"Well." My smile strengthened. "I do expect you to make that first marriage, Pearl. Yours is the ruthless beauty."
She lowered her lashes in a display of modesty that no one who knew her would believe, then brought her gaze to Father again. "I need at least a month at the Noble to make a marriage, Father. Even I can't do it from the Crossroads."
He looked at her and, though I could see it was against his better judgment, bowed his head. That moment was the first I truly realized my father could not tell his daughters—and perhaps his sons—no. We had always teased him about it, but I had never fully believed it, and I did not then understand the price we would all pay for his generosity.
We spent less than a day at our neighbors', and yet the retreat to the Noble came as a relief. Maman joined us, elegant with fragility as Father escorted her from the neighbors' house to the hired coach. I could not begrudge the neighbors for not wanting us, all still stinking of smoke and ash, in their own coach; it would be difficult enough for their servants to air feather mattresses and scrub the smell out of bedclothes. Should it settle into the leather of their carriage, they would carry it with them for months. I did, for the first time in my pampered life, worry a little about the expense, but that was beyond my purview, and if it did not fall out of my head, neither did it keep me from sleeping, as the days went by.
The first day we luxuriated in baths, each of us girls and father having clean, hot water poured for us, because the filth of soot and smoke blackened the tub so badly with Father's bath that we could not be expected to get clean without new water. The boys had to share a bath, but even they were glad to be rid of the smoke scent, and exhaustion claimed us all as its own that night.
In the morning we were visited by a dressmaker beside herself with concern over our displaced state. We girls received half a dozen new dresses each, with cunning overlays and wraps in different colors that could be switched around to make our wardrobes look thrice the size they were. Maman had three gowns of her own, and Papa two suits; the boys made do with a jacket apiece and two sets of new trousers, tights, blouses, and shoes, the last of which were the quickest in coming, as the cobbler had pre-cut soles ready for the stitching, and we all needed shoes badly.
Most of our servants had been let go, for we had nowhere to house them and no work for a groundskeeper or cook even if we could pay them. Father had his manservant, who helped with the boys, and we four women shared a lady's maid who fussed us into our new gowns and did our hair and made us presentable to the world. Within a week of our house burning, we were comfortable enough at the Noble, taking two rooms for sleeping and a third as our public room, that we might have visitors without being exposed to all the city who came by.
And all the city did come by: there was nothing as good as a tragedy to rile peoples' interests. It would have been, by gossips' estimations, vastly superior if someone had died, but there was a breathless interest in us having all survived, as well. Maman had not yet recovered from the shock of it all and played the role of invalid well, while Opal, the gentlest daughter, cared for her in a way that made other mamas imagine she might care well for their own darling sons and grandchildren.
Pearl proved magnificent in adversity, not by denying her aloofness but by playing to it: she sat in the window of our salon, looking shockingly dramatic as she gazed over the city. I didn't believe she had actually lost weight, but rather applied some subtle color to her cheekbones, making them all the more extraordinary. From the street she looked like a princess trapped in a tower. Our first visitors were Maman's closest friends, who went away to witter about Opal's kindness and Pearl's luminescent beauty. (I, being only seventeen, was largely expected to sit quietly, be useful, and eventually take advantage of my older sisters' good marriages.) The words deathly pale were heard on the wind, and suitors who had once been spurned now returned to see if the city's legendary beauty was, indeed, at death's door.
"Of course not," Pearl spat bitterly, and turned her face from them with the most delicate tremble, giving the lie—or at least an impression of the lie—to her words.
One of them proposed to her immediately.
Pearl, with more dignity and unspoken wrath than I would be able to conjure in a lifetime, stood and gazed at this unfortunate with a loathing she might usually reserve for a slime eel, or a fungus. "I suppose you ask so that you might have only a little time to put up with me, and a very long time indeed to fondle my fortune. I assure you, sir, I am not that desperate."
She swept from the room at the end of this speech, glancing back only once. But instead of the scathing glance I expected from her, I saw desperation instead. Desperation, vulnerability, hope, trust, and then those emotions were shuttered so fully that I thought I imagined that they had been there at all.
But then I saw the look in her suitors' eyes, and knew that somehow my arrogant sister had convinced them that her coldness was only for show, that she was dying, that she was terrified, and that she would do anything for a show of true passion in her final days.
One of the youths slapped Rafe, who had proposed, along the back of the head, half in jest and in all seriousness. "What were you thinking, man, proposing in front of her entire family? What did you expect her to say?"
Rafe, who was reasonably handsome and extremely wealthy, proved to have an excellent, if sheepish, smile. "She's Pearl Gryce, mate. I expected her to say no. She did before." His gaze lingered on the door Pearl had escaped through, though, before he turned to Father and offered a bow. "May I call again, sir?"
Father, whose eyes had bugged in near apoplexy at Rafe's rejection, made an agreeably non-committal grunt that earned a smile and a bow from Rafe, who then herded his comrades out of our salon to the noisiness of the street. I glanced out from behind the curtain and saw the other youths leaping on Rafe, razzing him and ruffling his hair, but he seemed to take no mind of it, smiling as his own attention returned not to the window I hid in, but the one next door. I imagined Pearl turning swiftly away from that window, a pretense of having been caught, and let the curtain fall as I chuckled. "I didn't know she acted so well."
"Why did she turn him down?" Father demanded.
Even Opal smiled, at that. "Had she accepted, he would have felt himself trapped and found a way out, even with all of us as witnesses. Now it's a chase again, and better yet, a rescue. It's all very romantic."