Evelyn smiled. “Oh, but I have the perfect solution to that. I do not wish to marry. At all.”
For a moment, her mother only stared. Then, with a gasp, she shot to her feet as if stung. “Do not be absurd!”
Evelyn arched a brow. “I’m never absurd before tea.”
“Do not jest with me!” Her mother’s voice cracked, and she began to pace as her skirts rustled furiously. “You cannot mean it. You cannot truly… I mean, Evelyn, it is unnatural. What would people say? What would become of you?”
“I should think,” Evelyn said, returning to her embroidery hoop with infuriating composure, “that people will say I am a spinster and be done with it. They are already saying it, no doubt, in much less charming words.”
“Spinster?” Lady Brimwood repeated the word like it were an illness. “You would choose such a thing? To grow old alone, without a husband’s name or children of your own? To live in the margins of other people’s households like some… some governess or maiden aunt?”
“Better an honest maiden aunt than a wife with an aching soul,” Evelyn said lightly, adjusting a stitch. “And who says I’ll be anyone’s charity case? I have my own plans.”
“Plans?” Her mother’s eyes flashed. “Embroidery and stubbornness are not plans!”
Evelyn laughed, and it nearly drove her mother to collapse onto the nearest ottoman.
“Mama, I adore you, but truly, listen to yourself. You speak as if unmarried women vanish into fog the moment they reach five-and-twenty. I am not declaring myself a nun. I shall have friends, and a garden and a room with good light. I shall readwhat I like, write what I like, and if I’m very lucky, scandalize at least two neighbors a year. Doesn’t that sound lovely?”
“It sounds mad,” Lady Brimwood cried. “You are still young, Evelyn! You could have so much… you could still marry well!”
“Well, I could also still fall into the duck pond and catch influenza, but we don’t plan aroundmaybes, do we?”
Lady Brimwood made a sound between a sigh and a growl. “Do not make sport of this, Evelyn. You are twenty years old. The season has come and gonetwicesince?—”
“Yes, yes,” Evelyn interrupted, snipping a thread with delicate precision. “Since my sister’s dramatic departure from civility and my own ruinous encounter with the Viscount of Forth. I remember it perfectly, thank you. A shining chapter in the Ellory family ledger.”
Lady Brimwood stared at her daughter across the drawing room, breathing hard. Her hands trembled in her lap until, all at once, they stilled.
And then, her voice came, very quietly. “Do you know why I want this marriage for you, Evelyn?”
Evelyn didn’t look up. She was carefully threading a new needle, her lips pursed in concentration, too calm by half.
Her mother’s voice didn’t only rise, it sharpened. “Because I have not seen your sister since the day she ran off to Gretna Green.”
Eleanor’s needle paused mid-air.
“She writes,” Lady Brimwood went on louder now, each word spat as though it burned her tongue. “But she will not come home. She will not visit. She will not so much as pass through London for fear of your scorn and your silence. Because you made it clear you would not forgive her.”
Evelyn looked up slowly. Her hands lowered. Her face had gone pale, the color draining from her so fast it left only steel behind.
“That is not my doing,” she replied in a voice flat and cold. “She ran off with the man who was courtingme. And you would now have me clap and curtsy and call it love?”
“She does love him!” Lady Brimwood cried. “And you… what did you have with him, truly? A few weeks of compliments and dances? He never asked for your hand. He never even wrote.”
Evelyn stood abruptly, the embroidery hoop slipping from her lap and landing on the rug with a dullthud.
“He never wrote,” she echoed, and her voice cracked just for a moment before she caught it again. “No. He never wrote because he was too busy stealing my sister in the dead of night.”
“She was the one with no prospects,” her mother shouted. “She was the one fading in the drawing room, season after season, while you basked in attention and suitors and admiration. And now you have the audacity to act as if you were the one betrayed.”
“Iwasbetrayed,” Evelyn said.
There was a horrible silence.
Lady Brimwood was still trembling when she found her words. “Well, it is time you put your feelings aside. The world does not revolve around your heartbreak, Evelyn.”
Evelyn frowned. “You mistake my heartbreak with leftover affection for the Viscount, but it has never been about him, Mama. The sole cause of my heartbreak is Matilda’s doing.”
