The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(82)
“I hope that foolish smile doesn’t mean you are laughing at me, Emma. And will you stop twirling that umbrella! You’re making me dizzy.”
The girl blinked a couple of times before realizing that her aunt had, for the moment anyway, stopped her ruthless dissection of her fiancé and was addressing her.
“Forgive me, Auntie. I was . . . remembering something funny that happened to me the other day.”
“Something funny? I can’t think what that might be. Perhaps the sight of Gilmore trying to eat properly with a knife and fork.”
And then, to her own amazement, Emma lost her temper.
“That’s enough, Auntie! That’s enough! Can’t you see I love him!” Emma paused, confronted with her aunt’s wounded expression as she gaped at her openmouthed, and she fumbled around for a less clichéd way of telling her aunt how she felt. If only there were some magic formula to describe exactly what someone would see pulsating inside her if right then she were stretched out on a table and sliced open. But there wasn’t. “I love him . . .” She gave in and simply repeated the same three words again very slowly: “I love him . . . I don’t care how he holds a knife and fork. I don’t care if he made his money by selling shoelaces or cleaning sewers. I don’t care if he always arrives late, if he talks too loudly or always treads on my toes when we dance. Before I met him, I didn’t know how to laugh . . . I never knew how, not even when I was small. I had the most absurd, pathetic childhood in the world: an unhappy little girl who didn’t know how to laugh!”
“I always thought you were a most interesting child,” the old lady protested. “I could never understand how my weak-willed sister-in-law managed to give birth to such a precocious little devil. I was convinced you would grow up free from all the frivolities of love and sentimentality, and I felt proud. At last, a Harlow woman with grit! I confess you even reminded me a little of myself when I was young. And now here you are, prattling on to me about true love! If you wanted to laugh, you could have gone to a zoo. Monkeys are very funny. They always made me laugh, but I never eloped with one.”
Emma sighed and bit her lip impatiently: How could she make her aunt see why she loved Gilmore? How could she explain to her why she couldn’t help loving him? How could she sum it up in one sentence, a few words? Suddenly, she knew.
“Monty is genuine.”
“?‘Genuine’?” her aunt repeated.
“Yes, genuine,” Emma insisted. “He is genuine. Look around you. All of us go through life wearing a mask. But not Monty. He doesn’t hide beneath a mask. He is real, not two-faced. You can take him or leave him. But if you take him . . .” Emma smiled, her eyes moist with tears. “Oh, if you take him, then you can be sure he won’t deceive you, that what he offers is all there is. I don’t know whether Monty is the most marvelous man in the world, but I do know that he’s the only man who would never lie to me to pretend that he is. And that is exactly what makes him so mar—”
“Stop right there, my dear,” the old lady interrupted brusquely. “I can’t abide romantic drivel. In my opinion, novelists who write that sort of twaddle should be shot at dawn. Of course, next you’ll tell me you don’t want to live in a world without him in it, or some such nonsense . . .”
Emma took a deep breath. She had nothing more to say, she knew she had found the right words, and all of a sudden she realized she no longer cared whether she had managed to convince her aunt or not.
“A world without him in it . . . ,” she murmured with a faint smile. “Auntie dear, the whole world is nothing more than the precise length of each moment that separates us.”
Just then, a distant rumble, which had been audible for a couple of minutes, but to which Emma and her aunt had not paid much attention, began to grow louder, suggesting that whatever was causing it was approaching the house at speed. Vaguely alarmed, the two women glanced at the wall separating the garden from the road, beyond which the din resounded as it approached the front gates. All of a sudden, there was a wail like a ship’s siren, and an instant later a strange-looking horseless carriage burst into the driveway amid a cacophony of clatters and bangs, leaving a trail of thick smoke behind it. At a speed that could only be described as breakneck, the vehicle rolled up outside the front steps, where the two astonished women watched it come to a halt, gasping like a dying animal. Emma had never seen an automobile like that before. She had glimpsed a few illustrations of those early carriages that had substituted engine power for horsepower, but they hadn’t looked very different from the ordinary horse-drawn ones. In addition, according to what she had read, the new automobiles barely reached speeds of twelve miles an hour, which any cyclist with strong legs could easily equal. Yet the impressive machine wheezing before her had sped through the front gates like greased lightning, covered the fifty yards between them, and pulled up outside the front steps in the time it took to draw breath. Moreover, the shape of it was unlike anything she had ever seen: the bodywork, which was cream colored and trimmed in gold, was long and sleek, and it was so low that the space between the ground and running boards was easily surmounted; the front was shaped like a big metal box with a grille, to either side of which two ostentatious lamps were attached, like a pair of elaborate horns; the back wheels were slightly bigger than the front ones, and above them was a roof, which at present was folded like an accordion; underneath the automobile, a mass of cranks and cogs was visible, seemingly operated by a tall lever to the right of the seat, which looked like a double throne; in front of the seat was the short shaft supporting the enormous steering wheel, which was adorned with a horn that was curled like a pig’s tail. And plumb in the middle of that extraordinary carriage, sitting bolt upright and clutching the wheel as if he were afraid that at any moment the machine might start moving of its own accord, was Montgomery Gilmore. He was wearing a pair of huge goggles that covered half his face and a leather cap with flaps down over his ears, giving him the look of a giant insect. In spite of this, Gilmore managed to smile radiantly at Emma.