“After the wedding, would you mind if I told Leander he spent an evening with me? Just to see the look on his face would be worth everything.”
“Of course you may. Lee has a very good sense of humor, and I’m sure he’ll enjoy the joke.”
“I somehow doubt that, but at least I’ll enjoy it.”
“Let’s go get ready. I want to wear something befitting that house, and you’ll get to wear the blue satin Worth gown.”
“I should wear my knickerbockers, but that would give it away, wouldn’t it?”
Blair followed Houston into the house, pleased by the entire arrangement. It wouldn’t be easy to impersonate Houston and that slow, lazy walk of hers, but Blair considered it a challenge and looked forward to it.
Blair started having second thoughts about the whole affair when she felt Houston tightening the corset strings. Houston didn’t have any qualms about enduring a little pain for the sake of beauty, but Blair kept thinking about how her internal organs were being reorganized by the whalebone instrument of torture. But when she put the dress on and saw herself with the exaggerated hourglass figure like Houston’s, she wasn’t displeased at all.
Houston watched her sister in the mirror. “Now you look like a woman.” She glanced down at the skirt and blouse she wore, feeling the lightly tied corset underneath. “And I feel as light as a feather.”
They paused for a moment and studied each other in the mirror. “No one will know one of us from the other,” Houston said.
“Not until we speak,” Blair answered, turning away.
“You don’t have any problems. At least as me, you can get away with not speaking.”
“And does that mean that I talk too much?” Blair shot back at her.
“It means that if Blair were quiet, we’d never get out of the house because Mother’d call a doctor.”
“Leander?” Blair asked, and they both laughed.
Later, as they were both dressed and ready to go out for the evening, Blair supposedly to spend the evening with her friend, Tia Mankin, she got to see something that few people ever saw: she saw herself as others saw her.
At first, she was so busy concentrating on trying to be Houston, imitating her walk, the way she entered a room, the way she looked at people as if from far away, that she didn’t see the way Houston was mimicking her.
Mr. Gates walked into the room and said very politely that both young women looked lovely. Houston, as Blair, leaned her head back and used her superior height to look down at the man. “I am a doctor and being a doctor is more important than being pretty. I want more out of life than just being a wife and mother.”
Blair opened her mouth to protest that she never sounded like that and that she’d never attack a man who hadn’t attacked first, but as she looked at the faces around her, she saw that no one thought what Houston had said was out of character.
She almost felt sorry for Mr. Gates when the little man’s face blew up like a fish’s and his skin turned red. Before she knew what she was doing, she stepped between her sister and the angry man. “It’s such a nice night,” she said loudly. “Blair, why don’t you and I sit in the garden until Leander comes?”
When Houston turned around, she had a look of anger and hostility on her face such as Blair had never seen before. Do I really look like that? she wondered. Do I really start most of the arguments with Mr. Gates?
She wanted to ask Houston those questions, but before they could get outside, Leander arrived to pick them up.
Blair stood back and watched Houston pretending to be her and, almost immediately, she wanted to protect him. He was courteous, smiling, polite and oh, so very good-looking. She’d never noticed before that Leander was enough to stop a heart or two. He was a serious-looking man with green eyes, a long thin nose and full lips. Black hair, overly long, scraped the collar of his coat. But what Blair was interested in wasn’t his surface good looks, but the expression in his eyes. It was as if those eyes hid secrets that he told no one.
“Houston?” he asked, bringing her back to reality. “Are you all right?”
“Of course,” she said briskly, trying to imitate her sister’s coolness.
As Leander put his hands on her waist and lifted her into the carriage, she smiled at him and he smiled back, quickly, briefly, but it warmed her and she was glad to have this time with him.
They were no more than in the carriage when Houston started on Leander.
“How do you keep peritonitis from spreading?” she asked in a hostile voice that made Blair look at her in wonder. What was she so angry about? And where had she learned about peritonitis?
“Sew both layers of the intestine together and pray,” Lee said quite sensibly, and correctly.
“Have you heard of asepsis here in Chandler yet?”
With her breath drawn in, Blair looked up at Lee to see how he’d take this question. Blair thought it was downright insulting, and she wouldn’t blame Lee if he gave Houston a piece of his mind. But Lee only glanced at Blair, winked quickly, and told Houston that the doctors in Chandler did indeed wash their hands before surgery.