Free Rumors by Anna Godbersen Page B

at last. She took a little step forward and smiled just slightly in hope that he might return thegesture, might confirm how fully her memory had obsessed him. But her footing was off. “Miss Diana.” His voice grew quieter with every word. She noticed that his standing collar was so high that he could not comfortably hang his head. “You know that cannot be.”
    Suddenly the floorboards below her, the gallery underneath, the subterranean caves holding props and rats and who knew what else—none of it was steady. A heat had come into Diana’s cheeks, and she thought of the blue-eyed sureness with which Penelope had looked across the house. “I don’t understand,” she whispered.
    “Perhaps you thought we might—” Henry broke off again, and shook his head as though he were shaking away a fly. There was coldness in his voice when he spoke again: “But you can’t think that anymore. No matter what pretty things I said to you, you must know now that they can never come to…fruition.”
    Diana frowned at the curious formality of his phrasing and took a step backward. Henry had had several lovers, by his own admission, and Diana felt herself suddenly to be one of many. She wasn’t even sure anymore if she could technically be called one of his lovers. “Is this because of Penelope?”
    Henry’s brow relaxed and he almost smiled. “No…not at all. Why would you…? No.”
    Every word was a struggle for breath “Then why…?”
    “I meant all those things, Di.” Henry reached and took her hand, which did nothing to bridge the already impassable distance she felt between them. He was a charmer—of course he would try out all his charming gestures on her now. “It’s not Penelope. It’s not any other girl. But it would be wrong. You might think you wouldn’t care about the impropriety now, but I was your sister’s fiancé. And your sister”—here he closed his eyes and swallowed—“is dead.”
    As Henry trailed off, his friend Teddy Cutting appeared in the corridor. He had been Elizabeth’s friend, too, Diana knew. His blond hair was parted at one side and slicked to the other, and he came upon them slowly and with a look of concerned disapproval in his face.
    “But…” Diana stopped herself and the flicker of a smile was put out on her face. But Elizabeth isn’t dead, she wanted to tell Henry. She would have liked to shout it. She couldn’t, of course—she had promised her sister that she wouldn’t tell. Telling would ruin everything for Liz.
    It was the entr’acte, and now there were dozens of men wearing their black waistcoats passing through the halls on visits of all kinds. Their cigar smoke had filtered out with them. When she felt Henry withdraw his hand she knew there was nothing else for her but retreat. She turned quickly enough, she hoped, that neither man saw the fallen expression on her face.
    Diana walked as proudly as she could in the direction of the Newburg box, though she knew already her capacity for smiling was entirely gone. The dress swerved behind her; it had so recently seemed to make her beautiful, but now it was an enormous encumbrance. Weeks of heightened anticipation had been decimated in mere moments, but as she took her seat she felt mainly stung.
    Later, at night, in her own room, with the salmon damask darkest in the places from which pictures frames had disappeared, she would see how far this unraveled all her hopes, all the assumptions on which she had based her idea of the future. Only then would she begin to feel so awful and desperate that it was as though, curiously, an enormous cavity had formed within her that could never possibly be filled.
    For now, sitting in the opera house, numb to the vibrations of the music, she thought of her mother, and lowered her eyes, and hid her wounded pride. She murmured demurely, just as Mrs. Holland would have liked, for Mr. Newburg and Mrs. Gore and all the rounds of guests who came to their precious opera box. On stage