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“You may have the advantage of us in our present circumstances, but I do not readily surrender to misery and hopelessness.”

“You won’t marry then?”

“Marry?” Her expression said marriage was far from her mind.

“In the time-honored tradition of gently bred maidens seeking their fortunes,” he explained.

“You take a mercenary view of husband-hunting! I am not yet reduced to such stratagems.”

“You said yourself that you had no relations to assist you.”

“Nevertheless, we will manage. My sisters may marry if they wish to, and my brothers will have their professions. We will come out right in the end. After the ball. After I win our wager, which I fully intend to do. Good day, Lord Graymont. The beach is yours.”

“You know,” he called as she trudged up the beach, “removing the buttons on that skeleton suit will reduce resistance and give you a faster glide through the water.”

*

Cordelia closed the ledger book on the dining room table. At Henry’s request she had checked his entries and could find no fault with them. Neither had she discovered any overlooked source of income. Instead, Graymont’s outrageous suggestion that she should marry for money popped into her head like the refrain of a song. In the parlor at Mama’s pianoforte, Roz was attempting to master a melancholy tune. A chord in the closing bars eluded Roz’s fingering with jarring dissonance and hung in the air like an unfinished sentence. Each time the mistake stopped her, Roz patiently returned to the beginning of the tune.

Cordelia pushed the ledger away with a feeling that studying their accounts was a fruitless business, like Roz’s playing. Cordelia refused to remain stuck. Even in their circumstances, there would be something she could do, some action to take. And it would not be husband-hunting.

She supposed that she had in her long-ago Season intended to marry, but in those days she’d had a dowry and no need to choose a husband for his pounds per annum. She had not been so giddy as to imagine that a potential husband’s best qualities were his breadth of shoulders and handsome face. She had easily rejected the obvious flirts and the gentlemen who rated themselves above the rest, but she had generally found her dance partners shallow or dull with their narrow concern with being seen to be knowing and fashionable, as if one’s hair arrangement or the cut of one’s coat made one superior to others. One partner had corrected her dancing. Another had prefaced all his remarks with, “When I was in Paris, they …”

She needed to get Graymont’s husband-hunting scheme out of her head. She left her chair, crossed the entry, and poked her head into the parlor. “Roz, you might try a different piece and come back to that one.”

Her sister looked up from the piano with streaming eyes. “You don’t understand, and you never will.”

“Perhaps not,” Cordelia agreed mildly. “What if you played on to the end, you know, to get over that rough patch?” Roz bent her head to the instrument and launched into the song again.

The front door opened, and Viola and Miranda came in, pulling off bonnets and gloves. “You’ll never guess who we met,” Viola said.

“Who?” Cordelia’s mind conjured Graymont’s careless elegance at once.

“Mr. Winter!” Viola said triumphantly. “He really is quite taken with Miranda.”

“You must excuse me,” Miranda said, moving past Cordelia to the stairs and disappearing up them.

Cordelia shot Viola a questioning glance. In the parlor, Roz missed her chord and restarted.

“Miranda is miffed,” Viola continued. “Her curate was off paying a mercy call on Mrs. Melbury, who is laid up with gout, I think.” Viola’s jonquil muslin gown had a red stain suspiciously like strawberry tart.

“And where did you meet Mr. Winter?” Clearly, her sisters had stopped somewhere besides the church.

“At the circulating library. Mr. Winter is quite interested in fossils. And even more interested in Miranda. He gets the most besotted look on his face when he sees her.”

“Did you speak with him?”

“Oh, we did, because we had a glorious idea for dresses for our ball.” Viola bounced a little.

“You had an idea,” Miranda called down from above.

“We aren’t going to wear ball gowns?” Cordelia asked.

Viola shook her head. “I thought since we are so lacking in the ready at the moment—”

“The ready?” The cant term on her sister’s lips once again made Cordelia wonder at the curriculum of the Hester Britt Academy.

“Coin, of course,” Viola said blithely.