His One Woman Read Free Page B

father peevishly. ‘Coincidences make life difficult to control.’
    â€˜But exciting,’ said Marietta, who had lately found this ingredient sadly lacking in her life. ‘Will they be at President Lincoln’s reception tonight?’
    â€˜Of course,’ said her father, ‘and yours?’
    â€˜Mine, too. Ezra Butler is taking him.’
    â€˜That figures,’ said her father. ‘Butler has shipping interests in Australia. It will be stimulating to meet your man, and you must meet mine—although he is happily married, I understand.’
    So her father was determined to matchmake. But she would not be pushed into anything, and, if she married, it must be someone whom she respected. Plain and twenty-seven as she was, love was too much to ask for.

Chapter Two
    T he drive outside the White House was thronged with carriages and bobbing flambeaux there to light the way for Mr Lincoln’s guests. Marietta, who was used to such events to the point that they bored her, was handed down from the Hopes’ carriage, Sophie following her. Sophie was looking particularly charming in young girl’s white. A wealth of gauze rosebuds decorated her hair and her pink sash emphasised her tiny waist. She was carrying a bouquet of crimson and white hothouse carnations from which trailed filmy lace.
    Marietta, for once not in a dark dress, was wearing lavender and was becoming increasingly conscious that it did even less for her than her usual colours, whatever her maid had said when she had helped her into it. She looked extinguished and knew it. The pale mauve gave her creamy complexion, one of her better points, a bilious cast.
    Sophie, coming into the hall just before they hadleft, and still resentful of Marietta for having entertained Jack that afternoon, had said, sweetly unpleasant, ‘Are you well, Marietta? Your colour is poor tonight.’
    Even the Senator—usually unaware of Sophie’s frequent brutality towards her cousin, whose lack of looks she thought was a good foil for her own delicate beauty—was alert to the insult, so pointed had it been.
    â€˜I think that you look very well, my dear,’ he’d said, frowning at Sophie whom he disliked. His praise had done little to comfort Marietta. Her glass had told her only too clearly the truth about her appearance.
    Before her father’s words that morning she would have shrugged off Sophie’s unkind remarks, but the armour which she had worn for the seven years since Avory Grant’s proposal had suddenly disappeared, and she was as vulnerable as she had been as a girl. Yesterday she would have ignored, or even been amused by, Sophie’s spite. Today, though, the words had stung—but she did not allow her distress to be visible.
    Once inside the White House, Sophie was less interested in her short meeting with the President and Mrs Lincoln than in looking around her for Jack Dilhorne. Marietta thought that Mr Lincoln looked tired, which was not surprising in view of his country’s desperate situation: civil war was almost upon them.
    Mary Todd Lincoln was, as usual, overdressed, and Marietta wondered how he had come to marryher: they seemed a most unlikely pair. This thought worried her, for she suddenly seemed to have marriage on the brain, and before tonight such a thing would not have occurred to her.
    Senator Hope’s party walked on through the crowds of eagerly chattering people, most of whom Marietta knew through her father’s work—but she was suddenly aware that none of them knew her because she was Marietta Hope, but only because she was her father’s daughter. This was another new thought, and not a pleasant one.
    A long mirror presented her with her ill-dressed self. I look forty, she thought, I really must take more interest in dress. No wonder Sophie laughs at me. I hope that she finds Jack soon; I cannot bear much more of her tantrums. I shall slap her, or scream, if