than any girl I’d ever known. It was like we’d met a hundred times before. And then, on the Princess, I felt I wanted to know you more and more.”
“Yes, for some reason you wanted me to believe that,” she snapped. “I can’t think why you’d still want to convince me of such falsehoods now.”
“How can you say—”
“Oh do let’s be honest with one another. I know about you and Camilla.”
The sun here was filtered by the high green canopy. His face was all dappled. His expression shifted, became serious. “Yes? What about me and Camilla?”
“I saw you together! On the ship—and yesterday, holding hands. Or the day before. Whenever it was. And I know what was between you in the past.”
“No, that’s not . . .”
The air was denser here, so full of tiny floating specks of life. Vida felt pink all over. The dress constricted her arms, her waist. Her underclothes chafed at her thighs. She was feeling so many things, certainly too many at once. Mostly she wanted him not to come any closer. She wished that she had never wanted him; that he had never been. That she was Mrs. Whiting de Young just now, or even Mrs. William Halliday, and that she was reading the Chronicle in the garden court of the Palace Hotel while she drank her tea and petted a little lapdog. And that she and Rosa de Hastings could go on pretending that they were lovely young ladies forever, who had only lovely things to say about all their friends and all their enemies and of each other.
Instead she was here—hideous, tired, harassed by tiny insects.
“That’s not true?” she prompted. “Do you mean to tell me there was never anything between you and Camilla Farrar?”
For a long time he said nothing, and Vida knew what hope was again. She had hoped—still! After everything!—that it had not been true, that she had misinterpreted things in the map room, that Fitz and Camilla’s intimate history was just rumor. But his silence confirmed things, and Vida learned there was still sufficient sensation in her trampled mess of a heart for it to sting with fresh humiliation.
Twelve
“Don’t you dare come after me,” she said. With a brisk little turn she marched on.
A few moments later she glanced back and saw that he had heaped yet more insult upon her by doing as she asked and not pursuing her.
On she marched—yet her abjectness marched on with her. Soon snotty tears were running down her face, and she gasped and sobbed and lost any sense of where she was, or who. She had believed herself somehow better than other girls—a girl especially adept in the fine art of being wanted. Now look at yourself, she thought. A sunburned wreck who sobbed in the ugliest fashion, and who, apparently, smelled like a back alley on top of everything else.
All she knew was the misery inside herself, and for a while she had no sense of her surroundings. Then a shock of pain spread in her toe—a rock had stopped her forward motion. She lost her balance entirely, and before she could grab hold of something she was facedown on the ground. The soft earth filled her palms.
“Oh,” she wailed pitifully.
Too late, she considered the tattered remnants of her once-civilized appearance. The tiers of pale pink lace, the belled sleeves she had lifted in her ship cabin to dab her wrists with tuberose perfume, were already stained by water and yellowed by sun, like some old doily left too long in the window of an unloved house. Now her garb was stained also by the wet soil of the jungle floor. In how many ways could she become more ugly? The idiocy of it all hit her at once—that her own vanity had further marred her appearance. She began to laugh and cry at once.
As she sat up she went on laughing and crying. It was distinctly possible that she was going mad. But laughing and crying at once felt good, so she went on laughing and crying until she heard the shriek.
The shrieking split her ears, zoomed past her and upward.
She gasped in terror and scrambled to her feet. Her blood coursed, and fear seized her throat—she couldn’t make a peep, much less call for help.
A burst of exquisite orangey red was disappearing up into the ropes of greenery overhead. A bird, she reassured herself, just a bird, and her breath came back to her, and she saw where