She curled a hand around the large pearl at her throat and departed, but not without one final shot. “All the care I have taken with you, to be repaid in such fashion, with such ridiculous, idle gossip—I shall never escape the scandal of you, shall I?”
Cici, sparing a look of pity for Lucasta, followed at her stepmother’s command.
Lucasta stood above her chair as if she were the one turned to stone.
Her mother, she’d been told again and again, had brought a stain upon the Frotheringale family, lowering herself with amarriage to a poor man and a foreigner to boot. Lucasta, as the rest of the clan made clear to her, had a great deal to do to climb out from beneath that shadow.
And now she’d gone and made an enemy of a marquess’s heir.
As soon as the portal to her aunt’s dressing room closed, Lucasta bolted for her music room. This refuge lay at the top of the curving stairwell of the rented house, dark with the wainscoting of a previous century. It had been a neglected sitting room where a previous tenant had begun to build a library, but the baron was not much interested in books, and Lady Pevensey preferred to impress her visitors with the formal parlor on the first floor. Lucasta paced across the broad room and threw open the heavy curtains to let the drizzle of the London morning show through.
So. Her aunt had not brought her to town out of some long-forgotten impulse of affection, nor the hope that Lucasta would make friends with Cici. Lucasta had been summoned from her safe, quiet nest in Bath and thrown to the lion-filled Coliseum that was London because the baron wanted her to marry Trevor Pevensey.
She knew him only by reputation, and if the reputation were true, then the baron’s son could be relied upon to gamble his wife’s dowry away at cards, expend it on drink and mistresses, and keep himself in horses and coats for as long as the money lasted.
It was a hum to say Aunt Cornelia meant to settle anything on her grand-niece, the family’s black sheep. What she need not bequeath to Frotheringale, spiting his mother’s expectations, Aunt Cornelia meant to leave to Miss Gregoire’s school, for Miss Gregoire and Lady Evers were great friends. Aunt Cornelia had threatened to favor Lucasta in order to tease a nosy relation, and now the baron thought it a promise.
Lucasta circled to the clavichord, then ran her fingers over the harp. She would not be in this situation if her parents were still alive. That ache of grief had dulled over time but never lessened. Lucasta’s sweet, beautiful mother had doted upon her only child, but died of consumption when Lucasta was seven. Her darling, distracted father, who lived among his books and invited Lucasta into that world with him, returned to the arms of his Maker when she was fourteen.
Aunt Patience, her mother’s sister, had little to do with Lucasta, though she lived with them when Lucasta was young. Patience was sharp-tongued and short-tempered, often heard to say that the humble life of a vicar’s family was far beneath her and her sister’s birth and deserving.
Then, quite suddenly, a year or so after Lucasta’s mother died, her aunt came over all smiles, and after a flurry of shop visits, fine fabrics, and a grand wedding, her calling card became a creamy slip embossed with “The Lady Pevensey.”
Lucasta pulled out her piles of music and sorted through the sheets. With Aunt Cornelia in Bath providing her tuition at Miss Gregoire’s Academy for Girls, Lucasta had never felt an outcast, like some other unfortunates. She’d found friends who understood and loved her, who made up for any other lack. But they were moving on now to their own worlds, their own futures.
All Lucasta had left was her music.
And it seemed Aunt Pevensey meant to deny her that, too.
Cici, dressed and ready for calls, found Lucasta at the clavichord, pounding out a stormy composition by the elder Bach. Her cousin pulled up a small upholstered stool.
“I shall not informbelle-mérethat she has granted you a gift, leaving you at home to practice your music. She shows little enough kindness to you, my dear.”
“I suppose she has no reason to. Cici, I never meant—” She stopped, for in all truth, shehadwarned Rudyard away from thisbright, darling girl. “I did not mean to damage your prospects. Your plain, awkward, unfashionable cousin, an object of pity and fun. I have shadowed your sun, and that was never my intention.”
Cici tossed her chin. “I have a Season before me. There are days, no, weeks of this. It will go on and on.” She studied her cousin’s face. “I did not know they meant you for Trevor.”
Lucasta shrugged off a flicker of fear. “Surely we, the two principals, are the ones who should discuss the matter.”
But she had already decided. She might have no suitors of her own, but she would not be yoked into marriage against her will, not even to a young man of tolerable morals and agreeable character, which Trevor Pevensey, to all accounts, lacked.
But she was under her aunt and uncle’s roof for the duration of the Season, not expected back at Miss Gregoire’s until her new term began in the fall, and so obliged to demonstratesomegratitude for the pains her aunt was taking with her. Short of throwing herself on Great-Aunt Cornelia’s mercy, Lucasta had nowhere to flee in the meanwhile, and no means of supporting herself if she did.
And Cici adored her brother. Lucasta would have a fine line to walk, refusing him.
“Lord Rudyard has such address,” Cici remarked. “And so well turned-out.”
And he had caught her when she tripped in the dance. Lucasta could not seem to put that recollection from her mind. His hands warm and steady, his firm grip, the way she felt the heat of the body as he pulled her close to him through the turn. She, who most often doubled as dancing master at Miss Gregoire’s when a male instructor was unavailable, had stumbled in the allemande.
A man of such fine appearance ought to have a fine character to go with.
Lucasta turned to her cousin. “I told Lord Rudyard I did not think him a good match for you.”
Cici widened her eyes. “Oh, me neither. He terrifies me. I live in fear of offending his elegant sensibilities.”
Lucasta had done so, freely, boldly. She had trod outright over every scruple, shred of propriety, and decorum, as well as his sensibilities.
“There will be such talk today, I don’t doubt. And you will be subject to the scrutiny, all on your own.”
