With This Ring Read Free Page A

smaller in the chair.
“… Too beautiful to waste on a red-faced squire’s son in
Devon,” Mama was saying. Lydia winced as Mama directed her
attention to her. “Blame Lydia, if this exercise makes you
uncomfortable,” she said to Kitty. “If Lydia had been even slightly
less plain, she could have smoothed the way for you! As it is, you must exert yourself and be seen where it will do you
the most good.”
    “ But a church with wounded soldiers?
Oh, Mama!”
    Kitty, you are fast approaching the
limits of Mama’s endurance, Lydia thought as she watched her mother
and sister. Lips in a thin line, eyes narrowing … I know the
signs. Kitty, are you really so dense that you never figured them
out? Of course, the wrath comes down less strenuously on you,
because you are beautiful, where I am not.
    “ It is an excellent plan,” Mama was
saying now, her tone placating. “You and Lydia will wait outside
the church in our carriage until you see young ladies and gentlemen
going inside. Join their party. Tag along behind them.” She took
Kitty by the shoulders and gave her a little shake. “Make something
of this opportunity!”
    “ Suppose no one notices us, Mama,”
Kitty countered.
    “ Everyone notices you, my love,”
Mama soothed. “It is Lydia that no one notices. It must be the
right people, however, to do us any good. When we go to Almack’s on
Friday, you will have someone to talk to,” she reasoned, concluding
triumphantly, “Visiting a few dirty soldiers will not have been in
vain.” She waited a moment. “Very well, then. The coachman will be
ready for you at two of the clock.”
    So we are reduced to nipping at the
gentry’s coattails like ill-mannered puppies? Lydia wondered as she
gave Mama sufficient time to descend the stairs. When she was sure
Mama was down the stairs, she opened Kitty’s door quietly and
tiptoed to the landing. As she looked down to the main floor, she
saw the door to Papa’s study open. She watched, humiliated for him,
as he stuck his nose out, looked this way and that for Mama, heaved
a sigh that she could hear on the first-floor landing, then quietly
closed the door again.
    Poor Papa, she thought, and not for
the first time, as she returned to her room. He has nothing but two
daughters, and his estate is entailed away to a male relative who
scarcely needs it. I wish it were not so, but I believe he only
waits to die, and inflict Mama on one or the other of
us.
    She picked up her book again, but it
held no interest for her. Instead, she looked out the window,
dreading, like Kitty, the visit to St. Barnabas, if for different
reasons. I do not wish to tag along and encroach upon the goodwill
of others, she thought. I am not nosing after scraps from the ton’s table, or licking someone’s pot, no matter how it
might forward Kitty’s prospects.
    As she looked at the traffic in the
street below, she noticed her own outline in the wavy window glass,
indistinct and barely there. It was her life’s story, and as she
sat and looked at her dim reflection, she discovered that she did
not care for what she saw. “But how do I change the people that I
must live with?” she asked herself. She peered closer at the
outline of herself in the glass, then reached out to touch her
reflection. “Could it be that if these people will not change, then
I must change myself?” she asked.
     
    With varying degrees of impatience
and resignation, they waited for what seemed like eons in the
family carriage outside the church of St. Barnabas. It was on the
edge of London’s docks, but on a quiet, little used street made all
the quieter by the quantities of straw strewn throughout the entire
block to muffle the sound of passage and allow a measure of peace
to the suffering inmates within.
    “ It is a mystery to me how you can
remain so content, Lyddy,” Kitty complained after an entire stretch
of ten minutes when no one paid any attention to her.
    “ My dear sister, that is why I
always