“Oh, my lady, what were you thinking?” cried Vanessa. “Did that boy behave inappropriately?”
“You must be freezing!” Ada tossed a heavier cloak over my shoulders.
“Let me brush the dirt from your hem,” said Thea.
“No, no,” I said to that last one. “I’m fine. How did you find me?”
They all began talking over one another, but it basically came down to their noticing my disappearance and questioning the boy at our town house’s gate and pretty much every person I’d passed in my outing. I’d apparently made an impression.
“Your grandmother doesn’t know yet,” said Vanessa, urging me forward. She was the cleverest of them. “Let’s get back quickly.”
Before I stepped away, I looked back at the angel, back at my parents’ names. “Bad things are always going to happen,” my father had told me in his last year. “There’s no way to avoid that. Our control comes in how we face them. Do we let them crush us, making us despondent? Do we face them unflinchingly and endure the pain? Do we outsmart them?” I’d asked him what it meant to outsmart a bad thing. “You’ll know when the time comes. And when it does, you need to act quickly.”
The maids couldn’t stop fussing over me, even on the carriage ride home. “My lady, if you’d wanted to go, you should have just let us arrange a proper visit with a priest,” Thea said.
“I wasn’t thinking,” I murmured. I wasn’t about to elaborate on how the letter from Lady Dorothy had nearly given me a nervous breakdown. “I wanted the air. I decided I’d just walk over on my own.”
They stared at me incredulously. “You can’t do that,” said Ada. “You can’t do that on your own. You . . . you can’t do anything on your own.”
“Why not?” I snapped, feeling only a little bad when she flinched. “I’m a peeress of the realm. My family name commands respect everywhere. So why shouldn’t I be free to move everywhere? To choose to do whatever I want?”
None of them spoke right away, and I wasn’t surprised that it was Vanessa who finally did: “Because you’re the Countess of Rothford. Someone with a name like that can’t move among the nameless. And when it comes to who you are, my lady . . . well, that’s something we never have a choice in.”
Chapter 2
I realized then that I was taking the first approach to this “bad thing” with Lionel: I was letting it crush me. And so, I decided then and there that I would choose the nobler, unflinching approach. I would endure the pain.
In the following weeks, I smiled and made my quips and acted as though our household wasn’t being torn apart. While the servants worked and worried about their futures, I calmly went about tasks that were appropriate to young noblewomen, painting pictures and planning my wedding attire. When callers came to wish us well, I sat with them and feigned excitement. More than once, I heard the arrangement referred to as a “smart match.” It reminded me of when I was six, when my mother and I had watched Princess Margrete’s wedding procession go by.
The princess had sat in a carriage, waving and stiffly smiling as she held hands with a Lorandian duke she’d only met the week before.
“She looks a little green,” I’d said.
“Nonsense. And if you’re lucky,” my mother had told me, “you’ll make a smart match like that.”
Would my mother have allowed this if she were still alive? Would this have turned out differently? Probably. A lot of things would’ve turned out differently if my parents were still alive.
“My lady?”
I looked up from the canvas I’d been painting, a field of purple and pink poppies copied from one of the great masters in the National Gallery. A page stood in front of me. From the tone of his voice, I could tell this wasn’t the first time he’d spoken to me.
“Yes?” I asked. The word came out a bit more harshly than I’d intended. I’d had an argument with Grandmama this morning about the dismissal of my favorite cook, and it still bothered me.
He bowed, relieved at finally being acknowledged. “There’s a gentleman caller here. He’s, um, making Ada cry.”
I blinked, wondering if I’d misheard. “I’m sorry, what?”
Thea and Vanessa sat beside me, busy with sewing. They looked up from their work, equally perplexed.
The page shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t really understand it myself, my lady. It’s some sort of meeting arranged by Lady Branson. I think she was supposed to be here to supervise but was delayed by business. I settled them into the west drawing room, and when I returned to check on them, Ada was quite hysterical. I thought you would want to know.”
“Yes, certainly.”
And here I’d thought this would be a boring day.
The other ladies started to rise when I did, but I urged them to sit down. As I followed the page back into the house, I asked, “Do you have any idea what this so-called gentleman is here for?”