One
“When will you get married?”
June blinked, and for a fleeting moment considered answering honestly:When the Thames flows backwards and the Archbishop of Canterbury elopes with his housemaid.
Instead she offered her mother a wan smile and said, “I suppose when I find a gentleman who prefers Latin verse to horseflesh and is sufficiently hard of hearing to tolerate Father’s opinions.”
Lady Vestiere gave her middle daughter a look that managed, in one sweep, to convey both disappointment and the certainty that she would, through sheer will, see June married before the season’s end. The Dowager Duchess of Wildmoore had been a force of nature in her day, and the passage of years had not diminished her gale-force meddling.
“You know very well what I mean, June. You are twenty now, and with your sisters both married to dukes?—”
“Only one duke between them,” June cut in. “May and April are married to two different men, but both cannot be dukes, else we would have the same problem with succession as Spain after the Hapsburgs?—”
“June,” said her mother, “do not talk of Spanish succession at the breakfast table.”
It was, in fact, not the breakfast table, but the drawing room of April’s newly acquired estate. The manor was host to a collection of relatives and their dependents, all gathered for April’s grand Norfolk house party.
The assembled family sprawled across the drawing room in varying states of dignity: Father snored in the corner, having learned to sleep with his eyes open after years of living with Mother; May perched elegantly by the window with her two small children, both of whom had already discovered the structural weaknesses of the new drapes; and April, radiant in both her new duchess-dom and maternal glow, presided over it all with a pitcher of cordial and an unshakeable belief in everyone’s happiness.
June, as ever, hovered at the periphery, an observer more than a participant. Her older sisters orbited each other in close, affectionate conspiracy, while June played the satellite, bound by gravity but never permitted entry to the inner circle.
She made a show of sipping her cordial, which was as much cherry brandy as it was juice. It was not June’s first glass, nor, she suspected, her last. The room hummed with the sort of amiable chaos that could only arise from cousins, in-laws, and three generations of Vestieres under one roof.
The interrogation resumed before she could finish her drink.
“Your sister April married at eighteen, and May at nineteen,” said her mother. “It’s positively unseemly that?—”
“—that I have not yet been snared by the marriage mart, yes,” June said, giving a tight smile. “Perhaps my prospects would improve if I began attending morning prayers with the local vicar. I hear he is in desperate need of a new bell-ringer.”
Her father coughed, which June knew to be his method of stifling laughter. Her mother glared at him.
“What I mean to say,” Lady Vestiere pressed on, “is that a young lady’s value does not increase with age. You are not cheese.”
“On the contrary,” said June, “most cheeses are infinitely improved by a few extra years.” She reached for another biscuit, holding it as both shield and sustenance.
April, who was arranging a fruit bowl with the seriousness of a military campaign, shot June a look both sympathetic and apologetic. “Mama only worries you’ll be left behind, Junebug,” she said, using the childhood nickname that June had spenta lifetime trying to eradicate. “You are so clever, sometimes it terrifies people.”
“That is precisely what terrifies me,” said Lady Vestiere, hands folded in her lap. “You say things that make people nervous.”
“Then I shall endeavor to say nothing for the rest of the day,” June replied. “I suspect the effect will be revolutionary.”
At this, May laughed. “You might as well ask the sun to stop rising.”
“I have often wished it would,” June muttered, “if only to spare us these interminable conversations.”
She drained the rest of her cordial and reached for a second glass. The warmth crept up her cheeks, making the world a little fuzzier, the air a little easier to breathe.
The party that night was to be a grand affair, the sort of event where fortunes were made and destroyed by a misplaced word or a poorly chosen dance partner. June had spent the better part of the afternoon enduring the ministrations of April’s lady’s maid, who regarded June’s hair as a personal affront. By the time she emerged in her borrowed dress—a shade of green she suspected had never occurred in nature—her scalp was raw and her ears ached from the onslaught of pearl pins.
She lingered at the edge of the ballroom, as was her custom. The men ignored her, and the women avoided her, unless itwas to ask about her sisters or to borrow a handkerchief. She watched April dance with her husband, and May laugh with Logan Blackmore, her own husband, and felt a curious ache in her chest. She was not jealous, not exactly—she loved her sisters, and envied them nothing but their certainty.
It was June’s third glass of punch that convinced her she needed air, or perhaps just an excuse to remove herself from the crowd before her mother marshaled a parade of eligible bachelors in her direction.
She slipped out a side door, the hallway beyond blissfully empty. She let her feet wander, unmoored from purpose, and found herself in the west wing, where the guest rooms were housed. The house was vast, and the hallway stretched on forever, lined with marble busts and the sort of family portraits that seemed to multiply in the darkness.
June’s thoughts swirled with the remnants of old humiliations: her girlhood infatuation, the overheard dismissal, the relentless sense that she was fundamentallywrongfor the world in which she lived. She had tried, truly, to care about the things her mother insisted she must. But after years of coming second to sisters who shone like stars, June had realized it was far safer to become a shadow.
Why would anyone willingly subject themselves to the matrimonial gauntlet?Why should I want it? So I can end up like one of those portraits—perfect on the outside, empty inside?She laughed, but the sound echoed a little too loudly, and she clapped a hand over her mouth.
