“No,”Miriam said, the word carefully drawn out, “no one has died.”
So what is it?Dani raised her eyebrows.
They weren’t looking at her; they stared at an adjacent chair, clearly waiting for her to inhabit it. A cat called Lemonade reclined on the slouchy cushion, an orange leg in the air as he groomed. It was Lemonade’s prerogative to sit all day long, but he was a cat.
Sighing, Dani shooed the animal away and dropped into the seat. She was in possession of a very strong will but she was not defiant. She reclined and licked crumbs from her finger. “I’m here.” She sighed to the tart. “I’m listening. I’msitting.”
“We’ve something important to tell you, Danielle,” Miriam began. Another cat, a short-hair gray called Misty, leaped into Miriam’s lap but she returned the animal to the ground. In her hand, she clutched a thick rectangle of folded parchment.
Dani paused, the tart halfway to her mouth. Rarely, if ever, was Dani addressed by her full name. And never, ever did Miriam Dinwiddie put off a cat. Whatever they were about to tell Dani must be very grave indeed.
“We’ve received a letter,” continued Miriam, “several letters in fact...” More folded parchment was added to the stack in her hand, pulled from the depths of her pocket. Miriam stared at the bundle like a dead bird.
“Am I meant to...” Dani ventured, “readthese letters? Are they from your cousin in Bedfordshire? Not her rheumatism again, I hope—”
“You are to be married, Dani,” blurted Miriam. After she said it, she squeezed her eyes shut.
Dani stopped chewing. She gulped the pastry down her throat. Very slowly, she rolled from the seatback to sit up. “I beg your pardon?”
“Forgive me,” Miriam breathed, blinking through tears. “Whittle and I have just received word, not two days ago, and we’ve not known how to say it. We’ve not known how to reckon with it. This day was always coming. We knew it would come.”
And now it was Dani’s turn to close her eyes. Behind her lids, she saw a painfully bright light. Her brain was on fire. “Married? Married to whom? And for God’s sake,why?”
Miriam pursed her lips and shook her head. Meanwhile, Dani could barely keep her mouth from falling open. She scooted to the edge of her seat.
“Sorry. Let us begin again,” Dani said. “Deep breath, Miriam. That’s right. Go back a bit and repeat everything.Please.”
“What we’re trying to say, Moppet,” said Whittle, “is that a marriage has been arranged—that is,yourmarriage has been arranged. For you. You are to leave us. Not far, apparently, but not—”
“Do not say the wordmarriageagain without sayingto whom,” Dani cut in.
She looked about the room, assuring herself that she sat in a known house, surrounded by known parents and known cats, within her known life. This was not a dream.
“And by whose authority?” Dani continued. “Whohas arranged for me to marry? And why have the two of you learned of itby post?”
To these questions, Miriam and Whittle seemed to have no answers. They huddled together on the small sofa and gazed at her in silence. They looked wretched; they looked like someone very dear to them had been lost at sea.
“Miriam?” Dani prompted. “Miriam.Marriedto whom? What you’re saying makes no sense.”
Dani entertained no suitors. Courtships with local men had been discouraged by Miriam and Whittle. Their reasoning had been vague, but they’d referenced Dani’s rank and the lack of appropriate men in the vicinity. In fact the only thing more vague than the lack of appropriate men was Dani’s “rank.” It was a nonspecific elevated station that no one ever discussed and had been a mystery to Dani for so long, she’d given up trying to learn more about it.
Conveniently, she’d also lacked interest in the young men of Ivy Hill. The farmers and tradesmen and even the educated sons of the village’s most successful merchant were sweet and earnest but also very dull. She’d not thought of marriage because she’d yet to encounter anyone she wished to marry.
For years, Miriam and Whittle had made promises of a London Season, but Dani had celebrated her twenty-second birthday in the spring, and surely the time for a London debut had come and gone. Honestly, on the rare occasion Dani thought of “marriage,” she dreamed about the privileges of adulthood it would bring, not the man who would be the conduit. She longed for her own home to manage, independence, more authority in her committee work. Any bridegroom in these fantasies was a nameless, faceless means to an end. And now this? It made no sense.
“Remember, Moppet,” began Whittle, “we’ve always said the parents of your birth...” He paused, wiping his brow.
Dani turned to him, a little stunned that he’d waded into the conversation. Silas “Whittle” Dinwiddie was a man of few words. He was especially silent during tense conversations or emotional reckonings. When he spoke it was only to praise and tease and reminisce about “days gone by,” in St. James’s Palace. And neither he nor Miriam ever raised the topic of Dani’s actual parents. On the rare occasion that Dani’s birth parents were discussed, the reference would be worshipful but nonspecific, as if they were long-dead saints. The parents of her birth were revered for their goodness but irrelevant for their absentness. Dani had been told only that they were very esteemed, and this esteem came with grave danger. And grave danger had been unsafe for a little baby. When she was older, the danger was also too grave for a little girl. In the end, the parents of Dani’s birth had represented too much grave danger to Dani at any age. And this great unsafeness precluded knowing a single other detail about them. Miriam and Whittle, being childless but very much wanting to be parents, had been chosen as surrogates. They’d been the only mother and father Dani had ever known; beloved parents in the truest sense. Add to this Dani’s innate practicality, her contentedness with the here and now, and her birth family just... ceased to be discussed. Miriam and Whittle were loath to talk about it, and Dani had little time for absent parents who’d abandoned her.
The topic of Dani’s birth parents was so very unspoken, Dani thought of themlessthan she thought of getting married, and that was saying quite a lot.
“Whatof the parents of my birth?” Dani asked Whittle, her voice going a little high and thin. She sucked in a breath. She would not accuse. She would only ask again and again until she understood. A cat rubbed against her leg—it was Pebble—and she swiped her up and began to stroke her with fast, heavy strokes.
“What Whittle wishes to tell you,” said Miriam, “is—”
“Knock, knock?” sang a cheerful voice from the doorway, and the three of them jumped.
“But Dani, you’ve not yet left?” asked Amelia Broom from the stoop. Dani’s neighbor and dearest friend smiled through the top half of the open Dutch door. “I thought for certain I’d missed you. I only popped over to—”
