Chapter 1
Brighton.
The name itself tasted of salt and social obligation.
The driver’s “Whoa!” cut through the air as the carriage shuddered to a halt on the sandy gravel. Before Emmaline Goode could reach for the door, it was flung open by an invisible footman.
Blinded by the combined assault of lamplight and the overpowering perfume of hothouse lilies, which seemed to blanket every surface from the drive to the entry hall, she simply sat in the darkness, allowing the relief to seep into her bones.
Every muscle, from her shoulders to her ankles, ached with the rigid posture required for hours of travel. Outside, the cries of gulls cut through the rhythmic hush of the waves against the shore—a sound that ought to have been soothing but instead felt like the preamble to a siege.
The house didn’t welcome; it announced. It declared its own importance, and by extension, the triviality of anyone who felt intimidated by it.
Not for the first time, Emmaline ached for Fairhaven. Her small country seat where the stables were as large as the manor house, the hills of Hampshire her racing grounds.
She counted the windows—sixty-three visible, not including the basement.
How many guests were already installed behind those glowing panes? How many of them had polished themselves to a glossy shine in anticipation of the Goode wedding party’s arrival.
Did anyone else fight the beginnings of a headache blooming at the thought of the social gauntlet awaiting inside?
Inside.
Better she go and get it over with.
The entry hall was a riot of marble and gilt. Servants buzzed about like bees in dark coats, whisking away hats and gloves, piling trunks, and proffering drinks on silver trays with the blank, mechanical precision of well-trained machines. Emma watched one of them, a youth not much older than herself, struggle to balance a stack of hatboxes and a sleeping spaniel. She felt a surge of sympathy for him, but said nothing.
Sympathy, like opinions, was best kept in reserve until it could be deployed with strategic advantage.
At the center of the chaos, her eldest half-sister, Nora, presided like a battle-tested general, her voice calm and her directives pitilessly efficient. “Mercy, take the yellow suite. Felicity, the east chambers, nearest the library. Emma, you are in the garden rooms—there’s a private exit for your…morning walks.” The way she said morning walks was both a kindness and a rebuke, as if Nora both pitied and envied Emma’s need for solitude and air.
Mercy, a golden-haired spark of energy, turned to wink at her. “If you see any ghosts, Emma, do send them my way. I prefer my company unpredictable.”
“Don’t be absurd, Mercy,” Nora snapped, “there are no ghosts in Brighton. Just bored aristocrats and overfed lapdogs.”
Felicity, Mercy’s twin in appearance only, trailed her gloved fingertips along the banister, and observed, “Technically, Mercy is correct. Ghosts abound where the living are too vain to realize they’ve died inside.”
Emma snorted. Felicity was a quiet love, but her wit could be astonishingly cutting. “This hall is full of people but empty of husbands,” she observed. “Where are the Goode men?”
Felicity offered a smile as thin as her wrists. “When it comes to weddings, men are more often in the way. They’ll arrive tomorrow with the rest of the guests.”
The twins, who’d married two Monegasque brothers, had recently arrived from a year touring the world on a scandalous French duchess’s yacht, THE HELENE. When once they’d been perfectly pampered and prim, the twins now had a worldliness and confidence Emma deeply admired.
And secretly envied.
She allowed herself to be herded down a corridor lined with ancestral oil portraits, their dark eyes following her with either disapproval or faint, bored curiosity.
“You’re not my ancestors,” she muttered. “I’ll thank you to keep your opinions to yourselves.”
Her room was not, as promised, a “garden suite,” but rather a glorified closet. The walls had been papered in an unfortunate green that reminded her of the local apothecary’s tonic, and the narrow bed was made up with linens so crisp they might have been starched by military decree. A quick survey confirmed that yes, there was a private exit, a door opening on the scuffed servants’ path to the stables.
Emma shrugged out of her coat and inspected her reflection in the little mirror above the washstand. Her hair, as Mercy had predicted, had worked itself loose in a dozen places. Her face, tanned by years outdoors, looked even more out of place against the pale, doll-like features of her sisters. She tried to smooth her dress and only succeeded in making it more wrinkled.
A knock at the door. Rosaline, the youngest Goode and perhaps the only one who’d ever understood her, poked her head in. She held a basket of cut flowers and wore a conspiratorial grin.
“They’re making you eat with the family tonight,” Rosaline whispered, as if imparting news of an impending execution.
Emma grinned back, wishing her ash brown hair held the gloss of her youngest sister’s. “Will they serve me raw or roasted?”
