And all that was about to befall me would be a lot.
CHAPTER 2
THE SISTERS
The blue salon was, indeed, blue.
Ice blue.
This mingled with a continuation of the richly creamy creams of the entryway and was, as Prudence shared when she’d escorted me there, “Where we like to take tea because it’s cozier than any of the other sitting rooms or parlors. Except, of course, for the one where we have cocktails before dinner. But you can’t have tea and cocktails in the same place!”
After she said this, she’d giggled, like I knew this rule and the very thought of enjoying both beverages in the same room was a universal understanding of ridiculous.
However, once accosted by the room, I wasn’t sure she had a handle on the meaning of the word cozy.
Set in the central section (not in a wing), on the hall off the south side of foyer, that room was like all the rest I’d encountered: huge.
And like all the rest, it was a study of contrasts. Old and new. Antique and modern. Formal and relaxed. Stiff yet comfortable.
But all of it expensive.
The sisters were a study of contrasts too.
There was Prudence with her avant-garde clothes and auburn hair.
And then there was the blonde I saw out in the garden.
Chastity.
She’d taken off the cardigan and hat to have tea, and her blue dress was a sundress—pretty and as ethereal and delicate as she was (no way I’d garden in that dress, but I was not Lady Chastity Talyn). Her hair was wild and thick and chaotic and amazing. Her face had that pinched but pretty Nicole Kidman look to it. And her eyes were a startling, almost-hard-to-witness sapphire blue.
She was soft-spoken to the point every word she said was a whisper, hard to hear, and she never made eye contact.
Not even close.
Temperance, on the other hand, was seriously something.
Shining ebony hair falling from a middle part in loose curls along the sides of her exquisitely beautiful face, her hair tumbling further down over her shoulders and chest. Her cold gray eyes were watchful and calculating. Her skin was so pale, you could see the blue of her veins. Her lips were perfectly slicked with a bright crimson lipstick. And her body was covered in a pair of casual black slacks, a complicated, edgy, short-sleeved black blouse, and a pair of black patent leather, four-inch Louboutin heels, with the lipstick sole that matched her lips.
She spoke in a sophisticated, catty, aristocratic drawl that reminded me of any of the actors who played the Royals on The Crown.
We sat around the low coffee table covered in a formal tea service and tiered trays filled with crustless sandwiches, pastries, biscuits (or to Americans, cookies), little cakes—and thank you, God (I’d had two)—scones filled with jam and clotted cream.
Chastity poured.
She also sat in one of the ice-blue Louis XV bergère chairs opposite the one Temperance sat in.
Prudence and I sat together in a curved-back settee that faced the fireplace.
I wasn’t sure Chastity knew I was there.
I wasn’t sure Temperance wanted me there.
But I was sure Prudence could talk for England.
“So I think Vivi’s book will span from Reign to Saint, or Bishop,” she was now saying after she’d pretty much outlined everything from my very first email to The Downs’s steward, to now, a history it was clear both her sisters already knew.
Though, curiously through this, she’d sometimes suddenly go off on another tangent that had nothing to do with what she’d been saying. Or she’d trail off and stare into space for a second, like she was in a mini trance, before she’d shake herself and start right back up where she left off.
