Next door, they were playing “Blue Danube.” The sickeningly romantic strains floated through the room as Julia spluttered on her brandy. “Nick? You thought I was jealous because of Nick?”
“Why not? Or was I not important enough to be a threat?” Just another Bridget: Irish and poor.
“Good Lord, Nick,” said Julia reminiscently. “He was a decent enough specimen of his kind, as male creatures go. Utterly spineless. Pleasant, but spineless. No, I didn’t hate you because of Nick,” said Julia in a detached, cool tone. “I hated you because I was jealous of you.”
She said it so matter-of-factly, as if it ought to have been blindingly obvious. “What on earth could I possibly have that you don’t?”
Julia sat up straighter. “The right to earn your own living. A scholarship, a proper scholarship, free and clear.”
“That’s just because my family didn’t have the money to send me.” Kate had been so grateful for that scholarship and worked so hard to justify it. Free and clear were never words she would have used to describe it.
“Did you think mine had?” demanded Julia. “Do you know what I had to do to go to Smith? Beg. You want to talk about charity cases? You’re looking at one.”
Kate blinked at Julia, trying to make the world stand still again. “But you—your family—”
“Doesn’t have two beans to rub together,” said Julia with a certain grim satisfaction. “My father lost it all on the stock market in ’93, poor sap. Then he killed himself. They put it about that it was a hunting accident, but it wasn’t really. He just didn’t have the nerve to face my mother. I don’t blame him. Well, I do, really. But I can understand why he’d rather face a bullet than my esteemed mater.”
“But wasn’t your mother married to a French count?” It had been mentioned a time or two. Or ten.
“Oh, yes. This was his—pretty, isn’t it?” Julia waved her flask, the silver glinting in the sparse moonlight. “He thought he was getting a rich American. My mother thought she was going to be Marie Antoinette without the whole guillotine bit. Both of them utterly washed-up. He was a wonderful old wastrel. He didn’t have a sou, but that didn’t stop him from buying me rafts of toys—and then tearing up the bills,” she finished cynically. “He had a theory that aristocrats shouldn’t have to pay. Unfortunately for him, that was a little too ancien régime for these democratic times. His creditors caught up with him eventually.”
“I don’t think we ever bought anything we couldn’t pay for,” said Kate wonderingly. Even when they were terribly, terribly poor. Her mother had a horror of credit, and of the pawnshop. “We went without when we couldn’t afford it.”
“That, my dear, is because you are poor but honest,” said Julia mockingly, but Kate knew, somehow, in this strange half-dream state, that the mockery wasn’t for her. “Not a washed-up aristocrat with delusions of grandeur. I refer, as you may have gathered, to my stepfather. My mother hasn’t delusions. She’s just a venal witch.”
Kate thought of her own mother, her work-worn hands turning the pages of a library book as she read to Kate. She must have been so tired—that was before her stepfather, back when her mother was scrubbing houses to keep them fed—but she had always taken the time to read to her.
“That seems a bit hard,” she said cautiously.
“Does it?” Julia gave a humorless laugh. “She tried to sell me off. They tart it up by calling it marriage and making it sound honorable, but my debut was really just another sort of auction. I was meant to be the last great hope, snag someone suitably plump in the pocket, and rescue my mother from the indignity of paste jewels. My mother was furious when Aunt Cora agreed to pay my tuition and board at Smith. But she couldn’t do anything about it—darling Auntie Cora holds all the purse strings—so she just had to wait and bide her time. Every moment I was at Smith I knew I was on borrowed time. You want to know why I hated you? I hated you because you were so free. There you were, off to do whatever you wanted to do—”
This was not the way Kate remembered it. She felt as though she was being told an entirely different version of her past. “Teach French to spoiled society girls?”
Julia shrugged. “Chacun à son go?t. Maybe you liked it. Whatever it was, you didn’t have someone on at you about how you owed it to her to marry the first wealthy bore who crossed your path.” In her usual bored drawl, she added, “Apparently she gave up her figure for me, and that means I’m meant to keep her in Paris frocks for the rest of her life.”