“That is quite enough, Dorothea. Cecilia understands her responsibilities. Do you not, Cecilia?”
Cecilia set down her spoon with deliberate precision. “Of course, Aunt. I am happy to be of service.”
It was the expected reply. The proper reply. The reply that preserved the peace, ensured her place, and demanded nothing so perilous as desire.
Yet somewhere—deep within the part of herself she had believed long since buried—something stirred. A flicker of…what? Not hope. She was far too sensible for hope. But something. A small, treacherous whisper that sounded very like:Why not me?
She silenced it at once.
There was no point in asking why not. The answer was self-evident. She possessed nothing—no fortune, no position, no family of consequence. She was a poor relation, dependent upon a charity that was not charity at all, but an arrangement of mutual convenience. The Ashwoods kept her because she was useful; she remained because she had nowhere else to go.
This was her life. This would always be her life.
She finished her soup in silence and requested leave to withdraw.
***
That night, alone in her small room on the upper floor, Cecilia permitted herself a luxury she usually avoided: memory.
She opened the wooden box that held her mother’s pearls—the only jewellery she had been allowed to keep, too modest to tempt anyone’s greed—and let them spill across her palm. They were beautiful in their simplicity, warm against her skin, each pearl perfectly matched to the next.
Her mother had worn those pearls on her wedding day. Cecilia had seen the portrait—still hanging in the drawing room—of Eleanor Ashwood in white silk, pearls at her throat and joy in her eyes. The portrait had not been removed when the house changed hands; Cecilia supposed it had never occurred to anyone to object. And so her mother remained, preserved in oil and happiness, gazing serenely down upon a household that had forgotten her daughter existed.
“I wish you had seen me at my first dance, Mama,” Cecilia whispered into the quiet. “You would have worn these pearls. You would have stood beside Father and smiled, and afterwards you would have told me you were proud and that someday, I would make some fortunate man an excellent wife.”
Somedayhad become a word Cecilia no longer permitted herself.
She clasped the pearls about her own neck—only for a moment, only to feel their weight—and studied her reflection in the small mirror by candlelight. The face that looked back was pleasant enough, she supposed. Not beautiful like Georgiana—whose golden curls and blue eyes might have been designed by an artist commissioned to depict English girlhood at its most charming—but not plain either. Simply…ordinary. Unremarkable. The sort of face that slipped from memory the instant one looked away.
You are two-and-twenty,she told her reflection.In a few years, you will be firmly on the shelf—if you are not there already. What then? Will you still be arranging flowers andpolishing tea services at forty? At fifty? Will you die in this little room, useful to the very end?
The questions had no answers. Or rather, they had answers that Cecilia preferred not to contemplate.
She removed the pearls, returned them to their box, and prepared for bed.
Tomorrow, there would be more tasks. More errands. More opportunities to prove her usefulness and bury her hopes. The machinery of survival would grind on—and she would grind with it, for the alternative was unthinkable.
But that night—for the first time in years—Cecilia Ashwood dreamed of dancing.
Chapter Two
“You are brooding again.”
Sebastian Harcourt, seventh Duke of Ashworth, did not look up from the letter he was pretending to read. “I am reviewing estate correspondence. That is an entirely different activity.”
“Is it?” His brother, Evan, settled into the chair opposite with the effortless grace of a man who had never in his life troubled himself over anything more serious than the cut of his waistcoat. “You have that expression—the one that suggests the weight of the dukedom is crushing your very soul.”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“I am never dramatic. I am merely observant.” Evan helped himself to the tea laid out on Sebastian’s desk, undeterred by the fact that it had not been offered. “Mother is here, by the way. She has brought Miss Crane—and a list of eligible young ladies that, I suspect, rivals the Domesday Book in both length and scope.”
Sebastian set down the letter—an earnest discussion of drainage in the eastern fields, and therefore far more appealing than matrimony—and regarded his brother with the flat stare of a man contemplating fratricide.
“She promised she would not do this again.”
“She promised she would not do this until after Michaelmas. Michaelmas was last week. She has, technically, kept her word.”
“‘Technical’ is a charitable way to describe an ambush.”
