Evergreen

by Marissa Doyle

  “Oh, I’m nobody special,” she gabbled, turning her face to one side as his loomed toward her. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, but she certainly had no wish to kiss a young man she’d met for the first time this evening. What could she say to stop him without causing a fuss or hurting his feelings…because really, this had been her fault? Oh, Mum…if only she’d explained a bit more clearly what she’d meant by humans being “strongly drawn” to dryads—

  “Miss Boisvert…” He raised first one of her hands to his lips, then the other. It was a deliciously romantic gesture but she could not let it continue, especially as he was tilting his head down now, his eyes fixed on her lips. This would be a good time for someone to break in on their tête-à-tête—

  “I can’t see the moon. Might we walk, please?” she asked brightly.

  Tom hesitated…and behind her Grace heard a voice say lazily, but with an icy edge, “Oh, I see. The moon. Is that why you’re out here?”

  For a second, Grace gripped Tom’s hands as hard as he’d gripped hers. Yes, she’d desperately longed for someone to interrupt them…but why had it had to be Kit Rookwood?

  Then she got angry. What was he doing out here anyway? Wasn’t he busy flirting with Alice? That was probably what he had been doing—until he surprised them.

  Tom cleared his throat. “Um, hello, Miss Roosevelt…Rookwood…nice evening, isn’t it?”

  “Looking at the moon seems like a perfectly good reason to be out here to me,” said Alice’s voice, which sounded amused, unlike the barely concealed anger in Kit’s voice.

  Grace disentangled her hands from Tom’s and turned. Alice’s grin was clear even in the dimness, but Kit’s face was expressionless.

  “Yes, we’re here for the moon,” she said to him haughtily. “And some peace and quiet. We Puritan maidens aren’t used to all this heat and noise.”

  “No?” Kit said softly. “Could have fooled me.” There was an odd note in his voice that Grace couldn’t decipher.

  Alice snorted a giggle into one gloved hand. “Now, Kit, don’t be mean to my best friend.”

  Tom cleared his throat again, more loudly this time, and, taking Grace’s hand, tucked it into his arm. “I don’t know what you’re on about, Rookwood, but if there’s anything you wanted to say to Miss Boisvert, you can say it to me instead,” he said sternly.

  “I don’t know why he’d care to say anything at all to me,” she snapped. “After all, I’m not the daughter of the vi—” She stopped and bit her tongue before the rest of what she’d been about to say could spill out.

  There was a silence…and then the moon rose high enough to illuminate the scene. Alice looked troubled, and Kit looked like he’d been carved from marble, so cold was his face. Oh, bother him! Even if he had been truly smitten by Alice and not by who her father was, he should be able to mind his manners toward Alice’s friend.

  “I should like to go inside now,” Grace said to Tom. He didn’t say anything, but nodded and led her past Alice and Kit. On the way she touched Alice’s arm and smiled. Alice smiled back, but there was still a troubled look in her eyes.

  They went back into the warmth and light of the theatre, for which Grace was grateful. Both trees and dryads found the full moon’s light disquieting, and it certainly hadn’t helped just now.

  Before he brought her back to her seat, Tom pulled Grace aside. “I—I’m sorry about that,” he said, a little shamefacedly. “It was all I could do not to plant Rookwood one right on the nose.”

  “It’s all right. He doesn’t bother me a bit,” she lied.

  “It’s only…” Poor Tom was turning red. “Well…I’d already invited him to watch the Cup qualifiers, and…and I don’t want him being rude to you again.”

  “Make sure you invite Miss Roosevelt as well. She’ll keep him occupied.” She gave him a cheerful smile—not a Captivating one—but he still looked at her with that besotted look in his eyes.

  “I’ll do that.” He sighed. “I wish we hadn’t been interrupted like that.”

  “Mmm.” Grace took refuge in an indecipherable monosyllable. It didn’t seem necessary to explain that some other type of interruption would have been fine as far as she was concerned.

  To Grace’s relief, the rest of the evening was uneventful—except for one thing. She noticed that Alice danced at least four or five times with Kit, rather than Mrs. Rennell’s stipulated twice…and slipped outside more than once, the last time coming in looking both disheveled and demure, which was worrying. Alice only looked demure when she’d been up to something she shouldn’t have been.

  As she’d expected, Alice came to her room after they got home so that they could discuss the evening. “Well!” She flopped onto Grace’s bed. “You made a conquest! That Mr. Livingston looked like he’d been hit over the head with a rock.”

  Grace was still at her dressing table, unpinning her hair. “I didn’t mean to,” she confessed. “You didn’t warn me that it was so easy.”

  “Oh, some boys are like that.” Alice waved her hand. “They drop like a ripe pear right into your lap as soon as you look at them. So what do you think? Do you like him?”

  “He’s nice, but…”

  “But nothing. He’ll do quite well to keep you amused while we’re here. Did he invite you anywhere?”

  How did Alice know these things? “He invited me—well, us—to go watch the yacht races in a day or two if the weather is fine.”

  “Oh, excellent!” She sat up and looked closely at Grace. “Did he kiss you?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Huh. Did he try to?”

  “Well…I think he wanted to, but I didn’t let him. He kissed my hands, but I didn’t want him to do even that!”

  Alice crowed. “Ha! Then why did you go outside with him? What do you think people go outside for at dances? To canoodle, of course. You must have known that—you’re not that much of a wet-behind-the-ears.”

  Grace couldn’t help squirming a little as she picked up her brush. She had known that…and she wasn’t proud of herself for having led poor Tom Livingston on, just to annoy Kit Rookwood. “Is that why you went out too? To canoodle with Mr. Rookwood?”

  Instead of laughing and denying it, Alice fell back onto the bed. “Oh, Grace—isn’t he something?” she said to the ceiling. “He’s sooo good-looking…and I swear, I’ve never had as much fun as I did with him tonight.”

  Grace tried not to let that declaration hurt. “What did you do that was such fun? Looking at the moon? I saw you go out with him again.”

  Alice giggled. “Yes, looking at the moon! I complained that I couldn’t see it well enough, so he” —she sat up again and grinned at Grace—“so he dared me to climb up onto the roof of the piazza, and I did.”

  “Alice! In an evening dress?” Grace laughed, but she couldn’t help being a little shocked, too. If they were almost grown-ups, as Alice had said, shouldn’t they…well…behave like grown-ups? Climbing on the piazza roof was not what adults would do.

  “Well, I couldn’t very well take it off, could I?” She laughed again. “He climbed up there first to give me a hand up, and we had a splendid view of the moon and the Casino grounds and all the other people who were out there to canoodle. I should have brought a notebook and pencil—we could have started a nice little blackmail scheme from up there. It felt a little rickety when we started dancing on it, though.”

  Grace stopped brushing her hair. “On the roof of the piazza? What if it had broken or you had fallen off it and smashed your head?”

  “Oh, stuff. I didn’t fall, did I? And anyway, Kit wouldn’t have let me.”

  “Hmmph.” What was he up to, letting her do scatterbrained things like that? Grace remembered Alice on the train, talking about her vow to live her own way and make her own fun…except that her idea of fun these days would give her parents a severe case of the vapors and quite possibly land her in trouble. Had Kit sensed her longing to rebel and decided it would be amusing to aid
and abet it?

  Alice interrupted her thoughts. “Look, I know you don’t much care for him,” she said. “He has been a bit beastly to you, though I don’t know why—he only shrugged when I asked him this evening—”

  “I fully intend to avoid him as much as possible in future,” Grace said—a little stiffly, she suspected. “I wish he’d do the same with me.”

  “I’ll try to keep you apart.” Alice’s face creased into what could only be described as a fatuous smile. It didn’t suit her. “Grace, he’s…well, he’s nothing like the boys my cousin Helen and I experimented on last year. He’s so…oh, I don’t know. So assured, and so much more mature—”

  “Because climbing on the roof of the piazza is such a mature thing to do,” Grace murmured, then wished she hadn’t as Alice looked annoyed.

  “All right, maybe we shouldn’t have,” she agreed irritably. “All I’m saying is that he’s not like any other boy I know—oh! I didn’t tell you. My magics worked! I’ve figured out how we’re going to get to at least one ball while we’re here.”

  Grace was glad for the change of subject. “Really? How?”

  “Simple. We’re going to make Mrs. Rennell give one herself. After all, she can’t very well lock us in our rooms to keep us from attending if she does give one. And we won’t really be going to a ball if she does—we’ll just happen to be here while one is taking place.”

  Grace snorted. “You’re wasted in Newport. You should be pleading cases in court.”

  “I’m sure Mrs. Rennell will see the reasonableness of it if we present it our way.” Alice grinned. “And besides, she won’t be able to resist the idea of inviting all the Newport nabobs…and they’ll come, too, because of us.”

  “Because of you, you mean,” Grace said dryly as she went back to brushing her hair.

  Alice didn’t look one whit abashed. “Well, of course!”

  * * *

  Dear Grace,

  See, I told you I’d write back to you if you wrote to me.

  It’s realy boring here without you, at least when I can’t go do stuff with Mary and Eunice and Anne. Then its all right. When you said you were going on a yacht we borrowed the Sears’ rowboat and took it on the pond, but I don’t think it was much like a yacht. Didn’t I spell yacht nicely? Mum told me how. Are you having a good time? You sound like you are in your letters, which makes Grand-mère frown the way she does when she’s angry. She wants you to come home. I do too, but I guess I’m not mad about it the way she is. I think you better not write about any boys when you send me letters, because Grand-mère reads them even though their my own PRIVATE corispondince and that’s what made her mad. But Papa says you’l do fine because you have a good head on your sholders. Guess what! Daisy and I won a race! We beat Harry Clarke and his—

  “Love letter, my pet?”

  Grace started and nearly dropped Dorothy’s letter. Mrs. Fish stood grinning at her under the fall of leaves of the weeping beech tree in Mrs. Berwind’s garden, where she’d taken refuge from the hubbub of a garden party.

  She probably shouldn’t have brought the letter with her, but the post had arrived as they were leaving and she’d tucked it in her purse without thinking. Reading it now was a bad idea; it had given her a full-blown attack of homesickness. The beech had done nothing to dispel her mood; it was very vain of its appearance and could only talk of itself. It had even tried to snatch her letter away from her, because it felt she was not paying it proper attention. She longed for the trees of home, who were comfortable old friends and possessed of much better manners.

  “No, not a love letter at all, ma’am.” She rose from the bench under the tree’s cascading boughs. “It’s from my little sister.”

  Mrs. Fish grunted as she sat down next to Grace, set her parasol on point between her knees, and leaned on its handle. “Sit down and talk to me. A letter from your little sister’s nothing to be proud of. It should be from some young man desperately in love with you at your age. No, don’t get all missish and modest. You have more sense than that, which is probably why you’re hiding here and not cooing at the flower beds.”

  Grace smiled as she sat down. The conversation among the ladies attending the party was insipid. (“Those pink begonias are very pink. And the white ones are very white,” she’d heard one lady announce with an air of great profundity. Her companion had agreed with equal gravity.) Then again, it was a ladies’ party, so there was no Kit Rookwood making her life unpleasant, which was a relief.

  “It is a little hard sometimes, not knowing everyone—” she began.

  “Oh, we’re like a coop full of hens, scratching for the same old worms and cackling about the same things day in, day out.” Mrs. Fish waved one hand at the crowd of mostly white-clad women. “Look at ’em! They even look like a flock of hens wandering around, except they don’t do any good by manuring the lawn while they’re at it.”

  Grace couldn’t help giggling. Mrs. Fish looked at her approvingly. “That’s why I like you. You’re not stupid. Everyone else here is stupid. Too bad Harry Lehr isn’t here to stir things up, but he’s on his honeymoon with that girl he married. Nice little thing, but too insipid. Not at all like your Roosevelt friend.”

  Grace caught her sideways glance and felt a pang of trepidation. “Er, no…you can’t say Alice is insipid.”

  Mrs. Fish nodded. “She was seen up on the roof at the theatre the other night,” she said abruptly. “She and young Kit Rookwood, which surprises me as he’s never been like that before. But sometimes people can have funny effects on other people.”

  Grace hesitated, then said, “I told her it was too much, and that she couldn’t do anything like that again.”

  “Good girl. But that’s not all she’s done.”

  “What?” Grace exclaimed, then felt herself flush. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I didn’t know. Would you tell me what else she’s—what else there is?”

  “The pair of ’em stole a boat at the Harbor Fête the other day and crashed the rowing races. He rowed and she sat in the stern, shouting and throwing peanuts at the other boats.”

  So that was why Alice had looked so disheveled when they’d finally found her that day. Grace wanted to laugh but managed to keep her mouth mostly prim. Mrs. Fish, however, grinned.

  “Oh, you don’t have to hide it. I’m sure it was as funny as anything,” she said. “But the local boys and the sailors from the visiting warships didn’t take kindly to it. They did return the boat to its owner, though.”

  “Thank heavens for small mercies.” Grace swallowed. “Anything else?”

  Mrs. Fish’s eyes lost their amused twinkle. “At Carrie Wilson’s musicale last night, someone saw her and Rookwood sneak out, then sneak back in about twenty minutes later. His hair was mussed and his tie crooked, and she was disarranged as well.”

  “Oh.” Grace closed her eyes. That wasn’t funny. She and Mrs. Rennell had somehow gotten separated from Alice when it had been time to take their seats for the vocal concert—Miss Nellie Melba was singing—and though she’d seen Alice on the other side of the salon at the start of the concert and at the end, she hadn’t paid much attention to the in-between. But to have been seen under those circumstances... Well, it was easy to jump to conclusions—conclusions that might well be true. The last thing a girl wanted was a reputation for being fast. Not only was it vulgar but it could follow her around for life and have an effect on her marriage prospects. Few men were interested in marrying a girl whose virtue and morals were suspect, and those who didn’t care weren’t necessarily the kind of men one wanted to marry. And if her parents heard, they’d kill her—or worse, try to send her to a strict finishing school, which would send Alice truly into rebellion.

  And she could completely see Alice falling into Kit’s clutches—or his arms—like that. She’d once told Grace that she was lucky if she got a quick handshake from her parents before she left to visit her grandparents or aunt for weeks or months on end. How alluring Kit’s cares
ses would be to a girl who was rarely hugged or petted by anyone.

  What should—or could—she do? Being a dryad was no help—in fact, being a dryad hadn’t been of any help with anything in Newport, and at times (like with Tom Livingston) it had been a downright nuisance. Well, she’d wanted to see what it was like to live more as a human. Or was it more a matter of living in the adult world, with adult problems? No matter what, she had to do something.

  Mrs. Fish had remained quiet while she thought. When Grace finally met her eyes, she asked, in a remarkably gentle voice, “Not out yet, are you two?”

  “Well, sort of, almost.” After all, they wore their skirts to the floor and put their hair up, even if they hadn’t been formally presented to society.

  “That’s even more reason your friend should behave herself. Especially considering she’s the vice-president’s daughter.”

  “Please, Mrs. Fish—you won’t tell anyone else about any of this, will you? I don’t think she did any of it to make a spectacle of herself—well, not much. She’s got too much energy bottled up inside her and no way to expend it, and—” She drew a deep breath. “And I don’t think her parents will understand at all.”

  Mrs. Fish sighed. “I’ll do my best to make sure the stories don’t get around, but you must try to keep her on a shorter leash.”

  “I’ll try, ma’am. Though I doubt anyone will ever be able to put a leash on Alice.” She bit her lip, thinking. “Perhaps…perhaps I should try to talk with him and make him see the damage he’s doing.” Though she’d much rather chop off his head and dump his body in the harbor than speak two words to him in private.

  “You could try.” Her heavy-lidded eyes held a sudden sparkle of amusement. “You know, the whole problem would go away if he could find someone new to occupy his interest. Some lovely, sensible girl who wouldn’t make a fool of herself over him.”

  “Yes, it would, but who— Oh!” Grace nearly fell off the bench. Mrs. Fish couldn’t mean—couldn’t mean that she should—