Remember Love (Ravenswood #1)(20)
Eddie thought. “I always find more eggs than Papa does,” he said.
“Admirable,” Devlin told him. “I love eggs, but I can never find any.”
The child’s tears appeared to have been forgotten by the time Devlin and Gwyneth turned away.
“Adults often assume that children’s games and contests are sheer fun,” he said. “We have short memories. They are anything but fun to the losers, and there are always far more of them than there are winners. I suppose they offer lessons in life, but why should children have to learn so early about failure?”
“But Eddie is good at finding eggs,” she said. “I hope his parents praise him for that. I am glad you reminded him that there will always be something at which he can excel.”
There was kindness in him, Gwyneth thought, even to the young child of a laboring man.
In one corner of the terrace, tucked in between the main block and the protruding section of one of the wings, a young man and woman had several pots of brightly colored paints opened up on a table between them. Both were wearing large aprons to protect their clothes as they transformed the faces of children into those of cats or clowns or princesses or ferocious warriors. Gwyneth had never seen anything like it before, but it had attracted a queue of eager children—some of them with more dubious-looking parents in tow. For the children were all wearing their best clothes.
“They assured my mother,” Devlin explained, “that the paint dries almost instantly, that is does not smudge or come off on fingers, and that it washes off both skin and clothing without leaving any stain. My father has promised to have them locked up in a dungeon under the hall if it should turn out they have misled us.”
“I would have loved that when I was a child,” Gwyneth said. “I would have been Cleopatra.”
“A lion for me,” he said. “Oh, goodness.”
Stephanie had appeared before them, her eyelids bright blue and glittering, her cheeks a shocking pink, her lips a bright and clashing red. She was beaming.
“Look at me, Dev,” she said. “Look at me, Gwyneth.”
“But who is this princess?” he asked. “Who let her in? No one invited her. No one would dare. She is far too beautiful. She will cast all the other ladies in the shade and have them all in tears.”
“I do believe she is Princess Stephanie,” Gwyneth said. “There is nothing to worry about, though, for everyone loves her to distraction because of her kindness and her sunny nature. The ladies do not resent her for being so much lovelier than they. They are too dearly fond of her. All the men admire her from afar, for she is Princess Stephanie.”
Stephanie giggled and darted off to show herself to her father, who was watching the races with Colonel Wexford and Mrs. Shaw.
“Shall we find the fortune-teller?” Devlin suggested, and he took Gwyneth under the nearer archway and through the tunnel into the brightness of the courtyard at the center of the hall.
The scent of roses came to meet them. The courtyard had always been Gwyneth’s favorite part of Ravenswood Hall, but she had never been able to decide whether she loved the cloistered walks about its perimeter best or the rose arbor and the fountain at its center. But why should a decision be necessary? Both were lovely, and they complemented each other, the one perfect for gentle exercise in the shade, the other ideal for quiet repose beneath the open sky.
The fortune-teller’s tent had been set up in a far corner, just outside the cloister. The portrait painter—or, rather, the portrait sketcher, since he always used charcoal rather than paint at the annual fete—had set up his table and chairs and easel in the diagonally opposite corner. He was at work now on Doris Cox’s portrait, while a small cluster of people, including her husband, watched over his shoulders.
As Gwyneth crossed the courtyard with Devlin, she felt very consciously happy. Quite bubbling over with happiness, in fact. Soon, of course, he would move off to other duties, and it was possible she would come nowhere close to him for the rest of the day. Or for the rest of her life. But why depress herself with such thoughts? At this moment she was at his side, her arm through his, and she was going to enjoy it to the full.
Someone was coming out of the tent as they approached, and as good luck would have it, there was no one else waiting to go in. Gwyneth had been this close last year and the year before, but both times she had turned away at the last moment. She had been afraid of being told unwelcome news of her future, though it was an absurd fear when the fortune-teller was an entertainer rather than a genuine seer and always knew the sorts of things people wanted to hear.
“Perhaps,” Gwyneth said, “it is best not to know what the future holds.”
“Even if it offers a tall, dark, handsome stranger?” he asked.
Oh, even then, she thought, for she did not want to meet a stranger.
“Only if she can promise faithfully and not raise my hopes in vain,” she said, and ducked under the flap of the tent before she could make an idiot of herself and lose her courage again.
The tent was dark blue and cut out most of the daylight inside. Gwyneth found herself standing in the blue glow of a lamp and confronting a crystal ball on a table covered with a dark cloth. A woman sat behind the table, dressed in a dark robe and hood with fair hair left loose and arranged in billowing waves over her shoulders.
She motioned Gwyneth to a chair on the near side of the table.