The announcement came at exactly the right moment.
Isabella had been sitting between Mrs Portsmith and Lady Coleridge for the better part of an hour, nodding at the appropriate intervals, saying yes, how wonderful, and how extraordinary at the appropriate pauses, while internally calculating how many more minutes she could endure before simply standing up and walking away without explanation.
Mrs Portsmith had moved on from gossiping about her husband's relatives to gossipping about her neigbours. Lady Coleridge had begun a detailed account of her daughter's recent bout of influenza. Isabella sat between them like a woman being slowly buried alive, smiling throughout.
"And the physician said it was the dampness in the walls," Lady Coleridge was saying, "which is exactly what I told my husband three years ago, but nobody listens to me, nobody ever—"
"Ladies and gentlemen."
