Danse de la Folie by Sherwood Smith Page B

would have been, your lover brought to your door
dead from the dueling field. You would swear to seek vengeance, even if it took
twenty years, and you would die an old maid, brokenhearted.”
    “I do not think that young men were brought anywhere but to
their homes.”
    This caveat was dismissed with a wave of Kitty’s hand. “One’s
husband, then. Or better, a cold and loathsome duke whom your family forced you
to marry.” Kitty gazed across the snow-stippled, truncated rose bushes, to the
white-rimmed low slate wall bordering the far side of the garden. Her
expression was rapt. “Cruel... Sinister... Though, of course, impeccable in
taste and quite handsome in appearance...” She tipped her head, the old-fashioned
bonnet framing her lovely face. “So his death would set one free. Only one
might not wish to avenge him, if he was so cruel and cold. And here’s another
thing. Seeking vengeance might be very well in its way, but I think upon
reflection it would be better to forgo it then to be honor-bound to spend the
rest of one’s days as an old maid. No, as a widow.”
    Clarissa made a polite noise, not quite agreement, which
Kitty—wrapped in romantic imaginings—took as enthusiastic corroboration.
    She heaved a great sigh. “But unless the Squire’s son alters
a great deal, or some wealthy and mysterious nobleman chooses this area to rusticate
in total anonymity, while looking for a bride, I am not likely to meet with
much in the way of romance. But you cannot escape it, in London.” She turned to Clarissa. “The balls, parties,
everything one needs to aid one falling violently, hopelessly , in love.”
    “I do not see the appeal in hopelessness.” Clarissa said
apologetically. “I am afraid one sees more of vanity and ambition and
calculation, and boredom, than love.”
    “Is that true? How horrid!”
    “Perhaps I may be mistaken,” Clarissa hastened to say.
“Perhaps one only hears more of those things. Gossip, I have discovered, is seldom
spread about people who find happiness or contentment.”
    “Then I shall imagine romance for my book,” Kitty said. “One
wants a story full of love, if it is difficult to find in the way of life.
Which I can corroborate,” she added in a low voice, almost under her breath.
“In my circumstances.”
    Clarissa looked away, over the bare tree tops beyond the
wall. “Laying aside the disagreeable topic of fortune hunters of either sex, as
far as I am able to determine, a hopeless passion would make one miserable. As well
as every creature around one. And a violent attachment must be doubly tiresome
to everyone else.”
    “Tiresome!” Kitty exclaimed, aghast. “Forgive me, Clarissa,
but you sound as if you are an enemy to romance. Is this true?”
    Clarissa had, from her first introduction into society,
observed the feminine wiles cast out to attach her cousin, and last year the
desperate ruses young gentlemen employed to catch the eye of her eldest
half-sister, Hetty. She had also been the sympathetic auditor of her half-sister
uttering threadbare phrases about eternal passions and tragical despair, but until
now nobody had ever asked what she thought.
    She had a horror of sounding impertinent, or snubbing, which
would be worse. “That is not precisely what I meant. But if one has
expectations, or scruples, and the gentlemen to whom one is introduced do not
meet those expectations, for whatever good reasons they might have, one might
slowly come to believe that the single life is not so very bad a thing.”
    “Then you are not an enemy to romance?” Kitty swung around
to face her.
    “Seeking romance appears to me to be another term for
hankering after the impossible. For example, in my situation, the offers—and
there were only three—that I have turned down were not because the gentlemen did
not resemble the hero of a novel , but
because upon consideration I thought I might be happier at home.”
    Kitty nibbled on the tip of her gloved