Victoria Ashford did not interview guests. She conducted weather systems.
Ivy felt the change the moment she crossed the terrace on Saturday morning: conversations thinned, spines straightened, and the matriarch of the Ashford dynasty turned from the croquet lawn like a lighthouse locating a ship.
"So," said Victoria. "The stranger my son toasted."
"The same," Ivy said pleasantly.
"You're from Ohio."
"Everybody is from somewhere less interesting than here, Mrs. Ashford."
A pause. The sort of pause designed to make young women fill it with their entire biography. Ivy sipped her coffee and let the silence do its work. First rule of the inquisition: never answer the question they're asking. Answer the question underneath it.
"Your family," Victoria tried again, "is in...?"
"Textiles. My great-grandmother ran a dressmaking house in Columbus. My mother refuses to throw away a single button from it." Ivy smiled at the middle distance, as if at a fond memory. "We're sentimental about cloth. It's terribly unfashionable."
It was all true. That was the art of it. Every sentence a guard could check would check out. The dressmaking house had existed — one room, nine years, a bankruptcy. "Ran a house" was not a lie if you didn't mention the size of the house.
Victoria studied her the way one studies an antique believed to be forged but beautiful anyway.
"Play me a game of croquet," she said.
They played. Ivy lost — carefully, by two points, after leading for most of it. You never beat the matriarch before lunch. But she routed her ball through three wickets from an impossible angle in the fourth turn, and Victoria's eyebrows rose a quarter inch, which Ivy had already learned was the local equivalent of a standing ovation.
"You play like someone who has read about the game," Victoria said at the end.
"I read about everything I intend to have, Mrs. Ashford."
The old woman's mouth twitched — down, at first, then, very briefly, up. "Lunch is at one. Sit across from my son. Not next to him. Let the household earn its keep."
That night, Ivy found the rival waiting outside her room: Camilla Whitmore-Pierce, Julian's on-and-off of six years, gorgeous the way a headline is gorgeous, holding two glasses of champagne and the expression of a woman who had read Ivy's file before Ivy wrote it.
"To new friends," Camilla said, handing her a glass.
"To new friends," Ivy agreed.
They drank. Camilla's eyes flicked to the glass, then to Ivy's mouth, one poetess to another. Both women smiled, and understood, and finished the champagne anyway.
Poison would be beneath us both, darling, Ivy thought, setting down her flute. We'll be using reputations instead. So much harder to detect.
She unpacked her dress for Sunday brunch. Somewhere downstairs, Julian was telling his grandmother about the freckled woman who read books, and the grandmother — who owned forty-one percent of everything — was listening.