miss-swire:
lady-rosamund:
It was far from the greatest opening and hardly the level of witty tete-a-tete that Rosamund was used to but she smiled encouragingly - in some circles they might have called it patronisingly - at the girl. She reached for the teapot and swirled the contents around with ease, not paying the slightest attention to what she was doing as she watched Miss Lavinia Swire critically. She didn’t look particularly different to the girl that Rosamund had met at Downton all those months ago but there was something distinctly sadder about the eyes that gave her pause.
“Thank you my dear, most people aren’t very fond of my decor-“
Which, Rosamund had to admit, mostly came from the abundance of styles that she thought looked perfectly marvelous together but did have the horrible habit of making people leave her house with a headache. Philistines that they were.
“But I’m glad to see you at least are a woman of fine taste.”
She poured the tea quickly and handed the cup and saucer to her guest.
“Perhaps it comes from being exposed to all the delights London has to offer?”
Lavinia accepted the tea, with a small, “Thank you”, and sat back, stirring it and pursing her lips, blew on it to cool it. She took a sip, not just to be polite, she was thirsty. It burnt her lips and tongue, and she winced slightly before clenching her teeth and proceeding to cool it further.
“Oh, yes, when I had the opportunity,” Lavinia informed her host, and at the raised eyebrow of Lady Rosamund, she hastily added, “Papa has never much cared for decorating the house, I could only ever admire such,” she swallowed, “tasteful furnishings and decorations in everyday life when I paid calls to ladies.”
Lavinia looked down at her tea.
She did not mention that, even as her father an important and well-off solicitor, she had been met with indifference and even hostility from the other ‘ladies’ who knew she was different from them, it was obvious in her appearance and manner, her nature. She was never treated with disdain by the opposite sex, however. But, being Lavinia, she had somewhat shied from any kind of contact with men. After knowing Richard Carlisle, it wasn’t much of a surprise. But when she met Matthew… that had been different, significantly so. And now, significantly, everything was different again.
She felt the belittling and curious gaze of Lady Rosamund and tried her best not to look up, stirring her tea and biting down on her slightly burnt lip, uneasy.
(OOC: Sorry it took so long darling, for some reason it wasn’t coming to me! Shall we pause for a bit till the end of hotel AU?)
“Well we ladies do like our visitors you know?”
Rosamund’s sharp eyes watched the girl sip the tea and recoil and instinctively she moved her hand towards the milk jug, offering it as a means of cooling, before thinking better of it. It was an altogether too motherly gesture and the very last thing she wanted to be perceived as was motherly; even Auntly would be odd with this girl given the elephant in the room that was not going away quite as easily as Rosamund had hoped it might.
Well, they couldn’t go on like this! She simply refused to sit silently, exchanging meaningless pleasantries with Miss Swire, when they both knew why the girl was in London and not at Downton where she should be. It wasn’t that Rosamund hated the thought of a middle-class girl sitting her Mama’s seat but this one was altogether too nice to quite take the mantle. She reminded her…Rosamund smiled softly when, quite suddenly, she realised that the bashfulness, tempered with intelligence and fragile beauty reminded her of nothing else but Cora when she was newly arrived from America. She hadn’t quite met one’s eye and cut herself off more than once when she thought she’d said the wrong thing.
With her newfound observation she looked kinder upon the girl and extended her hand to briefly squeeze Lavinia’s. Rosamund prided herself on not being quite as rigid as the inhabitants of her childhood home and so she thought nothing of the overfamiliarity of the gesture that might have so annoyed her Mother.
“Truthfully my dear, how have you been? After Matthew was injured I received a phonecall telling me just that and a week later I had a letter from Mary saying you had gone away. No one tells me anything of course, but I’m quite sure I can guess.”
