One
“There is no need to be nervous,” Lady Arabella Harcourt said.
“I am not nervous,” the Honorable Margot Harcourt responded sharply. She had not meant to speak in such a way to her cousin, yet despite her claims, she was indeed feeling nervous.However, that feels like an understatement of the highest order.
“Nor is there a need to be so defensive,” Arabella continued, not letting her cousin’s sharp tone get to her. “Likely, nobody is even going to notice you. All this worry is for nothing.”
“Are you sure about that?” Margot scoffed.
“If anything, I am the one who should be ripe with nerves…” Indeed, Arabella fidgeted as she spoke, her eyes glancing every which way. They rode in a carriage together, and were it not for the fact that it moved at a steady pace, Margot wondered ifher cousin might leap from it and run while never looking back. “Perhaps this was a mistake.”
“You are the one who convinced me to come!” Margot cried.
“Only because Elizabeth convinced me first,” Arabella shot back, her fidgeting increasing so that she could not sit still. “Would it be so awful if we turned about and went home?”
“We are not going home.” Sitting beside Arabella was her older sister, Lady Elizabeth Harcourt, and she looked at the two women with the firm command that was needed for a moment like this one. “You both need this – despite how much the two of you complain. Why I bother…”
“I wasn’t complaining,” Margot said. “That was Arabella. Truly, I am excited for this evening…” She affected a smile, but it was forced, and the way her stomach twisted with dread made the smile hard to keep.
“Oh, you are not,” Arabella said.
“I am.”
“Am not!”
“Will the two of you stop!” Elizabeth cried over them. “You are both being ridiculous – and you know it.” She raised an eyebrow at each, warning them off their bickering. “For too long, you have both hidden away as if doing so might solve all yourproblems, when all it has done is exacerbate them. It is easier to gossip about a person when they are not there to defend themselves, and the way you have both behaved these last three years has made for a verdant field of unchecked rumor.” Again, she looked between them. “It is time that changes.”
Arabella shifted with discomfort but did not argue, accepting her sister’s words as the right ones.
As for Margot? She wasn’t so certain that she agreed with Elizabeth. It had only been three years, after all, and surely in that time most had forgotten about Miss Harcourt and the reason she’d fled the ton in shame.In truth, it has been so long that even I have started to forget…So why would others care to remember?
She resigned herself to the fact that it made no real difference anyhow, and her return to London’s social scene was inevitable because she could not hide forever – that was the main reason she had agreed to attend tonight’s ball. Not because Arabella had insisted. And certainly not because Elizabeth had forced the issue.
Personal issues, also, those which she tried not to think about, because then she would surely turn as nervous as her cousin was. A problem, but a necessary one that she had to overcome, so why not kill two birds with one stone?
At least this way, I will see firsthand if everyone has forgotten about me. If so, perhaps it is time that I stay. And if not… well, what’s another three years spent hiding?
“Oh, this is going to be fun!” Elizabeth clapped her hands together excitedly. “The first ball of the Season. How I have looked forward to it.”
Arabella sighed. “Just promise me that we do not have to stay all evening – you know how I hate crowds, Elizabeth.”
“Yes, yes,” her older sister waved her down. “I promise I will not force you to spend the entire evening. But we cannot return home too early either. Mother will not be happy.”
“She’s never happy,” Arabella sighed.
Elizabeth laughed. “This is also true.”
The mood in the carriage shifted, and the tension eased enough that the three young women were able to chat comfortably without the weight of nerves hanging over them. Even if Margot felt them always, gnawing at the back of her conscience, warning her against getting too comfortable. She looked to the window, through the darkness and the star-splattered sky, wondering to herself how her life had come to this.I had so much promise. The world was my oyster, and all I needed to do was open it. Yet here I am, positively terrified at attending a simple ball despite it being something I used to love more than the world.
Oh, how things had changed…
It hadn’t always been like this. Just three years ago, when Margot was eighteen, she had been the toast of the ton, suchthat her first Season as a debutante had seen her announced by all as the Diamond of the Season. She was elegantly beautiful. Prim and proper and desirable. Her only fault had not been her own, raised by a single father who might have loved her but was so distraught by the loss of his wife that he’d succumbed to loneliness and heartache in a way that invited whispers about his mental health and fragility.And that’s not to mention the booze which followed.
Even with that burden, Margot was looked upon as one that any man should covet. In her desperation to secure a marriage that she hoped might remove the stain from her name and propel her into a life that she thought herself to deserve, she had been courted quickly… too quickly.
Margot did not like to think too often about what had happened next. How it had happened. The fool she had been, and the consequences borne from it. But there were many, and she’d been forced to flee London in shame, living with her cousins on a remote estate so that her mistakes might be forgotten.
For three years, she had lived away from prying eyes and gossipy tongues, enjoying the company of her cousins – Arabella especially, a year younger than Margot – but also eager to escape London for reasons that were not far removed from Margot’s own. And there she might have stayed, had circumstances not brought her back to London.
