“His aunt and cousin are still in half-mourning,” Annis replied. “I did not imagine they could accept.”
“This is because it is now the fashion to regard the utterances of Lord Rudyard as the proclamation of an oracle,” Lucasta said. “And to believe because he has exquisite taste in dress, he is wise in other matters.”
Selina forced a smile. “My stripedrobe d’anglaisedid make me look like a zebra, I suppose.”
Selina had begun the season as a prime catch, gracious, educated, the daughter of a distinguished officer. Then Rudyard called her a zebra. The gossips picked up the slur about her parentage—not black, not white, but something in between—and Selina dropped from favor like a coin tossed into the Thames.
“He told me my mink pelisse made me look sallow,” Annis offered.
“He informed me I was too tall to wear heeled slippers,” Minnie said. “I wish he would ask me to dance, so my heeled slippers might tread on his toe.”
Selina fussed with the lace at her sleeve. “If we are laughed at, there will be no more offers of marriage. Mama will be so disappointed.”
Despite Selina’s brave face, Lucasta knew Rudyard’s remark about her gown had cut her friend deeply. Lucasta slid an arm around the girl’s waist and squeezed.
“I am very glad to have these weeks with you all, and I expect that by the end of the season, you will each have a proposal in hand. Or several.”
Minnie shrugged. “If Gorgons they wish to call us, then Gorgons we shall be and turn any man who looks at us into stone.”
“I propose a forfeit for the first of us who accepts an offer of marriage and thereby breaks up Miss Gregoire’s Girls,” Annis suggested.
“Oh, a forfeit.” Minnie’s eyes lit. “If it is Selina, she must write up her experiments on animal surgery.”
“Oh, no, I could not presume.” Selina glanced around in alarm, though as usual no one was taking any notice of them.
“Annis has to give a lecture on astronomy and the celestial mechanisms,” Lucasta said, for the Russian girl had her head always in the heavens.
“With pleasure,” Annis said with a slow smile.
“And mine?” Minnie demanded.
“You will publish your translations, of course,” Lucasta said. “What are you working on at present?”
“A long chivalric poem in Middle High German, but it is not complete,” Minnie said. “Nevertheless, I accept. And you, Lucasta?”
Lucasta watched the dancers move in their figures. She stood in the shadow of her more confident, more accomplished friends, her role in their group undefined. The four of them had come together at Miss Gregoire’s because they felt outcasts everywhere else, in Lucasta’s case because she was an orphan, and the other girls because they were thought foreign. But instanding together against indifferent assessments of their worth, beauty, or right to belong, bonds had formed, deeper than blood.
“You shall sing,” Minnie said. “In public. For money.”
Lucasta’s heart sank like a stone in a still pool. “Great-aunt Cornelia says it is vulgar, and Aunt Pevensey agrees. I won’t be allowed.”
Annis lifted a dark brow. “The rest of us have accepted our forfeits.”
Lucasta swallowed the bitter taste in her mouth, left by the most recent row with her aunt. In the Pevensey’s rented townhouse, Lucasta was nothing but the daughter of an obscure vicar and a well-bred young woman whose family had disowned her upon her low marriage.
Vicars’ daughters were not invited to sing at courts or theaters or the finest concert halls of Europe. She was not to dream of stepping onto a wooden stage beneath glittering chandeliers and gorgeous art, nor imagine she could hold an audience in thrall with her voice alone. It was not for vicars’ daughters to lift hearts, wring tears, or transport their listeners to a place of perfect beauty, just this side of heaven.
Besides, a musical vocation demanded long study and constant practice. But Lady Pevensey would not permit lessons in London, and great Continental music masters did not linger long in Bath.
After years of spinning wild hopes, Lucasta was shut out of her great dream, just as she was shunned from the world of London’s fashionable. Forced, like now, to stand on the periphery looking in, the spectator and never the subject, her spirits as heavy as her skirts.
Forced, as she always had been, to expect little, make do with less, and be grateful for the scraps doled out to her.
She summoned a smile. She would not pity herself when there were real misfortunes in the world, and she would keep herspleen to herself, let it poison her own breast and not that of her friends.
“Very well, to sing my forfeit shall be. Though I am the least likely to be obliged to pay it.” For what suitor would see a prize in poor, plain, undistinguished Lucasta Lithwick?
“You can cheer us with some of your epigrams,” Minnie suggested. “Or the broadsheet ballads you were composing at Ranelagh Gardens.”
