Re: Vauxhall Gardens
She doesn't curtsey or bow or bob her head. Station doesn't require it, and she's still a child of her upbringing. But her expression is defiantly bright, and she regards him with the steady gaze of an equal. They'll chitter, the bored women of London, and the whispers will carry far and wide over tables and in sitting rooms. People with nothing to say to each other, they can cling to this transgression witness in the blatant light of day.
Did you hear about Mina Murray? Sir Malcom's daughter...
And the stories would begin anew, fresh, from the wedding called off on the morning of the blessed event, to the girl's seduction by a foreigner, to Jonathan Harker's abandonment of her. Years missing, and the family insisted she was tangled up in no bedsheets at the time. She was ill, abroad, &c. All of it born anew behind fans and kid gloves.
"I am one and the same," she says, and she holds out the folded handkerchief with care, as if it was something quite precious. Like those birds fallen from nests that she and Peter rescued as children, and held out the same way, leading them home again to straw and stolen ribbons.
She inclines her head, as if to share an intimacy, and even the flowers gasp around them. She imagines it, gasping flowers, and it brings out the youth in her smile. "You ought not let yourself be heard comparing me to anything Heavenly, not even a portrait," she suggested, no guilt upon her lips at the ill state of her reputation. "I think it's the idolatrous Catholics prone to stoning, but the dear members of my faith might choose to make their own exception on this point." She meant none of it, and her voice was sunshine as she spoke of damnation.
That there was no Heaven, she knew with perfect certainty, just as she knew the white she wore lent the appearance of virtue.