But the high point of the Season was certainly Mrs. Breen’s growing friendship with Lady Donner herself. The doyenne seemed to have taken on Mrs. Breen’s elevation as her special project. There was little she did not know about the First Families and their lesser compeers, and less (indeed nothing) that she was not willing to use to her own—and to Mrs. Breen’s—benefit. Though the older woman was quick to anger, Mrs. Breen never felt the lash of her displeasure. And she doted upon Sophie. She chanced to meet the child one Wednesday afternoon when Mrs. Breen, feeling, in her mercurial way, particularly fond of her daughter, had allowed Sophie to peek into the drawing room.
Lady Donner was announced.
The governess—a plain, bookish young woman named Ada Pool—was ushering Sophie, with a final kiss from her mother, out of the room when the grande dame swept in.
“Sophie is just leaving,” Mrs. Breen said, inwardly agitated lest Sophie misbehave. “This is Lady Donner, Sophie,” she said. “Can you say good afternoon?”
Sophie smiled. She held a finger to her mouth. She looked at her small feet in their pretty shoes. Then, just as Mrs. Breen began to despair, she said, with an endearing childish lisp, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Donner.”
“Lady Donner,” Mrs. Breen said.
“Mrs. Lady Donner,” Sophie said.
Lady Donner laughed. “I am so pleased to meet you, Sophie.”
Mrs. Breen said, “Give Mama one more kiss, dear, and then you must go with Miss Pool.”
“She is lovely, darling,” Lady Donner said. “Do let her stay.”
Thus it was decided that Sophie might linger. Though she could, by Mrs. Breen’s lights, be a difficult child (which is to say a child of ordinary disposition), Sophie that day allowed herself to be cossetted and admired without objection. She simpered and smiled and was altogether charming.
Thereafter, whenever Lady Donner called, she brought along some bauble for the child—a kaleidoscope or a tiny chest of drawers for her dollhouse and once an intricately embroidered ribbon of deep blue mulberry silk that matched perfectly the child’s sapphire eyes. Lady Donner tied up Sophie’s hair with it herself, running her fingers sensuously through the child’s lustrous blonde curls and recalling with nostalgia the infancy of her own daughter, now grown.
When she at last perfected the elaborate bow, Lady Donner led Sophie to a gilded mirror. She looked on fondly as Sophie admired herself.
“She partakes of her mother’s beauty,” Lady Donner remarked, and Mrs. Breen, who reckoned herself merely striking (Mr. Breen would have disagreed), basked in the older woman’s praise. Afterward—and to Sophie’s distress—the ribbon was surrendered into Mrs. Breen’s possession and preserved as a sacred relic of her friend’s affections, to be used upon only the most special of occasions.
In the days that followed, Lady Donner and Mrs. Breen became inseparable. As their intimacy deepened, Mrs. Breen more and more neglected her old friends. She was seldom at home when they called, and she did not often return their visits. Her correspondence with them, which had once been copious, fell into decline. There was simply too much to do. Life was a fabulous procession of garden parties and luncheons and promenades in the Park.
Then it was August. Parliament adjourned. The Season came to an end.
She and Mr. Breen retired to their country estate in Suffolk, where Mr. Breen would spend the autumn shooting and fox hunting. As the days grew shorter, the winter seemed, paradoxically, to grow longer, their return to town more remote. Mrs. Breen corresponded faithfully with Mrs. Eddy (kind and full of gentle whimsy), Mrs. Graves (quite grave), and Lady Donner (cheery and full of inconsequential news). She awaited their letters eagerly. She rode in the mornings and attended the occasional country ball, and twice a week, like clockwork, she entertained her husband in her chamber.
But despite all of her efforts in this regard, no heir kindled in her womb.
Mrs. Breen had that winter, for the first time, a dream which would recur periodically for years to come. In the dream, she was climbing an endless ladder. It disappeared into silky darkness at her feet. Above her, it rose toward an inconceivably distant circle of light. The faraway sounds of tinkling silver and conversation drifted dimly down to her ears. And though she had been climbing for days, years, a lifetime—though her limbs were leaden with exhaustion—she could imagine no ambition more worthy of her talents than continuing the ascent. She realized too late that the ladder’s topmost rungs and rails had been coated with thick, unforgiving grease, and even as she emerged into the light, her hands, numb with fatigue, gave way at last, and she found herself sliding helplessly into the abyss below.
The Breens began the Season that followed with the highest of hopes.
They were borne out. Lady Donner renewed her friendship with Mrs. Breen. They were seen making the rounds at the Royal Academy’s Exhibition together, pausing before each painting to adjudge its merits. Neither of them had any aptitude for the visual arts, or indeed any interest in them, but being seen at the Exhibition was important. Lady Donner attended to assert her supremacy over the London scene, Mrs. Breen to bask in Lady Donner’s reflected glow. After that, the first dinner invitations came in earnest. Mr. Breen once again took up at his club; Mrs. Breen resumed her luncheons, her charity bazaars, her afternoon calls and musical soireés. Both of them looked forward to the great events of the summer—the Derby and the Ascot in June, the Regatta in July.
But, foremost, they anticipated the high holiday and official commencement of the London Season: First Day and its attendant Feast, which fell every year on the last Saturday in May. Mr. Breen hoped to dine with one of the First Families; Mrs. Breen expected to.
She was disappointed.
When the messenger from Lady Donner arrived, she presumed that she would open the velvety envelope to discover her invitation to the First Feast. Instead it was an invitation to the Second Day dinner. Another woman might have felt gratified at this evidence of Lady Donner’s continued esteem. Mrs. Breen, on the other hand, felt that she had been cut by her closest friend, and in an excess of passion dashed off an indignant reply tendering her regret that Mr. and Mrs. Breen would be unable to attend due to a prior obligation. Then she paced the room in turmoil while she awaited her husband’s return from the club.
Mrs. Breen did not know what she had anticipated from him, but she had not expected him to be furious. His face grew pale. He stalked the room like a caged tiger. “Have you any idea what you have done?”
“I have declined an invitation, nothing more.”
“An invitation? You have declined infinitely more than that, I am afraid. You have declined everything we most value—place and person, the divine order of the ranks and their degrees.” He stopped at the sideboard for a whisky and drank it back in a long swallow. “To be asked to partake of ensouled flesh, my dear, even on Second Day—there is no honor greater for people of our station.”
“Our station? Lady Donner and I are friends, Walter.”
“You may be friends. But you are not equals, and you would do well to remember that.” He poured another drink. “Or would have done, I should say. It is too late now.”
“Too late?”