Chapter One
“Cecilia, the chocolate is bitter again.”
The words floated down the breakfast table with the weary inevitability of sunrise, and Cecilia Ashwood—who had prepared the chocolate exactly as she had prepared it every morning for the past five years, which was to say exactly as her Aunt Lavinia demanded it—set down her own cup of rapidly cooling tea and summoned a patient smile.
“I shall speak to Cook directly, Aunt.”
“I cannot fathom why it must prove so difficult.” Lady Ashwood pressed a hand to her temple, as though the offending chocolate had conspired to ruin her morning single-handedly. “One would think, after all this time, that the matter could be managed without constant supervision.”
One would think, Cecilia agreed silently,that after five years of preparing chocolate to your exacting specifications, I might be trusted to know the recipe. And yet.
“Perhaps a trifle more sugar?” she suggested instead. “The weather has turned cold; sweet things are ever more welcome in such weather.”
“Do not patronise me, Cecilia. I know perfectly well what I taste.” Lady Ashwood took another sip, grimaced with theatrical suffering, and pushed the cup away. “But I suppose it must do. I have not the strength to quarrel this morning. My nerves are quite shattered.”
Cecilia made a sympathetic sound. Her aunt’s nerves existed in a state of perpetual near-collapse, threatened by everything from unexpected callers to the wrong shade of ribbon upon a bonnet. It was remarkable, really, how much devastation a nervous system might endure while still permitting its owner to deliver a steady stream of complaints.
“Georgiana, sit up straight,” Lady Ashwood continued, her attention shifting to her elder daughter, who lounged over her toast with the elegant indifference of a young woman perfectly aware of her own prettiness and wholly unwilling to exert herself before noon. “No gentleman desires a wife who cannot maintain proper posture.”
“There are no gentlemen present, Mama,” Georgiana replied, not unreasonably.
“There might be. One never knows when a gentleman might call.”
“At half past eight in the morning? In Hertfordshire?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
Cecilia rather doubted that—Hertfordshire lanes were notably devoid of eligible gentlemen making dawn social calls—but she kept the observation to herself. Five years in this household had taught her the value of strategic silence. Speech invited attention; attention invited criticism; criticism invariably concluded with the assignment of some additional task to prove her usefulness.
Usefulness was Cecilia’s sole currency. It was the coin by which she purchased her place at this table, her small room on the upper floor, her continued existence within the walls of what had once been her home.
Thornfield. The very name still caught in her chest, a small sharp hook of grief. She had been born in this house, had taken her first steps along its corridors, had pressed flowers from its gardens into books that now belonged to someone else. The entail had seen to that—the legal contrivance by which her father’s modest estate had passed, upon his death, to his nearest male relation, leaving Cecilia with nothing but her education, her mother’s pearls, and the dubious charity of cousins she had scarcely known existed.
“Cecilia.” Her uncle’s voice emerged from behind his newspaper. Horace Ashwood was a man of middling height, middling intelligence, and middling ambition—qualities that might have rendered him perfectly pleasant, had they not been coupled with a profound reluctance ever to contradict his wife. “There is a letter here from Lady Marchmont. It requires a response. My handwriting is not what it was.”
Your handwriting was never what it was, Cecilia thought, but she rose obediently. “Of course, Uncle. I shall attend to it directly after breakfast.”
“See that you do. The woman is a fearsome correspondent. She will notice if her letter goes unanswered.”
Cecilia did not ask about its contents. She would discover them soon enough, when she sat down to compose a reply that would bear her uncle’s signature but none of his words. This, too, formed part of her usefulness: the ability to write a coherent letter, to keep accounts from descending into chaos, to smooth the rough edges of a household which had somehow acquired a baronet’s daughter without acquiring any corresponding notion of how she ought to be treated.
She was not a servant. Servants were paid.
She was not a guest. Guests were welcomed.
She was something between—present yet unacknowledged, necessary yet unvalued, existing in the margins of a family portrait from which she had been neatly cropped.
Breakfast proceeded in its customary fashion. Dorothea, the younger daughter, ate her eggs in anxious silence, casting the occasional furtive glance at Cecilia that might have signified guilt—or merely indigestion. Georgiana studied her reflection in the back of a spoon and appeared satisfied. Lady Ashwood catalogued her ailments—a headache threatening, her joints aching with the change in weather, a general malaise that would certainly require rest—while simultaneously issuing instructionsregarding dinner, the linen-cupboard, and the draft in the morning room which must be addressed immediately.
All of these instructions, Cecilia noted, were directed at her.
“The Hendersons are calling this afternoon,” Lady Ashwood announced, apropos of nothing. “Georgiana, you shall wear the blue muslin. Dorothea, the yellow. Cecilia—” A pause, during which her gaze swept over Cecilia’s plain grey morning dress with eloquent disdain. “Cecilia, I believe you had better see to the arrangement of the drawing room. Fresh flowers, if any remain at this season. And pray ensure the good tea service has been properly polished.”
“Of course, Aunt.”
“And speak to Cook about luncheon. Nothing too heavy—Mrs Henderson is forever remarking upon her digestion.”
“Yes, Aunt.”
