Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 21
At length the small party was assembled downstairs and the carriage brought around. Emma could not help but admire the elegance of her sister’s gown. It was a light blue silk creation with gold trim at the bodice, hem, and sleeves. Her hair was beautifully curled and lifted into a high chignon that was contained within a golden diadem.
Emma’s ensemble was, by comparison, quite simple; she’d have called it understated, but her sister deemed the word merely a euphemism for boring. She wore a sheer white cotton batiste fabric with red embroidery that was concentrated at the bodice. The sleeves of her gown tapered demurely towards the elbows, but stopped short of reaching them. She wore no more accouterments than the red ribbon woven into her coiffure, her matching silk fan, the long silk gloves, red slippers, and her best red drop earrings to compliment the total effect.
Once her uncle had handed the ladies into the carriage, the feathers of her aunt's turban inciting his hearty sneezing as they tickled his nose, they set out for their dinner engagement at Winterly House on Half Moon Street. Emma had not eaten all day and it was already half past eight o’clock! Very late for a dinner party. The Stapletons always dined before six.
The sun was low in the evening sky, an uncanny sort of filmy cloud diffusing the light into a reddish halo. Emma had read somewhere that the ancients had considered it a bad omen or a sign of change. Hopefully it meant the latter.
The strange fluttering in her belly struck again and grew ever more acute as the conveyance sped steadily westward. All too soon they were on Piccadilly. Not long now and she would have to face him again.
Chapter Eleven
Winterly House
My dear Mary,—The coroner has ruled the nightmares as a result of exsanguination, not gothic romances. I long for the quietude of Little Snoring, where my sleep is in no danger of being assassinated by London terrors. Yours wakefully,
Emma.
Winterly House, unlike its master, was no more intimidating than the rest of the neighboring four story mansions. She almost laughed at herself as she alighted from the carriage, having fancied him residing among gothic buttresses and snarling gargoyles. Instead, it had turned out to be a most benign and stately terraced home of rectangular stone and stucco with a sloping slate roof and chimney stacks fringed by a parapet.
Behind it the evening sky spilled its roses and violets, limning the rooftops in a dying splash of gold. There was a quaint square of garden in the front, now swathed in shadow, and a red Palladian front door, with a semicircular fanlight above it, that stood neatly beside the two large sash-windows of the first floor.
Emma was very soon to find, however, that the gargoyles she’d imagined, though absent from the charming exterior, were in fact waiting within.
The front door opened before the party had reached the stairhead and from within there appeared a bloodless face with dour, black eyes squinting against the early twilight. A butler. He wordlessly admitted them into the dim vestibule. Though tall, he was a stringy creature, his onionskin flesh stretched unnaturally across his skull so that the blue network of veins stuck out in prominent webs. Emma found herself transfixed not by the elegance of their surroundings but by the strange servant who shut the door soundly behind them, his waxen features relaxing visibly beneath the candlelight once the door was closed.
As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, the butler received their pelisses and jackets and handed the articles to a liveried footman who had somehow exhumed himself from the outlying darkness with the stealth of a spider. He was possessed of an equally fearsome grimace better suited to guarding the stonework of an ancient cathedral with its fellow grotesques. The butler hemmed, having caught her staring like a fool, and then proceeded to guide them into the drawing room.
Here the light was far more cheery and the assembled faces—most of whom were strangers—as beautiful as the servants’ had been frightful.
“Good evening,” said Victoria, drifting gracefully towards them. “Welcome. We are delighted to have you for dinner.”
The gentlemen behind her exchanged amused glances whilst the hostess pressed her cheek first to one sister and then the other, whereupon she warmly greeted the Haywoods as though it were not the first time she was meeting them.
Emma’s eyes had briefly met Lord Winterly’s when she entered, but his searing gaze quite overpowered her and she dropped her eyes almost as soon as they locked with his. Instead, she took up the task of appraising the sumptuous furnishings which were undoubtedly splendid, though she did not care for the dark ostentation; it was all carmine velvets, red and gold silk wall coverings, elaborate black hardwood furniture, and a ceiling of ornate gilding. It was all perfectly hideous. The direction of her regard did not, however, mean she was oblivious or invulnerable to her host’s piercing attention, which she felt as palpably as if he were touching her.
So distracted was she by the lurid room and the host’s pressing gaze that it was not until the necessary introductions were all but concluded that Emma realized her brain had not recorded a single name, never mind placed one to a face. Which meant that there were six new faces that remained unknown to her. She only hoped she had at least curtsied automatically at all the appropriate moments. The odd looks she earned from her family, however, suggested otherwise. A propitious start to the evening, she thought glumly.
“And, finally,” said their hostess, gesturing to the strapping gentleman leaning a casual