With her golden curls, blushing cheeks and rigid posture Emma Ada Canterbury conjured a memory of the fine porcelain dolls she had played with as a girl. Jacob leaned forward and impatiently pulled at one of her curls, laughing careless as she flicked his hand away.
"We are in public Jacob, will you never grow up?" She chided.
"I suppose we won't know until I do." Jacob dismissed easily turning his attention to a waiter that appeared at his elbow. He murmured an order of drinks as Emma curiously glanced around the lavish main dining room of the Hotel Gregorian.
"What an oddity, this city habit to dine in front of complete strangers." Emma mused. She refrained from glancing at the small tables crowding around them. Jacob marveled at her control knowing she was his mother's greatest achievement.
"I'd thought you'd be rather taken with the novelty of it," Jacob grinned catching the way his sister's nose wrinkled at a loud businessman across the room speaking through a mouthful of mash potatoes.
"So did Audrey and Elizabeth." Emma nodded politely at the waiter that settled a strawberry lemonade in front of her and a whiskey in front of Jacob. Emma sipped the drink and let her eyes wander over her surroundings again. It was her first time in the city and Jacob knew from experience the city was an overwhelming place.
"There is a rush to it. The way the buildings touch the sky and there is never a real moment of quiet." Emma admitted quietly. Jacob nodded catching sight of familiar faces being seated at one of the tables just behind his sister's right shoulder. He barely nodded at them easily adopting the casualness of seeing acquaintances in public, comforted in the ability to hide in the teeming life of the city.
"It's odd how I've grown used to the city itself, like school before it." Jacob mused.
"Do you think Europe will be like this?" Emma asked excitedly.
"Maybe with a couple more ruins here and there." Jacob shrugged unimpressed. The young man had grown accustomed to the freedom of his university semester and city work, just beyond the reach of his mother and his father. He wasn't sure what to make of traveling across the seas with his mother and younger sister, no matter how much business he was doing on his father's behalf.
"You aren't excited?" Emma quirked a brow at him, in a playful but knowing look. Emma hadn't seen her brother since the previous summer, but she found she could read his emotions clearly in the way he worked to keep his shoulders down and his right pinky tapped impatiently at his palm.
"Did you enjoy your afternoon with the young ladies?" He asked abruptly changing the topic.
"Elizabeth has blossomed, now her oldest sister is engaged and stopped being so sour."
"Oh, that does mark the change in her. I hadn't made the connection." Jacob frowned recalling when three months prior the eldest Samson sister had announced her engagement to the dandy in the state senate. A widower with a good set of holdings and an equally expansive estate along the Virginia shore.
"Really…" Emma began before another spoke her brother's name.
"Jacob Canterbury, yes that's him." A staged whisper carried over the hum of the voices in the dining room. Jacob's eyes snapped to the table where the familiar faces had settled.
"With a young lady, but it isn't that young Longfellow Ward? Miss Alexandra Kai?" A nasal voice prickled at Jacob as he willed his sister to maintain her rigidness, her training, and not turn. Although he couldn't ignore the rising color of embarrassment on her face.
"No, a different young lady. Maybe one better suited for him, Miss Kai is a wild one. With the way the papers and ladies gossip, you'd believe it is just a matter of days before he's proposing." The pretense of the whispering had been abandoned. Jacob clenches his jaw, glaring daggers at the two women sitting between their husbands.
"He couldn't possibly marry the girl, no matter the size of the dowry Thomas Longfellow promises."
"It seems he's still quite an eligible young man."
"I saw the young man's mother in the lobby earlier, I believe that's his sister." One of the men at the table finally blessedly interfered in the gossip. Someone dropped a fork onto a plate, another table unsettled into roaring laughter, a waiter practically shouted behind Jacob's head. Jacob dug his own fingers into his knee under the table trying to work the rushing sound from between his ears. He didn't notice when Emma quietly ordered their dinner.
"Jacob," Emma reached out and tugged his hand away from his knee. "Finish your whiskey, brother."
"Yes, right." Jacob mechanically took the glass and gulped down the rest of the amber liquid without removing his gaze from the edge of his shoe.
"Audrey, if one could believe it, comes even more alive in this city. It is as if she were born a man, the way she struts upon the streets and commands the very air around her." Emma continued suddenly as if she hadn't been interrupted.
Jacob glances at his sister, grateful for how she's keeping her own gaze interested in the pink lemonade in her glass.
"She burns brightly," Jacob murmurs.
The gossip had begun mounting to unbearable degrees in the winter. He vowed every time he went back to school to stop causing it. To cease calling enough to proclaim favor, to tone down the endless flirting, to not escort her to as many events, to be less obvious. But to cease for Jacob had proved impossible. He would have to abandon her and he couldn't. Or he wouldn't. The distinction did not matter, for it was not to be done.
"You know I've always found Audrey Kai to be the best kind of woman." Emma mused. "She's the sense of child intent upon carrying a candle when they've got a frock too long for their legs…"
"You think her foolish?" The question escaped him before he realized it.
"I think her, and you, brother, brash and impulsive." Emma smiled.
"Wild?" Jacob prodded irritated.
"You've never learned gossip is about envy. A wild girl is one to be envied. And your Audrey,"
"She is not mine." Jacob snapped automatically.
"Is charm and wit, mystery and adventure." Emma finished as if he hadn't spoken at all.
Mrs. Longfellow stepped into the dining room being ushered straight to her children's table by an obliging bell boy. She settled into the seat between her son and daughter, instantly commanding the nearest waiter and making the poor man repeat their entire dinner order. If she noticed the empty whiskey glass Jacob was clutching or the color draining from her son's cheeks, she did not comment.
"Kai, she's been invited to the dinner at the Vanderbilt's. I believe Mr. Canterbury is escorting her." A voice carried from the pillar to the right.
"I heard the Longfellow ward was recently in the company of the Rockefellers." Another voice from the left side of the dining room intoned loudly. The gossip suddenly centered around only Audrey Alexandra Kai in the dining room and Jacob began to wonder if having dinner in public was a good idea at all.