The Beautiful Ones - Silvia Moreno-Garcia Page 0,15
choker around her ancient neck. She had not donned a stitch of color since her husband died decades before. Valérie suspected the old cow enjoyed widowhood and the grim aura it gave her.
“What is this that you will not give Gaétan Beaulieu an answer?” she asked.
“I need time to think, Grandmother.”
“Time! A woman does not have time. A man has turned his eyes toward you, but he might as quickly turn away and find a more tractable fiancée. Time and choice are not luxuries you can allow yourself. Do you know about your aunt Cibeline?”
“The Duke de Lammarck broke his engagement to her. It was a scandal.”
“Yes, a scandal. He had to pay her father a sum for all the trouble, as one does in these cases, but then came an epidemic of smallpox. Her face was disfigured. She became such a nuisance, she had to be dragged off to the asylum at Rangel. Had she married him the previous spring, as I had suggested, this would not have happened. No woman needs a three-year engagement.”
“But a long engagement, Grandmother, it gives one a chance to know the groom better.”
“What must you know about Gaétan? That without him you will end up an old maid, penniless, living off the charity of friends?”
The withered woman reached forward and grabbed Valérie’s hands.
“Soft, pretty hands. They won’t be soft and pretty in a few years. You’ll end up a governess for one of your old friends. How will you like to take care of Miranda Oclou’s little ones? I won’t live forever, and once I die the jackals will take what they can, this house, the bits of valuables left behind. You’ll be cast out and alone. What will happen to your soft, pretty hands then, Valérie?”
She had not replied, trembling with rage, unable to speak. She wanted to spit at the hag’s face. But she knew her grandmother told the truth.
Valérie did not demur after that.
She could never remember penning the actual letter, the moment lost to her, though years later she could recall the exact words.
Consider yourself relieved of your promise.
I have wed someone else.
Valérie.
She kept the ring. She ought to have tossed it away. An idea held her back, silly as it might be, that if she kept it, she might keep a part of him. And there was a part of her in that ring, too. A younger, more carefree shard of Valérie.
Once in a while she would take the ring out and hold it for a minute or two before quickly putting it away. That night, however, Valérie held the ring for a long time.
“Nina informs me that she has a new admirer,” Gaétan said.
She looked up at her mirror and her husband’s reflection. He was a dull man with an air of satisfaction about him that she thought came from his wealth. The world, she thought, had been kind to Gaétan, and it had made him soft, undefined, placid. He paid for her bills, bought her expensive presents, yet she resented him for his lack of spirit and for his devotion to his family. She also thought ill of him for the things he refused to provide her: funds for the Véries, that post her cousin might have had in the army if only Gaétan had bought it.
The limits of Valérie’s power and influence chafed her. She begrudged Antonina for this reason and also because she was by nature a jealous, possessive creature. She had to have every bit of everything, and that included every bit of everyone. Gaétan’s love for others struck her as a personal insult, and if he could not love her absolutely with no room for another, she did not believe he could love her at all.
“I wouldn’t call him an admirer. He did ask her to the theater,” Valérie said. She placed the ring back in her jewelry box, straightened her shoulders, and reached for her hairbrush.
“I know. She told me yesterday and begged me to intercede in her favor,” Gaétan replied.
The gossipy idiot. Valérie should have known she’d go running to Gaétan.
“That girl,” Valérie muttered, “is trying to go behind my back. She knows full well you’ll do whatever she wants. It’s always like this with her.”
Her brush caught in her hair and she pulled it down, sharply, to untangle it. It hurt.
“Valérie, you mustn’t be angry. She’s … excitable.”
“I told her I would think about it. I have not made a decision.”