“Which is whatbelle-méreintends, I gather. If she parades you about it should seem she is flaunting her triumph, and that would be?—”
“So very vulgar,” Lucasta said along with her. They shared a smile, which on Cici’s side turned sly.
“But if she hides you, that will only increase the speculation. Mark you, we will visit half a dozen places, and at each we will be swamped with questions regarding you.”
“With all eyes on you,” Lucasta realized. “How cunning.”
“She did not make herself a baron’s wife by her sweet nature, that is certain.” Cici rose, then paused, her gaze softening as it rested on her cousin.
“All these entertainments are quite wearying for you, aren’t they, my dear? Miss Gregoire’s seems a sober, gentle sort of place.”
Lucasta selected another piece, wrestling with the flash of acute longing for her school, her home. At Miss Gregoire’s she spent her days in quiet industry, immersed in the sciences and music and art and books, and her evenings with the other teachers and their brightest students engaged in reading, painting, dancing, and discussing the latest publications on philosophy or travel.
Their evenings out consisted of a lecture, a concert, or a ball in the Bath Assembly Rooms, which were known for being sodecorous that they ended at ten of the clock. Such a life would seem dull to the Cicis and the Rudyards of the world, whose entertainments were loud, bright, and costly.
No wonder Lucasta and her friends lacked that ephemeral quality calledton. He was right to call them the Gorgons. She would never be accepted among the great, and it was nonsense to try.
Cici swept away, tiny nose in the air like a sparrow sniffing out crumbs. Lucasta hoped with all her heart that Cici would enjoy her Season and its pleasures and find an advantageous marriage at the end of it. She hoped that her father, with all his calculation of advantages, would at least take Cici’s wishes into account.
Lucasta pulled out a stormy piece by Mozart that might relieve some of her tempestuous feelings. She could only expect a future of misery if she were given to a man like Trevor Pevensey. The prospect of becoming Lady Pevensey would cost her everything. Unable by law to possess her own property or direct her own finances, she would live on whatever her husband allowed her, and whatever credit would be extended to them by resentful tradesmen.
Her husband would dictate where she lived and whom she associated with. He would have complete control over their children. There was no custom and no law to compel a man to show fidelity or respect to his wife. He could gamble, drink, pursue other women, run the Pevensey estate into ruin and its tenants into starvation, and if the other young men of his birth and station that Lucasta had met were any pattern, that is exactly what he would do. She could not vow to honor and obey a man such as that.
Perhaps this was why Aunt Pevensey had prevented Lucasta from taking music lessons. If she had any hopes at all of supporting herself on the stage, performing at courts andconcert halls, then she might be in a position to decline Trevor Pevensey’s oh-so-generous offer for her hand.
She must deny him at any rate. She only needed to figure out how to do so without tying the noose around her own neck.
Some hours later,immersed in dolorous communication with Handel, Lucasta didn’t hear the knocker and was only warned by a lively tread on the stairs moments before the door to the music room flew open.
“He called you clever,” Selina announced, a grim set to her mouth. She wore a sumptuous evening gown of French satin in a deep silver hue.
“He called you interesting.” Annis tucked Lucasta’s violin beneath her chin and tuned it with a few brisk notes.
“He called youfascinating.” Minnie went to the harp and strummed a chord. Minnie’srobe à la francaisewasa pale purple silk brocade with yellow and orange flowers swarming the bodice and skirts. Smart Jeremy would certainly have something to say about that eye-watering pattern.
“Aunt told me I am not at home to callers,” Lucasta warned. “I am in disgrace.”
Annis shook back the cascade of lace and ruffles at the sleeves of her damask robe, a shimmering pale blue. “We are family, and so I told Possett when we climbed over him to get in. Don’t you want to attend the Skylar rout? Rudyard will be there.”
An odd jolt went through Lucasta at the thought, as if her friend had struck a string that sounded both dissonant and resonant at the same time. That momentary press of their bodies had been an accident, a stumble.
But there was that other odd moment when it felt he was drawing her to him, trying to convince her of something. Unlike other men who wore too much powder or cologne, Rudyard had a light, clean smell like pine and the outdoors, and that marvelous liquid voice. A thrill went through her again.
“I most emphatically do not want to see him,” Lucasta said. “He overheard my epigrams and challenged me about it. Then he gave Clara Bellwether charge to make fun of me.”
“Or make something else,” Minne remarked. “He said Miss Thomasina Brentleigh possessed elegance of mind and manner, and now the Earl of Avon is paying her his addresses, and she is nothing but a squire’s daughter from Shropshire.”
“Did he also observe that Mina has the most brilliant mathematical mind ever seen at Miss Gregoire’s? The man is nothing but a narrow-minded peddler of trumpery. He called me a Medusa, which I am sure Lady Clara has also taken pains to mention.”
“Then we ought to run him to ground, so you might turn him to stone.” Minnie plucked out a tune on the harp.
“Is he the reason you are mewed up here like Rapunzel in her tower?” Annis played back Minnie’s impromptu melody, then gestured with her bow toward Lucasta’s worn day gown and old apron.
Lucasta slumped on the stool. “I learned this morning why my aunt brought me here for the Season.”
Selina sat on the stool beside Lucasta, peering into her face. “Not for Cici?”
Lucasta shook her head. “The baron seems to believe that I will be heir to my great-aunt Cornelia’s estate. And that makes me, therefore, a suitable bride for Trevor Pevensey.”
