“He’s awful,” she sniffs.
“The absolute worst,” I reply, a little thin. As proof, I run across the hall to my room and pull his calling card out from where I’d hidden it under my mattress. I don’t know why I kept it. I was being stupid.
Lydia gasps in glee as I pass it to her, and she smiles wide when I tell her she can be the one to burn it.
She tosses it into the fire, laughing, and we both watch as it curls and turns to ash.
“Try not to miss me too much when I’m gone,” I say with an elbow to her ribs.
“I always miss you,” she says, and it’s a little too honest. It’s not something we can bear, so we say nothing at all.
Chapter Nine
Mama drags Lydia out of bed the next morning to say goodbye, and we share an awkward brief hug at the door. We’re all elbows as we knock into each other. Her eyes are still swollen with sleep, but I don’t know if that’s the reason she can’t really look at me. We can’t bear how much we love each other. It’s like an open wound we can’t touch for all the stinging it causes.
“I’m going to miss you so much,” I whisper, so quiet only she can hear.
“He’ll fall in love with you if he has any taste at all,” she whispers back.
Mrs. Tuttle kisses me twice on both cheeks and says, “When you’re a princess, you’d better let your old Mrs. Tuttle visit you in that fancy palace of yours.”
Papa hugs me last, his eyes wet with tears. “When did you grow up?” he asks into my hair.
He has to know as well as I do. But I just hug him back. At my feet is a bag of books he’s given me, old volumes of Socrates and John Locke. I don’t want to haul them across town with me, but as usual, I indulge him.
The carriage pulls away from Belgrave Square, and I watch my home disappear behind me in a cloud of dust.
When we reach Kensington Palace, there’s a fearsome woman standing on the steps, waiting for us. “You’re the last to arrive,” she says curtly as the footmen haul my single trunk out of the back of the carriage.
Mama glances at the watch chain pinned to her waistband. “But we’re right on time.”
“Lady Marion Thorne has been here with her parents and lady’s maid since first light,” she replies. “The rest arrived after breakfast.” I’m embarrassed that the other girls arrived early to get ready together. Did they talk about it without me?
Without waiting for a response, she marches with the posture of a military commander across the lawn as Mama and I skitter after her. England hasn’t had a military since Queen Mor put an end to the War of the Roses, but I’ve read about it in books. Nothing described in the pages of novels was quite as fearsome as the lady before me. She’s in her sixties, with white hair swept up into a bouffant and a serious gray spencer jacket buttoned over her gown.
“I’m Viscountess Bolingbroke, and I will be your chaperone for the season. I promise to guide you all, educate you to the best of my abilities, and ensure that your honor remains firmly intact. I’ll reside with you and the five other girls here on palace grounds. I expect your behavior to be unimpeachable.” She looks down at my embarrassingly small valise. “I’m glad to see you packed light. A trousseau of all required items will be provided to you by the Crown.”
She leads us to Caledonia Cottage, a squat little building, crawling with ivy, perched on the wooded edge of the palace grounds.We step through the threshold from the quiet garden to a storm of activity as the other girls and their staff prepare for the ball tonight. Viscountess Bolingbroke takes us up the carpeted staircase to what will be my room. It’s fashionably decorated, but smaller than my room at home, with a slanting ceiling and a single window letting in streams of golden midmorning light.
Two beds with matching pale-blue silk damask canopies are placed against the far wall, the one closest to the window already rumpled and covered with discarded clothing.
“You’ll be with Faith Fairchild,” the viscountess says. “I will be staying down the hall for the remainder of the season, and you will be attended to by a full staff of palace professionals. Family visits can be arranged with me directly, but we discourage visiting too often lest it interfere with the girls’ focus.”
The viscountess swishes out the door, and I bid my mother a brief goodbye. She’s never been one for tears; she just squeezes me and says, “Do your best.”
A luncheon has been laid out in the dining room downstairs, a getting-to-know-you meal for me and the other girls. We don’t have long to sit, though. As tradition demands, there will be a ball tonight at the home of the Twombleys, where everyone will show off their new faces and talents and whatever else people can think to bargain for. A few years back, there was a girl who bargained for a strange little clock that meowed like a cat on the hour. Still, no one knows why.
When I was eleven or twelve, at the height of my faerie obsession, I stole one of my mother’s unused journals and listed every single bargain and cost I could find, desperate to identify some rhyme or reason to them. I came to the conclusion that they’rerandom, completely reliant on the queen’s whims, which terrified and thrilled me all at once.
The Benton household received our invitation from Count Twombley’s footman at first light this morning. My mother pulled me into a tight hug, her eyes wet with tears upon tearing open the invitation’s wax seal. It would never have arrived had I not been one of the prince’s suitors.
Greer sits at the end of the table, the difference in her immediately obvious.
Her face, once ruddy and sweet, has been sharpened and thinned into something strikingly beautiful. I can’t look at her, it’s too uncanny and unsettling.
Olive, too, appears changed. She strides in and smiles widely, revealing two rows of perfect white teeth. She’d been missing an upper molar before, and the bottom row had been a mess of overlapping.
Emmy, Marion, and Faith remain outwardly unchanged.
