‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I… I have something really important to tell you. I have-’
‘So it’s true?’ Eve demanded, skipping forward eagerly. ‘You do have a lover?’
I blinked at her, taken aback.
‘What?’
‘I knew it I knew it I knew it I knew it!’ Eve started a little dance around me that would have been more fitting for a Cherokee medicine man than for a proper young English lady. Some part of my mind wondered how the heck she was managing those acrobatics with a hoop skirt on. Most of my mind, however, was wondering what the heck she had been talking about.
‘I knew it was true the minute Patsy told us what Ella had told her,’ she babbled, and it all became clear to me.
The ball. Patsy grilling Ella for information, and Ella spouting out the ridiculous excuses I had told her.
No. Oh please, God, no! Don’t let Patsy have told everyone!
As usual, God didn’t listen.
‘Flora didn’t believe it, but I knew right away it was true. You were away all the time last week and not one of us had the slightest idea where you had disappeared to and oh isn’t this exciting, girls? Lilly has found herself a man! You must tell us all about him!’
‘Well, really I came to talk about something el-’ I began, but that was about as far as I got.
‘Is he tall?’ Eve demanded. She had stopped dancing around me and was now bobbing up and down in front of me like an overexcited puppy. ‘Is he handsome? Is he rich? Will you marry him and go live on a vast estate in the country somewhere?’
‘Eve!’ I said, shocked. ‘Where’s your pride as an independent woman?’
‘Right here,’ she said, indicating her head. ‘Now will you tell me whether he’s rich and handsome?’
‘Look,’ I said, crossing my arms defiantly, ‘this isn’t what I came here to talk about!’
‘Too bad.’ Patsy grinned at me over tiny Eve’s head. ‘Because it’s apparently what you’re going to have to talk about.’
‘But-’
‘What’s his name?’ Eve interrupted me eagerly. ‘Does he live in London? Well of course he does, or you wouldn’t have been gone all that time. You were with him, weren’t you? Were you two up to anything, you know… special?’
She winked, and then winked a couple of times more in case I hadn’t gotten it. I had, and so apparently had everybody else in the vicinity. The looks from passers-by had become a good deal more disapproving.
I would have to stop this. Ella I could deal with, but these three were of another calibre entirely. I would have to placate them somehow. Inspiration struck me!
‘I haven’t got a lover, all right?’ I hissed. ‘Now stop it, you’re making people stare.’
‘Oh.’ Eve stopped bobbing up and down, obviously deflated. ‘But… but Patsy said…’
‘Patsy said what Ella told her.’
‘And what you told Ella wasn’t one hundred per cent true?’ Patsy guessed, her grin having widened after a momentary flicker.
‘Actually,’ I corrected, ‘it’s not even one per cent true. But I couldn’t correct Ella at the time. She mustn’t know.’
‘So what is it you have been up to these last few weeks?’ Patsy sounded quite demanding, and when Patsy Cusack demanded, you didn’t deny her. She might be inclined to back up her demands with a swipe of her mighty parasol, the destroyer of worlds.
‘You mustn’t tell a soul,’ I whispered, grabbing the three of them by the arms and dragging them away from the people in the park, who were still muttering about loose morals in this modern age and unladylike behaviour. ‘Especially not Ella. She mustn’t know what I’m doing.’
We ended up by the same bench behind the discreet clump of bushes where we had sat before. It was our favourite spot. Nobody ever bothered us there.
‘So it has something to do with Ella?’ Eve enquired eagerly, sitting down beside me, her disappointment at my lack of romantic entanglements already forgotten. ‘What you’ve been doing all this time, I mean?’
‘Yes, very much so. She’s in danger.’