Mrs. Rose mumbled to herself, “The scandal! Well, that at least explains why I was never able to find him a match. I supposethis means my nearly perfect record is never going to be a perfect record again.”
“As if you didn’t already know,” Elswyth said. “And what of it? Why not just let people love who they love? And damn anyone who says otherwise.”
“But is that really what you want? To be an outcast? Silas is abastard, Elswyth,” she said. Venom dripped from the word. “And beyond that, he is of mixed blood. Wherever you go, people will see him, and you, and they will judge you both. Is that what you want? For your children? To be stared at wherever you go about, to be an object of curiosity?”
Elswyth turned her scarred side to Mrs. Rose. “I already am, Mrs. Rose. Why should it matter?”
“This will be different. You don’t know what it’s like to be outside of society. Even with your scar, you’ve always been a part of this world. Thisbeautifulworld.”
Mrs. Rose gestured upward, looking around the dining room, taking in the sight: the crown molding, the high ceiling, the art, and the splendor. Her voice was dreamy, almost frantic.
“And yet you have not?” Elswyth said. She meant it as a jest, but Mrs. Rose’s face fell. Elswyth realized then. She didn’t know anything about Mrs. Rose, not really. She wasMrs.Rose, notLadyRose, so she wasn’t titled, but she lingered at the edges of nobility, always adjacent.
“Mrs. Rose, why do you hate bastards so much?”
“I never said that.” Mrs. Rose tried to laugh. What came out was a weak, desperate sound.
“You’ve judged Silas since the moment we met him.”
Mrs. Rose’s smile faltered. She cleared her throat. “I suppose I know a horrible story about a bastard. That’s all.”
“And you hate him because of a story? Stories are just lies with endings, Mrs. Rose. They’re not the truth.”
“Some are,” she said. Mrs. Rose stood, flattened her skirts, as if to excuse herself, and then turned away. She moved to the piano, tracing her hand along the keys. A bouquet of flowers waited there: white lilies and violet hyacinths, interspersed with a smattering of forget-me-nots. “This one is about a little girl. She was born in a whorehouse, down in the Rows. Her mother was a singer who immigrated to London and fell on hard times… Her father was the son of a baron. When the singer became pregnant, the baron’s son told her to cut the baby out. But she didn’t.”
“I don’t understand,” Elswyth started.
Mrs. Rose sighed. She sat down at the piano and played a few keys; her voice was wistful. “The singer had a lovely voice. She used to sing to her daughter. Her favorite song was called ‘Rozhinkes mit Mandlen.’”
“Is that… German?” Elswyth asked.
Mrs. Rose shook her head. “Yiddish, dear. ‘Raisins and Almonds.’ It’s a song about a mother singing to her child, promising that one day, he’d grow rich trading raisins and almonds. The singer raised her little girl to dream. She raised her to remember who her father was. To remember that she was noble.”
Elswyth studied Mrs. Rose’s face. Mrs. Rose toyed with the bouquet of lilies and began to sing:
“Un az du vest vern raykh, Yidele, Zolstu zikh dermonen in dem lidele.”
She sang fluently. No trace of accent. Slowly, Elswyth began to understand.
“That wasn’t true, of course. When she was old enough, she went to find her father, now a baron himself. He didn’t wantanything to do with her, of course. None of the nobility did. She stood on the street outside his house for hours one Christmas, looking through the windows at his gilded rooms, his true-born daughters in their gowns and flowers. A perfect world, just beyond a pane of glass.
“When her mother died, she didn’t have any choice but to start paying rent to the brothel’s owner. She was a smart girl. She did what she had to. And then one day, a man came along who changed everything. A man who adored her.”
She smiled. “They fell in love. He came from money, like her father. He taught her how to dress and dance and all the proper manners. He helped her lose her accent. She sang for him, and he loved it so much that he put her on a stage. And then everyone loved her. For a brief, dazzling moment, she was a star.”
Her fingers traced over the piano keys, and she began to play. A sad little song, echoing the lullaby.
“She changed her name. Together, they wrote her a new story. A happier past. And then he married her. And for ten years, everything was perfect.”
She stopped playing. The song echoed for a moment before fading. “That couldn’t last, though. He died. And after a while, everything dried up. She was too old for the stage then. The people she called friends knew that she wasn’t really one of them. They cut her out. Like pruning a flower.
“But love had pulled her out of poverty, and love would do it again. So she remarried. An even richer man this time. But it wasn’t the same, not really. She did love him, or she thought she did. But nothing would ever be like her first love. And when her second husband died, she cried much less. Her third, not at all.
“But no matter how rich her husband was, society neveraccepted her, not fully. She never let it cow her, though. She started a business. Took on a whole new persona. She became her own star. And all through the years, she thought if she could just be more like them—if she could remember the right spoon to use, remember all the names of flowers and the little social niceties—well, then they would love her, wouldn’t they?”
Mrs. Rose shook her head. “But no. Even if they didn’t know where she came from, the stink of being a bastard would still be on her. She’d always be that little girl in the whorehouse. Looking through a window into someone else’s beautiful world.”
Mrs. Rose looked up from the piano. When she did, tears glistened in her eyes. “I don’t want that to be you, Elswyth. If you marry Silas, it will be. Everywhere you go, you will be Lady Blackthorn. And you will never outrun that name.”
