Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,50
the perfume of bark and pollen, and drank from the spray of the little waterfall with cupped hands.
Everyone wanted to hear a happy story, and Vida very much wanted to tell them one.
Perhaps this was the reason that she lost her usual firm hold on her emotions and nearly burst into tears when she felt how Eleanor struggled with her hair.
Vida had braided it in those first hours on the island, and had occasionally retightened the plait, but had not dared to take it all apart for fear of what knots had formed and become permanent. Fitzhugh was “picking her up” at six, however. The whole group of ladies was effervescent with expectation. She wanted to look her best, but some things could not be helped.
“Oh, say something.”
“Shhhh,” Eleanor admonished. “Don’t speak now.”
“It’s awful, isn’t it?”
“It’s not . . . not awful.”
Vida glanced toward her lap and saw how her hands whitened into fists, and she felt all achy in her throat. The ache of a little girl in whom sobbing is imminent. But no: she couldn’t disappoint the others by losing control. She flinched back tears. She breathed in the humid air. “I’ll have to cut it, won’t I?”
“Oh no,” said Miss Flynn, rousing herself from the rock. “No, you can’t do that.”
“But the tangles are too bad, aren’t they?”
Camilla came and rested a hand on Vida’s shoulder. “We’ll pull it back and wrap it in a sort of bunlike thing. It’s only hair. It’s your eyes he’ll be looking at.”
“But it’s hopeless, isn’t it? I’ll have to cut it.”
“Tomorrow,” Camilla said.
“Tomorrow—tomorrow I will cut the damn braid off.”
“But tonight it looks fine, and tomorrow it will grow back.”
Then Vida braced herself and let Eleanor do her best with strong fingers to make the horsetail of her hair into a big circle above the nape of her neck.
When she had pinched her cheeks for color and curled the little wisps at her earlobes around her pinkie; when she had asked Camilla one too many times if she really looked all right, if she was sure the sight of Vida wouldn’t turn a man like Fitz to stone; and when she knew that she could not ask again, they walked together as a small flock back to their shelters, situated themselves on the slope of sand by the area that corresponded roughly with the front door of a house back in the city, and waited in that state of feigned inactivity they had often assumed in drawing rooms, posing in anticipation of gentleman callers over cold tea.
The arrival of Fitzhugh was foretold by a gentle hum of feminine excitement.
Vida kept her face turned away, her gaze focused on something not quite there.
“Miss Hazzard,” he declared with the formal baritone a man employs in a ballroom when he is about to ask a girl to dance.
“Oh, hello, Mr. Farrar,” she replied, and her mouth did the thing it used to do in those same ballrooms, when she was upholding the pretense that this meeting was all very chancy, and that nobody had any idea what was about to transpire. Even though all parties knew precisely what was about to transpire, and there wasn’t the least smidgen of surprise to any of it.
He was only a few feet away.
She paused a few more seconds and met his gaze.
He grinned. “You look well.”
Vida let her eyelids sink in demurral, the better to keep any rogue smiles at bay. “Don’t let’s exaggerate.”
He offered her his hand, and she thought that—if they were not performing the ritual of fine young men and women meeting with all eyes upon them—she might have said how lovely he looked, too. He did—it pleased her eyes to look at him, all trim and sunbrowned. His black trousers were rolled as they had been, but he had donned the black jacket that she had not seen since their arrival here. His hair was polished with some sleek stuff—in the dining room of the Princess she might not have noticed this change at all, but here it had a dramatic effect.
It made the whole ruse seem real.
“Would you walk with me?” he asked, and pulled her to her feet.
Together they began to stroll past the little huts, past the watchful crowd, his elbow raised to support her arm, her pace matching his.
“Did you have a good day?” he asked, and she answered. They conversed like this on and on, with the surface gentleness that had been the tone of all their