Free Rumors by Anna Godbersen

this and turned to her mother, her face imbued with the curious light of two divergent emotions. She would have liked to tell the petite matriarch that if she was not so ham-fistedly trying to marry her daughter off, then she wouldn’t have to worry so for the safety of these gentlemen. This seemed irritatingly obvious enough to Diana. But the mention of Spencer Newburg’s name was like music. Not because of any innate characteristics possessed by Mr.
    Newburg, who was a widower of twenty-seven, and whose face, always long, had grown ever longer since the loss of young Mrs. Newburg to rheumatic fever. Still, the sound of his name had been sweet to Diana since that morning when she’d read the papers and realized that her evening of listening to opera with him would afford her the first chance to see Henry in weeks. Her heart thrilled at the thought that she might be under the same roof as him that night, that their eyes might meet, that perhaps their hands might even touch. Spencer Newburg’s bit part in all this afforded him a special grace.
    Her mother rose from her chair now too. Stern veins stood out along her neck, and the bones of her face pressed against the skin.
    “Anyway, Mrs. Gore is my host, and I’m not even sure I will meet Mr. Newburg,” Diana said, somewhat disingenuously. For though Mr. Newburg’s elder sister had been the one to officially 36 ♥elavanilla♥

    invite her to sit in their family box, she had made clear on the two occasions she had visited the Hollands that it was for her brother’s sake that Diana should come. Moreover, it was well known that Grover Gore’s wife had made it her mission for the season to find her brother a good match who might mend his broken heart. Mrs. Holland—it was not lost on her younger child—had been allied with the Gores for several decades. “But if I do, I will handle him delicately.”
    The length of Mrs. Holland’s neck seemed to grow and her chin gestured toward the white plaster filigree of the ceiling. Diana watched her, waiting for some sort of rebuke, but the tension in her mother’s face disappeared then, and her whole body seemed to slacken. It was as though she were going to faint. “I think I’ll be going to bed,” she said abruptly. “Be good, Diana.”
    She left a pall in the room even after the door had shut behind her. Diana blinked and then turned to her aunt. “Look, I frighten even my mother.”
    “You look beautiful, Di,” Edith answered from the bed with a sympathetic little wink. The late Mr. Holland’s younger sister shared several facial features with her nieces, and had been known for being rather passionate in her youth. She had made a bad marriage to a titled Spaniard, which had ended in divorce, and she was now known by her maiden name. She had always liked sitting in while Diana played dress-up. “And I don’t think you have to worry about Mr. Newburg being the only one who notices,” she added with a purposeful inflection that made Diana wonder briefly how much her aunt intuited about her desires.
    Diana leaned back into the mirror to check her reflection a final time, and found that she agreed that she wouldn’t have to count on Mr. Newburg alone for attention. Her eyes were hazy and dark, her mouth tiny and plump. The only anxiety she felt was that some of the loveliness might fade before she found Henry. She was in a fine mood again, and she maintained it by reminding herself that once her mother understood that Henry loved her and that she loved Henry, then all this anxious nonsense about a swift match would finally cease.

    They arrived late to the Metropolitan Opera at Broadway and Fortieth, as was the prevailing custom of their class. The street was still crowded with carriages when Diana and Mrs. Gore alighted on the pavement and joined the other women in their brocade wraps making their way to the ladies’ entrance on the side. They missed the masked ball scene entirely but took their