“Depends if you talk back to Nora again. I’d suggest roasted, with a side of bitter greens.”
They both laughed, a sound that felt illicit in the muffled hush of the house. Rosaline set the basket on the windowsill and began to arrange the flowers with the careful precision of someone who’d learned to find beauty in small, controlled bursts.
“I saw a dog in the drive,” Emma said, more to fill the silence than anything. “And one being carried by a porter.”
“Our guests are bringing seven dogs, actually,” Rosaline said. “And a monkey. Mercy’s friend brought it from Vienna. Apparently it eats only sugared almonds and bites men with mustaches.”
“Aunt Edna better watch out then,” Emma let out a genuine laugh, and for a moment, the ache inside her eased. She watched Rosaline for a while, marveled at the effortless way her hands moved, then reached over and plucked a sprig of rosemary from the basket.
“For courage,” she said, tucking it behind her ear.
Rosaline shook her head. “I’ll need a whole bouquet.”
With that comforting, if somewhat self-pitying thought, Emma squared her shoulders and marched out into the corridor, the scent of rosemary trailing after her like a promise.
Chapter 2
Emma’s fingertips traced the cold edge of her silver fork as she surveyed the dining room.
Light splintered from the chandelier, fracturing across the mahogany table in dazzling pinpricks that made her eyes water. She shifted forward in her chair, the silk upholstery whispering beneath her, careful to maintain the half-inch gap between her back and the ornate carving that pressed against her shoulder blades whenever she relaxed. Each breath came shallow and measured against the unyielding pressure of whalebone. A footman leaned between guests to pour wine, his sleeve brushing against the towering arrangement of lilies. The petals shuddered, releasing a fresh wave of perfume that coated her tongue with a sickly film.
It was a beautiful room, an opulent room, and she had never felt more like a trespasser.
Across the table, her brother Emmett fiddled with his cravat, his expression as strained as her own.
Poor Emmett, a baron more comfortable with ledgers and wood planes than with the delicate architecture of society small talk. Beside him, his fiancée, Lucy Pembroke, was a vision of pale, romantic loveliness, her gaze fixed adoringly on him. And beside Lucy, a thundercloud in mauve silk, sat her mother, Lady Brackenfeld, whose pinched face suggested she was enduring the dinner only through sheer force of will.
It was their unhappy union that brought them all to Brighton. A place away from London to have a quiet, more intimate wedding for the reclusive Baron Cresthaven and his young bride.
As much as Emma disliked her brother’s soon to be mother-in-law, she felt exactly like the grimace permanently affixed to Lady Brackenfeld’s drooping features.
The weight of the family’s future, of restoring the Goode name from the mire of their father’s scandals, rested on this match. Emma could feel the pressure of it in the air, heavier than the scent of roasted meat and too many competing perfumes.
The conversation, thankfully, did not require her participation. It eddied around her, a dull murmur of gossip and pleasantries, until one of the men—a baronet with a florid face and an opinion on everything—began pontificating on the Corn Laws. He spoke with the unshakeable confidence of a man who has never missed a meal in his life about the necessities of keeping bread prices high.
“…a matter of protecting our landowners,” he boomed, gesturing with his fork. “It is the very bedrock of our national prosperity.”
Emma listened, her stewed squab growing cold on her plate. She had read the pamphlets, the arguments from the manufacturing districts, the accounts of families in Manchester who could barely afford a loaf. Her fingers tightened around the stem of her wine glass.
“But surely,” she said, her voice clear and carrying in a momentary lull, “a prosperity built on the starvation of the laboring class is no prosperity at all? It is a sickness in the nation’s accounts.”
A sudden, profound silence descended upon the table. Forks paused halfway to mouths. Lady Brackenfeld’s nostrils flared. Emma felt a dozen pairs of eyes turn to her, not with interest, but with a kind of horrified shock, as if a horse had just offered an opinion on the sherry.
Pru’s lips compressed to a single, bloodless line.
Then, a gentle pressure on Emma’s arm.
Honoria. Nora.
Her raven-haired sister, who had ruled the family with a velvet-gloved iron fist since the scandal broke, leaned close. Her perfume, a subtle and expensive lavender, was a stark contrast to the lilies. Her voice was a low, urgent whisper, meant for Emma alone.
“Emma, dear,” she murmured, her tone infused with a genuine, painful concern that was somehow worse than anger. “You know I adore your opinions on the state of the world.” She paused, her grip tightening almost imperceptibly on Emma’s forearm. “It’s only…this wedding is so vital, Emmett fears one misplaced word could bring it all down around our ears. Please, darling, for his sake. Try to be…be less…less…you know. Just for this week.”
The words struck Emma with the force of a physical blow.
Less.
Less herself.
