The carriage slows. I pull back the curtain to see my family’s town house, the white limestone and soaring columns lit up with gas lamps.
I tap on the window and ask the driver to drop me around the back. I stand less of a chance of being caught if I go through the service entrance in the basement.
“Thank you for your assistance,” I say as I take the driver’s hand and hop down from the carriage.
Emmett leans out the door, a calling card clutched between his knuckles. He reaches out to me. “Please. Can I see you again?”
“Absolutely not,” I reply.
“I beg of you, consider it.”
I take the card out of habit and am a few steps away, nearly to the back staircase, when Emmett’s voice calls from the darkness.
“You can keep the coat.”
I turn back to him. He’s enveloped in shadows, but his smirk is visible even from here. “No, thank you, I’ve got plenty of my own.” I chuck the coat back in his direction, and it smacks him square in the chest. I’ve always been rather proud of my throwing arm.
He waits until I’m inside to pull away.
The fireplace is cold, nothing like Mrs. Osbourne’s kitchen, where the bricks by the hearth were always warm. I’m not six years old anymore. There is no one waiting to tend to my wounds, no big sister’s bed to crawl into.
I climb the limewashed back staircase up to my second-floor bedroom like I’m a ghost haunting this house.
I peel out of my bloodstained dress and am pulling my arms through the warm flannel of my dressing gown when I hear a commotion down in the foyer.
Someone is pounding on the door. For a minute, I freeze with terror, mortified at the thought that perhaps Prince Emmett has come back for me.
Then I hear footsteps. Someone shrieks.
I race out onto the landing just in time to see Lydia stumble into the marble hall, leaving a smear of muddy footprints in her wake.
Chapter Two
Three Months Later
The doors to the atelier are thrown open to the street, bursting with so much activity it’s impossible to keep it all inside. Girls and their mothers spill out onto the sidewalk in a crowd so thick we have to elbow our way in.
The seamstress has been slow to let out the hem of my sister’s gown to fit me, and I know well enough it’s because we haven’t spent enough money in recent years to make us priority customers. My mother knows it too, but she just keeps on smiling in that pinched way of hers.
I wish I could have done this some other day, when there would be fewer people to hide from, but tomorrow is the first of May, and there is no time to waste.
All of London is whipped into an absolute tizzy. The start of the season—the moment for the debutantes to line up to make their bargains with the queen—is all anyone can talk about.
Most of the citizens of England will make their bargains on some other date. The queen’s throne room is open every Sunday from noon until midnight, and anyone who wishes to bargain with her may do so at this time. Some make their bargain as soon as theycome of age; some wait well into adulthood, until they find something they want desperately enough to make a deal.
Those from the Midlands say it’s luckiest to make the bargain on the first Sunday of the month. Girls from Bristol always make their bargains sporting two left-footed shoes. People from Liverpool arrive at the palace wearing necklaces of their own braided hair. Counties and villages and families all have their own superstitions about the practice, entrenched now for over four hundred years.
Some never make a bargain at all.
But for girls like me, girls with titles or money enough to buy influence some other way, it is expected that we make our bargains on the same day we come out into society, officially available as merchandise on the marriage market.
Our clever bargains for shinier hair or prettier feet are just another line item on our wifely résumés, proving that we aregood girls. Rose Bargains, they’re called. Bargains to make us beautiful, fragile, sweet—perfect English roses.
The official debutante coming-out is always on the first of May. Such is the fanfare around the aristocratic girls in their finest lining up before the queen, it’s been calledthe Pact Parade.
The bell to the shop chimes as we enter, barely audible over the chatter.
The Alton sisters drop their gazes as I approach. The little one turns away so quickly she trips over the edge of a rug. Our shame is contagious, and no one can afford to catch it, especially not now.
