“And the fire in the morning room—”
“The draft. Yes. I shall see to it.”
Lady Ashwood’s eyes narrowed. There was something in Cecilia’s tone—not quite impertinent, nothing that might be openly reproved, but a certain flatness that suggested she had heard these instructions before. Which, indeed, she had. Daily. For five years.
“You seem tired, Cecilia,” Lady Ashwood observed, in a manner that contrived to make concern sound like accusation. “Perhaps you are not sleeping well. An excess of sleep may be quite as debilitating as a deficiency, you know. The physician says—”
“I am quite well, Aunt. Merely eager to begin my tasks.”
It was the proper reply—industrious, grateful, entirely devoid of personality. Lady Ashwood accepted it with a gracious nod, as though Cecilia’s eagerness to serve were a gift rather than a strategy for survival.
“Very good. You may be excused.”
Cecilia rose, dropped a small curtsey—neither too formal nor too familiar—and made her escape.
***
The morning room was cold.
This was not the fault of the draft—which was largely imaginary—but of the simple fact that coal cost money, and Thornfield’s finances were no longer what they had been. Cecilia knew this better than anyone: she was the one who balanced the household accounts, who bargained with tradesmen, who performed the quiet economies that kept the family afloat without obliging them to acknowledge they were economising at all.
She stood now at the window, gazing out upon the October garden with its fading blooms and yellowing leaves. This view had been her mother’s favourite. Eleanor Ashwood had spent countless hours in this very room—reading, embroidering, teaching a small Cecilia the names of the plants visible from this precise angle.
That is a late-blooming rose, my darling. See how it persists, even as the others fade? Some things are stronger for having to fight for their place in the world.
Cecilia touched the chill glass. Her mother had been gone ten years now, though it seemed at once longer and shorter. Longer, because the grief had settled into a constant undertone beneath all she did; shorter, because some mornings she still woke expecting to hear her mother’s voice calling her to breakfast.
Her father had never recovered from Mama’s death. Sir Edmund Ashwood had been a gentle man—scholarly, impractical, more devoted to his books than to the mundane business of estates and entails. He had loved his wife with adevotion that left no room for prudence, and when she died, some essential part of him had died with her.
Cecilia had been twelve. She had become, overnight, the manager of a household whose master was present in body but absent in spirit. She had learned to consult with the steward, to review the accounts, to make decisions that should have been far beyond her years. She had done it all without complaint, because her father needed her, because someone had to, because useful people were not abandoned.
And then her father had died too, five years ago, and she had discovered exactly how much her usefulness was worth.
Nothing. Usefulness required context—and hers had been swept away by the inexorable tide of an entail that cared nothing for grief or competence or the simple fact that she had been raised as the daughter of this house.
Horace Ashwood inherited everything. Horace—who had visited Thornfield perhaps three times in Cecilia’s entire childhood. Horace—who had never troubled to learn the tenants’ names, the rhythm of the harvest, or any of the thousand small details that kept an estate alive. Horace—whose wife had taken one look at Cecilia, at her education, her capability, her quiet sorrow, and seen an opportunity rather than a person.
“Family takes care of family,” Lady Ashwood had declared, in those early weeks when Cecilia’s future hung in the air like smoke. “We cannot possibly turn her out. What would people say?”
What people would say, Cecilia soon understood, mattered enormously to Lady Ashwood. Appearance was everything—the appearance of generosity, of family feeling, of benevolence. The reality beneath it was of considerably less importance.
And thus, Cecilia had stayed. She moved from her childhood chamber to a small room on the upper floor, once occupied bya particularly senior housemaid. She packed away her pretty dresses—they were too fine for her new station, too conspicuous, too sharp a reminder of what she had been—and adopted the plain greys and browns of a woman meant to be useful rather than noticed.
She had learned, in those five years, to want nothing.
Wanting was dangerous. Wanting led to hope; hope to disappointment; and disappointment was a luxury she could not afford. She had a roof above her head, food enough, a place to exist that was not the street or the uncertain charity of distant relations who had never met her. This was enough. It must be enough.
Some things are stronger for having to fight for their place in the world.
Cecilia turned from the window and set about arranging the morning room for the Hendersons’ visit.
***
The letter from Lady Marchmont, when Cecilia finally read it, proved rather more interesting than the usual social correspondence.
She sat in her uncle’s study—a room she used more than he did, though she was always careful never to sit in his chair or leave any trace of her presence—and smoothed the heavy paper with its elaborate crest. Lady Marchmont was a distant connection of Lady Ashwood’s, a wealthy widow whose estate in Kent was rumoured to be magnificent, and whose social influence was rumoured to be greater still.
My dear Lady Ashwood, the letter began, in a hand that suggested dictation rather than any personal acquaintance with a pen,I write to extend an invitation that I hope you will find agreeable...
