“After reading and writing and sums,” she went on, “these windowed boxes and my own sketching took up nearly all of my time. On a particularly long visit, Aunt Mary conspired with me to repaint my bedroom and select fabric for new linens. After that, I was off. I remade the bedroom of my governess, the nursery, my brother’s rooms—on and on it went until I had I made changes to every room in the house.”
Cassin glanced around him at the blue walls and back to her.
“I’ve redesigned the interior of every room in Leland Park many times over. This drawing room, for instance, I’ve only just finished.” She held out her arms and pivoted, indicating the long, blue room.
Cassin thought of the cold stone walls of Caldera, his castle in Yorkshire. Ancient tapestries had hung on the same walls for what must have been hundreds of years, and portraits of identically posed relatives lined the corridors. A belching fire dusted everything with a whirl of black soot. It had never occurred to him that the rooms should look any other way. His mother and sisters had never shown the slightest interest in bringing in so much as a new footstool. The sturdy antique furniture was as natural to the castle as the towering trees in the garden.
She was at the mantel now, adjusting the angle of a vase and lacquered box. “I hope this explains, at least in part, my great desire to relocate to this new neighborhood in London. When I am reunited with my aunt and uncle and am in their employ, I can devote every day to the designs of one beautiful new home after another. All the best craftsmen and merchants are at their disposal.” She turned to beam at him. “Leland Park can only be made over so many times,” she said. “A few select Pixham neighbors have taken my advice on a room or two in their homes, but to design every room in every house in an entire London district? It is the opportunity of a lifetime.”
She looked at him, waiting for some response. The repeat chorus ofTell herscraped at the back of his head, but he could barely hear it.
She returned to the sofa, and the dog jumped beside her. “It’s why I conceived of the advertisement. I have to get to London, and my mother cannot be persuaded.”
“Why is your mother so opposed?”The last question, he thought.
“My mother doesn’t care that I will never have a family or that I should like to fill my life with something I value instead. She will not listen; she never has. And she detests my aunt’s choices for her life. Considering this, I was forced to find a way around her.”
“So many secrets,” he said.
“Yes, well, you should try to lead a fulfilling life with lively interests and engaging relationships but absolutely no rights, and you’d see how many secrets you are compelled to keep. Better still, try living at the mercy of others who enjoy unlimited rights. What then? Self-preservation quite literally forced my hand. It sounds drastic, but I grow older with every year. Life is passing me by.” Her voice broke, and she struggled to gain composure.
“It does not distress you to join an aunt whom your parents have disowned?”
“Well,Ihave not disowned her. Aunt Mary was dear to me as a child. She alone saw that I would not have motherhood to occupy me, and she set me on the path to find satisfaction in another way. I owe her so much. We correspond weekly. When she wrote to say she could make a place for me in their new commissions in Belgravia, I could not help but conceive of some method or means to get myself there.”
“Why was this aunt disowned?” he asked.
“Reasons entirely unfounded.” She waved her hand, sweeping away the insignificance. “She married a penniless man of no distinction. He is lovely, of course, and completely devoted to her. She viewed him as an artist—he designs furniture, you see—but the family saw him only as a yeoman laborer, toiling away with his hands. Now the two of them create furniture and design the interior of homes. They are quite renowned in London, really. Certainly he is penniless no more. They’ve made a name for themselves and are sought after by the finest families.” She shrugged. “But none of this matters, does it, when she was the daughter of a rich baron, and he was the son of nobody-knows-who.” She smiled at him.
“So you would live in the care of this disgraced London aunt. But where? In their . . . flat?”
She laughed. “Oh no! They live in one of the first townhomes built in Belgravia. Aunt Mary has promised me ground-floor apartments—large enough for me and my man, Mr. Fisk, and my maid, Perry. And if my friends are able to find arrangements for their dowries, they may come too. The accommodations could not be more perfect, really.”
She beamed as she said it, looking off as if to imagine the perfection of this collective life with her two bosom friends and a fallen aunt and her carpenter husband.
“Your own apartments,” Cassin repeated. “And your hus—” He swallowed what he almost said, what he had come here specificallynotto say, and corrected himself. “The man you marry is meant to pay no mind to an arrangement that your mother will not allow?”
Her smile fell just a little. Her eyes darted left. “The man I marry will receive a large sum of money to pay me no mind whatsoever. Won’t he?” She looked back.
“That would depend on what you would be doing and where you would be going, in and out of your private entrance.”
And there it was, the question he’d wanted to know most of all. His primary question. He raised an eyebrow.
She laughed again, although it was an uneasy, cautious laugh. “I will be making my dreams come true. Designing the interiors of these beautiful homes.”
He considered this. An answer that was really no answer at all. He wanted to ask again, to press her and make her define the life she intended to lead as a married woman with an absent husband, but . . . but . . .
But he was not to be that absent husband, so what could it matter?
She returned to the sofa and leaned to him, as if intimating a secret. “Look, Cassin, I know the scheme is outrageous and unorthodox. And if it was only me and my dream, I probably would have already given up on the idea. It is exactly the life I have always wanted, an alternative to the family I cannot have. Is it worth deceiving my mother and marrying a stranger under false pretenses? Probably not. But it’s not only me and my dream, is it? When the lives of my friends became complicated in such a way that they, too, could benefit from a fresh start in London, I thought,I can do something about this for all of us.”
She sat up and waited. She added, “I could but act.”
Cassin could think of no answer to this, only more questions, and he’d already appeared too interested and too conspiratorial. It was almost as if his time to tell her had come and gone. He sighed and ran a finger through his hair.
He was just about to ask her about the urgency of her friends’ flight from Surrey when they were interrupted by a fresh wave of barking.
She laughed. “My mother’s dogs again. She allows them free rein of the house, I’m afraid. I’m sorry for the barking yesterday—and today. They are impossible to contain.”
