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I already knew something was going wrong, I just didn’t know what it was, before we entered a dining room that was a study of turquoise.
The tablecloth was white.
The wood was cherry.
There was a massive tapestry on the wall that looked ancient.
But everything else, including the trim on the china, the vases that held extraordinary flower arrangements, the embroidery on the serviettes, and the cast to the crystal glasses and candelabra, was turquoise.
The table could seat three times our party, but even so, the fullness of it was set for us.
Head to foot.
Two place settings swimming in the long trail of the port side, three on the starboard.
We had not all been arranged at one end so we could easily see and talk to each other.
We were all going to have to yell at each other.
The thing was, there were only six of us.
Richard led Jane to the foot, Daniel leading Portia to the two-seating side.
Daniel explained things as Lou and I lingered in confusion at the door.
“Allow the seat between you, Ian will be here…eventually.”
Hang on.
The prodigal son was returning?
And no one thought to mention that?
Of course, during our allotted forty-five minutes of cocktail time, the feel of the evening deteriorated as the minutes ticked by, but I thought it was because Richard and Jane were more and more beleaguered at having to spend time with us.
Now it would seem, considering the hard mask (or harder mask) that slammed down over Lady Jane’s face at the mention of her eldest, it was because they were growing more and more annoyed that he’d broken the rules and not turned up at the appointed cocktail forty-five minutes.
And now we were to start dinner without him.
Which was what happened after Richard did triple duty of seating Jane, then moving to Lou to push her chair under the table, then to me, simply to stand there in a wasted display of chivalry, his hand on the back of my chair, for I was already seated and had tucked myself under the table.
His expression said I should have waited for him.
He was a man. Even if he’d seen my shoes, he couldn’t know that no way was I standing on them for longer than I had to. Nor generally waiting for someone to help me do something I was perfectly capable of doing myself.
I ignored his expression, took hold of my napkin and flung it out to the side before draping it on my lap.
And thus, Richard had a hard(er) mask on his face when he finally seated himself.
He immediately turned to the butler who was hovering. “Soup, Stevenson,” he murmured.
The man bowed then took off at a good clip to disappear behind a hidden door in the cherrywood paneling.
“This table is beautiful,” Lou tried gamely, offering this to Jane.
The woman slowly tipped her head to the side in a regal, yet birdlike manner that had me glaring at Portia.
If recent memory served, Lady Jane hadn’t uttered a single word since we’d met her.
