The Beautiful Ones - Silvia Moreno-Garcia Page 0,8

a bench where one might sit and contemplate the foliage.

Taste was the most important consideration in Valérie’s conservatory, not practicality. There was no point in toiling with geraniums in this space. She had dedicated herself to the cultivation of striking plants. Ferns, palms, heliotropes, azaleas, these offered the refinement she sought. Lately she had been taken with the notion of orchids, but these might require the construction of an orchid house, an idea she was still mulling over.

For now, Valérie bent over her roses, running a finger over the delicate white petals. She employed a gardener who took care of her plants, but Valérie believed in the value of proper supervision, and since her new roses—a delightfully fragrant variety, highly ornamental—were the most precious flowers she owned, she thought it prudent to look after them carefully. These white ones had budded, opening to the onslaught of spring.

After Valérie was satisfied with the state of the conservatory, she went to her office. Valérie received an infinite number of invitations, thank-you missives, and letters, which must have a response. Ordinarily she did not mind this activity, but there was a letter from Antonina’s mother that had arrived two days prior and that she had been putting off.

With a sigh, Valérie sat down before the desk and opened the letter. It was, as she expected, the usual bit of nonsense from Camille Beaulieu. The woman worried endlessly about her daughter, asked how Antonina fared.

Valérie hardly knew how to answer. The truth of the matter was she considered Antonina half a savage, though her vulgarity was not truly her fault and must be laid at her mother’s feet. The Beaulieus were a wealthy family, and their original home was in the south, in the region of Montipouret. Gaétan’s father had been the eldest child, followed by another boy—Benedict—and two daughters. In an act that Valérie would never be able to comprehend, Benedict had married a nobody, the daughter of a local schoolteacher. As Benedict was the younger, sickly son, his possibilities were more reduced than those of his brother, but he ought to have done better than Camille.

At first glance, a casual observer might have questioned Valérie’s distaste for the woman, since Valérie herself had come from an impoverished family. However, Valérie considered her situation to be utterly different. First of all, although her family had lost practically all their lands and money, they had kept their distinguished name. Valérie was born a Véries, and that alone was a form of currency. Second, Valérie was young, beautiful, and charming, qualities she thought made up for her financial shortcomings. The most charitable point one might make about Camille was that she was plain.

It was no wonder then that Antonina had grown to become a confusing girl. After all, her mother had lacked the proper education and refinement of the Beautiful Ones. Nobility could not be feigned.

At nineteen Antonina was without all the skills a young lady making her entrance into society should possess. She could not sing, danced mediocrely, and displayed neither wit nor seductiveness. She was not particularly pretty, having inherited the tall forehead of the Beaulieus coupled with her mother’s strong jaw and heavy-lidded eyes. But no matter, because Gaétan had decided his “darling” cousin deserved the excitement of Loisail and an engagement to a promising young man.

Gaétan was attached to Camille and her daughters, probably as a result of his mother’s death when he was but a four-year-old. When his cousin Madelena had married, he sent the girl a most extravagant diamond-and-pearl necklace in addition to a lump sum of money to help the newlyweds establish their household, even though Madelena’s father had already provided rather nicely for her. Gaétan’s affection for his cousins was likely compounded by his sterility: they could not have children, this they had discovered a few years after their wedding. This biological fault spared Valérie from the presence of crying babies, creatures she did not cherish, but it also ensured that Gaétan’s cousins acquired an even more crucial dimension. They would be his heirs.

Valérie therefore found herself in the uncomfortable position of having to introduce and cart around a girl who was not terribly fit for polite society. She, Valérie Beaulieu, chained to this lump of a child who at times proved annoyingly recalcitrant. She worried what others might say of her, how Antonina would reflect on Valérie’s reputation as the perfect hostess, the impeccable lady. She perused the pages of the papers ferociously each day, looking