Rumors by Anna Godbersen Page A

herself, when to make herself rare. She was developing the instincts of a lady—that was what Elizabeth had possessed, the thing that had drawn Will to her.
    But Liz was dead, and Lina was learning more every day, and when she saw Will next, she would have that something, and it would draw him to her instead.
    If she had imagined that she would get to practice her new mien in the ladies’ lounge, however, she was disabused of the notion upon entering it. The women who rested there, on low velvet couches, glanced up at her entrance and cast looks in her direction that were quite the opposite of the appreciative glances she had received from Mr. Longhorn’s friends. Their expressions were blank and their shoulders turned away from her at unwelcoming angles. The color rose in Lina’s cheeks, and she found herself for the first time longing for the invisibility that came with being a lady’s maid. Her mouth opened, but then she realized that she didn’t even begin to know how she should start a conversation with any of these women. She was an outsider again.
    “Excuse me,” Lina heard herself say. There was a heat rising in her chest, under all those layers of dress and underthings.
    A woman in pale red with fluffy blond hair and black lashes pushed herself up on her elbow and said, “Are you lost?”
    Lina’s blush flamed up, and when she heard the twitters this inspired, she decided to leave. She had only just turned her back on the laughter, however, when another girl came rushing through the heavy damask curtains and ran full into her.
    49 ♥elavanilla♥

    “Oh,” Diana Holland said. She appeared stricken—Lina noticed that even as her own breath shortened and she began to realize, with no small amount of agitation, how one mistake had piled on another. Diana’s expression had already changed into one of recognition; in a moment, the truth would be out. Then the younger Miss Holland—the only Miss Holland—blinked and looked out at the other ladies, and when she looked back at Lina her expression had changed again. “Oh…I was hoping I would run into you,” she said loudly as she took Lina’s arm and steered her toward a private little settee covered by silk cushions in the corner.
    Lina’s breath came back to her as she sat. She might have felt relief if she hadn’t been so confused. There was a long pause in which Diana closed her eyes and let some private pain pass across her features. She was wearing a dress of pastel green that Lina remembered unpacking from Elizabeth’s trunk upon her return from Paris at the end of the summer, and her brown curls were falling out of place as usual. When Diana’s lids fluttered open again, she didn’t look exactly overjoyed, but there was a certain gladness in her expression.
    “Oh, Lina,” she said quietly. “I’m so happy to see a friendly face right now. But what are you doing here?”
    “I’m a guest.” Lina looked out across the room and saw that several ladies were pretending not to watch them. They were all far away enough, however, that if she kept her voice low she wouldn’t be heard. “Of Mr. Longhorn’s.”
    “Carey Lewis Longhorn?” Diana asked, her eyebrows arcing upward.
    “Yes, and actually”—here Lina’s voice broke a little, though she forced herself to push on—“I like to be called Carolina now, if you don’t mind. It’s my given name, what they call me out west, where I’m from,” she concluded, her voice now becoming almost inaudible. She willed Diana to understand her intent and play along.
    The light danced in Diana’s wide, dark pupils. The women across the room shifted in their seats, rustling their gowns and murmuring to one another. “I like the sound of that better, actually,”
    Diana said after several moments.
    “You do?” Lina tried to look more serious than surprised, though she had in truth lost all sense of what her face must look like. She had left the Hollands on the worst possible terms, and