier stance, for all of a sudden she knew precisely how to stand. Her smart jacket, which was fitted in the waist and puffed elegantly at the shoulders, had quite obviously been made by a skilled dressmaker, and was of extravagantly expensive cloth. She leaned closer to Elizabeth and went on in a low, pointed voice: “Or was that just a story to cover up your intentions regarding a certain boy who used to work in a stable?”

Elizabeth shrank a little at that, and her eyes filmed over as though tears might follow.

“Oh, don’t.” Carolina curled her upper lip back and held her former mistress’s gaze. “I once loved him too, or did you forget that while you were so busy feeling sorry for yourself?”

“He was my husband.” Elizabeth’s voice wavered over the words, and when she finished speaking, she pressed her lips together firmly, as though she were trying to contain some violence of emotion.

The girl who would have felt jealous or devastated or anything by this news was gone. If Elizabeth wanted to lose control, that was her decision — Carolina was past making such mistakes. She raised her chin slightly and allowed a sense of her own prowess to radiate across her clavicles and down into her fingertips. She arched one thick eyebrow with slow purpose and allowed the standstill to lengthen a few seconds.

“I wouldn’t want that one getting out.”

Elizabeth closed her eyes. “You wouldn’t tell—”

“Probably not.” Carolina laughed her most insouciant laugh. “But then, I am awfully thirsty and I was under the impression that I was attending a luncheon party.”

The brown eyes under Elizabeth’s fair brows opened again. She looked at Carolina with greater vulnerability than ever before, which was quite remarkable considering the two had known each other almost since birth and had been friends as little girls.

“Of course,” she said in a new tone. It was the sound of weakness feigning strength, but it fooled neither party about what had just transpired. Carolina was no longer Elizabeth’s subordinate, and she had a piece of gossip on her once again. “Won’t you come in? Perhaps you would like to sit with me, at my table, where I can be sure that you are getting the best of everything?”

Carolina, who could hear the strain in Elizabeth’s voice, lifted her arm and waited for the other girl to take it before nodding her assent. “That would be perfectly lovely,” she said, her blood pumping triumphantly as they walked into that festive room. It was full of well-heeled guests and brightly shining serving trays laden with rich, aromatic food, which she might once have carried in from the kitchen, but which she would now allow to be presented to her from the left so that she might take whichever portion she pleased.