A Teatime in July Joseph Umland looked between two of his siblings, a hint of amusement in his brown eyes. “You know, Julian,” he said, “he’s really played this quite well.”
John looked up from his teacup for the first time in several minutes, this time looking at his brother instead of his sister – on the previous occasions that he’d addressed anything but the porcelain dish in his hand, it had always been to Julian. She and John both, Lenore had noticed, watched each other as though quite afraid the other would vanish if they looked away too long, which was interesting, considering that their long separation had been entirely voluntary on John’s part.
“How do you reckon I’ve done that?” he asked Joe.
“We ought to still be pissed with you, but we’re glad enough you’re here – and better – that we can’t seem to manage it,” said Joe.
John almost smiled, then. “What can I say,” he said. “I have a gift.”
Julian laughed, and Lenore noted that she had not seen her cousin look so happy and free of stress in – actually, she wasn’t sure she ever had. “You wretch,” she said affectionately to her brother, beaming at him. “If I thought that was true, I’d knock your eyes out.”
“Watch your eyes with this one, William,” said John, addressing his teacup again. William, already pale with irritation, put his teacup down wrong and sloshed tea into his saucer.
It was not, Lenore knew, William who was responsible for John’s sudden habit of talking to the china instead of the people whose names he occasionally affixed to his sentences. Nor, she thought, was it something to do with trauma – the thing which they all kept implying, but not quite saying, had sent him running off to his boyfriend in America in the first place last summer. It was Lenore herself.
Weddings were miserable affairs, and the closer they came, the more miserable they became. Lenore had taken one look at Julian, running back and forth between talking to this person or that person associated with the wedding planning and then this person or that person involved in remodeling part of the house into what Julian seemed to still imagine would make a happy, cozy little home and had decided to retreat to the safety of the library without saying hello. They could talk later – she estimated it would be about an hour before Julian got flustered enough to have a cup of tea and drop a bit of a calming draught in it, and then she would be much more agreeable company.
She had not been there long when she’d heard the telltale signs of someone else having the same idea. The step was all wrong to be Julian’s – too heavy, and too evenly distributed – and it was not William, either. Therefore, Lenore had felt no need to look up from her book when the steps stopped abruptly, having rounded the corner she was around, and she caught a glimpse of a tall figure in her peripheral vision.
“Hello, John,” said Lenore.
There was a long pause.
“Lenore,” said John finally.
“My feelings were hurt when you failed to pay your respects this winter,” said Lenore, still not looking up. “Or answer my letters. I know they call it the gentleman’s way out, but it’s not actually very polite to sleep with a girl and then pretend she doesn’t exist.”
Another pause, but this one briefer. “Manners aren’t really something I think apply to our situation,” said John.
Lenore finally closed her book. “Of course they are,” she said. “Etiquette is all that separates us from the anarchy of the beasts.”
“No, self-control is what separates us from the anarchy of the beasts.”
Lenore smiled slightly, leaning against the shelf beside her and looking directly at him for the first time. “You don’t consider etiquette a form of self-control?” she asked mockingly.
John scowled at her. “You’re demonstrating very clearly that it isn’t,” said John. “You’re defining etiquette as the thing you use to tell yourself it’s all right to lose control as long as you only talk about it in the right places and say the right things afterward.”
“Isn’t that what you do when you go to your confessions?” asked Lenore.
“No,” said John. Lenore raised her eyebrows when he failed to elaborate, gesturing for him to go on, and John shrugged irritably. “What?”
“Elaborate, please,” said Lenore. “Educate me, Umland. Explain to me why your way is the only right way.”
John did not rise to the challenge she put before him. “Stop it,” he said, warningly, instead.
“Stop what?” asked Lenore.
“Stop trying to - to distract me,” said John, color rising in his face as he no doubt recalled the last time they had had a half-decent argument.
“You’re the one who started this conversation,” said Lenore.
In the few novels Lenore had read, it was always the women who desired sex but fastidiously abstained from it, frustrating their would-be partners. If this was how things normally ran in the real world, Lenore supposed she now knew something of what it was like to be a man. Something – not all. The other way in which Lenore should have had some experience, now, of what it was like to be a man was in being the socially powerful one in the relationship, the one who commanded loyalty and obedience so long as the pair were in the same district, and John would not give her that. This, she supposed, was why she had not lost all interest in him once he’d served his purpose and helped her annoy Will – clearly she was the party in the relationship with all the power, and trying to figure out why he acted as though she were not was interesting. It had been a very long time since Lenore had met anyone who really did anything remotely interesting, much less someone who did and said anything interesting.
Will was not, she thought, very interesting. Now, ignoring the mess he’d made of his saucer, he compressed his lips into what might have been intended as a smile. “I begin to think Julian doesn’t love me well enough to claw my eyes out,” said William. “I’ll leave that honor to you, John.”
Julian laughed again, but this time with a hint of exasperation. “Oh, hush,” she said, rising and crossing to the table Lenore shared with William. She – to Lenore’s surprise, and, from his expression, evidently William’s as well – seized part of his hair in one hand even as she laid her other hand, rather more gently, against his temple. “You know I’m as fond of you as anyone can be,” added Julian before kissing him, much more abruptly and aggressively than Lenore had seen her do before. She straightened, a reckless sort of sparkle in her eyes. “So, unless we’re all going to finish with cold tea – you pour for Lenore, and I will again for these two,” she concluded, turning away and returning to her place, leaving William looking thunderstruck.
It might have just been the highly unsociable hour – her cousin was someone who lived on a very conventional schedule most of the time, no late nights – but when Lenore first saw the look on Julian’s face when the older witch abruptly sought admittance to Lenore’s boudoir, she had thought something was terribly wrong and had almost dropped her book as she rose from her sofa. “Julian?” she’d asked. “What’s the matter?”
Julian had seemed to try to speak, but to find doing so difficult; her lips moved, but she said nothing, and made no noise the first two tries. The third ended in what sounded, oddly enough, like laughter! Lenore, seeing she’d have no sense out of her just yet, sent for tea and in the meantime splashed cold water into a glass and shoved that into Julian’s hand. A few gulps of that seemed to steady her a bit, because after them, she began to speak all at once.
“I’m sorry, bothering you at this hour – but William wouldn’t stop complaining about how he had to go to work in the morning, and everyone else is asleep, and I’m too excited to go to bed.”
“By what?” asked Lenore, mystified.
“I convinced John to come back.”
Lenore had still had the water pitcher in her hand, and in her surprise had not minded how she held it; water promptly soaked a significant portion of the front of her dress. Julian hardly seemed to notice. “So of course we were all at home this evening – and then I went to see William, but he started sulking because I missed dinner and because he didn’t see why I was so happy and I lost all patience with him. I told him he was being stupid, but that I was too happy to argue with him, and that did upset him! So I left.”
Confirmation of all this had come from William the next day – he had been exceedingly, exquisitely annoyed with Julian’s joy, so much so that Lenore had been unable to tell if it was more antipathy to a topic that had nothing to do with himself or antipathy toward John specifically. She knew he had hoped Julian would come back from Arizona in tears, rejected once and for all by her prodigal brother, so William could use grief to tie her more firmly to his own side, but that she had not was a minor enough setback that she didn’t think it would have triggered so much aggravation – probably. He was, after all, remarkably petty sometimes….
After tea, Julian wanted to take a walk in the garden, and would hear nothing of John’s attempts to escape back to the library. Outdoors, she linked arms with him and Joe, which left Lenore to trail behind with William.
“I hardly know what she invited us for,” grumbled William.
“You aren’t overjoyed to spend time with her when she’s happy?” asked Lenore sardonically. “Or to see your soon-to-be-brother returned safely home.”
William responded, in so many words, with an assertion that this was not and never would be John’s home. Lenore felt a perverse sense of satisfaction at his obvious anger and oblivion to his own impotence.
“I’d suggest taking a softer tone,” said Lenore. “Not only is she awfully pleased with herself for bringing him back here, but they’re inseparable now – any chance you had of driving a wedge there’s gone. If you want to screw her out of house and home, you’d best fawn over him as much as she does.”
William opened his mouth to make a no doubt furious reply, but before he could, Julian half-turned back toward them. “What’s keeping you two?” she asked impatiently. “Hurry up. Conspire with us.”
Even after her first fit of enthusiasm over her subjects had waned, Julian had, Lenore had determined, been too animated to have any kind of serious discussion with. On the next available opportunity, however, Lenore had found the first opening possible to say, “I know it’s probably not polite to mention it this close to your wedding, but I just thought of it – have you made any kind of will?”
“Will?” said Julian, looking as though she did not quite know what the word meant.
“Yes – decided what should happen to your property if anything happened to you.”
“Goodness, no – I don’t think I’m in much danger of dying soon!”
Lenore shrugged. “But anything can happen – John’s younger than you and you thought he might die last summer. And – of course Will’s a good man,” said Lenore, telling a lie. However cross Julian was with him over not treating John’s return as something to be sung about in the streets, she would likely reject the idea that he was fundamentally someone she should not trust in the slightest. “He wouldn’t want to cut your family off, but he’d be under pressure from all sides, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want everyone fighting over who got which pieces of the pie….”
Maybe, Lenore thought as she and William picked up their pace, Julian was not as dim or besotted as they thought, because it had not been hard to convince her that preparing for eventualities was a good idea. Convincing her to seek out a solicitor other than Uncle Bertram had been more of a challenge, but Lenore had done it, and now, she supposed, the die was cast - nothing to do but see how it landed, really.
For now, she joined the Umlands, stepping into place beside John just to annoy William further. She couldn’t say honestly that it was altogether unpleasant just to rub it in his face that he didn’t own her and never would, aside from other advantages and no matter what happened later. Even if Aunt Lucy continued to favor him and this led to Lenore eventually marrying him after all, she would be his better, too, as much as she had always been, and she could not say she did not enjoy reminding him of it now and again. John gave her a look which let her know she was annoying him, too, though, which made her smile.