The Rose Bargain

Chapter Three

Mama and Mrs. Tuttle dress me in my sister’s Pact Parade gown, a confection of Swiss-dot chiffon and a bodice embroidered with English wildflowers, white thread on white fabric. It’s been altered to fit me, but I still feel like I’m wearing a Lydia Benton costume.

I sit on the small stool in front of my vanity, and Mama’s cool fingers wind my hair into a nest of braids at the back of my skull. Mrs. Tuttle helps her pin white roses, fresh from the garden, in my hair. The effect is beautiful, but no match for the diamond-encrusted tiaras and bandeaux the other girls will be wearing. Papa tells me not to concern myself with matters of finances, but how can I not when I overhear him and his business advisers arguing in the study all day long.

How could he have known that the land he bargained for the spring he turned eighteen had been so overfarmed it was barren? He was sure it grew plentiful produce when his father’s tenants farmed the field right next door, but he gave up his childhood memories in exchange for the plot, so he can’t be entirely sure. The tenant farmers have all packed up and left in search of literal greener pastures.

Others would have leaned on friends for advice, but Papa’s lack of childhood memories made it difficult to bond with the other men of the peerage. He doesn’t remember their boarding school stories or the tales of rugby victories in their youth. There’s a hollowness to him that others seem to be able to sense.

He’s tried to fill it in the years since with books and philosophy. We’ve spent our family dinners debating matters of politics and Plato, but it only helped serve to make us all a little odd.

“What will you ask for?”

my mother asks one final time as she fastens her own mother’s pearls around my neck.

I hate lying to her. “I’ll ask for what you asked for, Mama, to have a better memory. I’ll get to know someone so well he’ll have no choice but to see I’d be the best wife for him.”

My mother’s hands go still, and she runs her thumb over the nub of her pinkie. She’s no longer looking at me in the mirror; her eyes are far off, somewhere else. “That’s a lovely thought, sweetheart.”

“Then why do you still look so sad?”

I smile as I say it, but my heart is aching too.

“Just be careful.”

She shakes her head and returns to fixing the flowers pinned to my head. “Remembering is heavy. It lasts so long.”

My dress has a wide V-neck decorated with a ruffle that continues down sleeves that stop at my elbows. The bodice ends in a point at my waist, and the skirt is wide.

“You look perfect,”

Mama whispers.

I look like Lydia. Our curly honey-blond hair and brown eyes are the same, only Lydia has a face that’s sharper somehow, as if my features are more settled on her face. My cheeks are rounder, my eyes a little softer around the edges.

She’s been in her room all morning. I knocked on her door to ask her once more to dress my hair, and I had to pretend that I didn’t care when she said no.

I poke my bare feet out from under the hem of the dress. “The matching slippers, Mama? I didn’t see them in the atelier’s box.”

My mother looks down at the carpet awkwardly, her face turning the same splotchy, tomato shade of red I so often see on myself. “She must have forgotten them. You can borrow your sister’s.”

I can read between the lines well enough. We couldn’t afford a new dress, and we couldn’t afford new shoes either.

I’ve felt so much embarrassment over the past few months, the sting is taken out of this particular blow. I’m just annoyed.

Mrs. Tuttle walks through the door moments later, Lydia’s white silk slippers dangling from her fingers. “Here you go, darling,”

she says pityingly. “Do you need my help putting them on?”

“No, thank you.” I smile.

She closes the door behind her, and I grimace. Lydia’s feet have been smaller than mine since we were children. On one particularly humiliating occasion when I was eleven, a cobbler told me I was shaped like the letter L.

I attempt to cram my toes into the delicate silk shoes, but they’re pinching all over. I take two steps, and my left heel pops right out.

This day is going to be difficult enough without hobbling all over the palace.

I hide Lydia’s slippers under a bonnet in my wardrobe and slip on my stockings and trusty, well-worn boots instead. Under the layers of my dress, they’re hardly visible, and no one will be looking at me enough today to notice.

I’m tightening the final laces when my mother’s voice calls from downstairs. “Ivy, we can’t be late!”

“Coming!”

Praying she doesn’t see my traitorous choice in shoes, I race down the stairs to join her.

The carriage pulls up at exactly eleven, and Mama and I make our way across town to Kensington Palace.

It’s a perfect verdant spring day after a gray English winter. Yellow daffodils dot the roadside. The gardens of society’s finest homes have only just sprung to life. Riots of pink explode in window boxes, and waterfalls of purple hyacinth drip from the eaves of the estates we pass.

We join a line of carriages at the entrance to the palace, and a veritable army of footmen stream out the doors, ready to greet us.

Today, all the debutantes wear white, as tradition for the Pact Parade demands: white to mirror the white gown Queen Mor wore when she first appeared on King Edward IV’s burning battlefield.

I spot all my old friends among the crowd, as well as their mothers and chaperones. They shift slightly as we approach, putting their backs to us.

Lady Marion Thorne takes a small gasp as I walk by her, and she whispers to her mother, “I didn’t think she’d be invited.”

It’s a fair enough remark. I didn’t think I’d be invited either.

But next to me, my mother stiffens, and the familiar pangs of pity return. She belonged to this world long before I was even alive, and they’ve gone and thrown her out, like they weren’t all girls together, once huddled and giggling in gowns on these very steps. “Ivy, fix your face,”

she hisses, and I realize I’m glowering.

We linger in an awkward semblance of a line outside, ready for the palace doors to open. It is tradition that each girl enters the queen’s throne room alone. But instead, at the appointed time, the footmen open the double doors to the main hall of the palace and gesture with gloved hands for us all to step inside as a group.

Kensington Palace is the main residence of the royal family, but they keep larger palaces like Buckingham and Eltham for official events. It’s intimate to be invited here, into the queen’s home. I’ve never been inside, only to the gates a few times a year as a child to deliver my baby teeth. But everyone knows you leave those with the guards; she never comes outside to collect them herself.

My boots click over the polished black-and-white checkered marble floor as we enter the main hall. There are rumblings of confusion around me, but I’m too busy taking in the splendor of the palace to truly care. The ceiling soars four stories tall, and in the middle of the great entryway is an oak tree, hundreds of years old, its roots intertwined with the very foundation of this palace. Its branches soar above us, spring green leaves brushing against the honeycomb glass of the ceiling. The walls are covered in lush murals of emerald and gold, scenes of the Otherworld where Queen Mor grew up, a place where no human has ever set foot.

As if we are sheep being herded, we follow the lead footman up the stairs to the throne room. I trail my gloved fingers along the brass railing, which is fashioned to look like vines twisting their way up and up.

The footmen swing open the doors to the throne room and gesture for us all to enter as a pack. My mother throws me a questioning glance as another murmur of concern ripples through the crowd. We should be entering one by one, not all together like this.

The expansive throne room spans the length of a city block. My boots sink into the midnight-blue carpet threaded through with gold stitched into the shapes of constellations. The ceiling is painted in a mural of sunset pinks and blush lilacs. The walls are gilded in ornate gold molding, surrounded by yet more paintings of goddesses hunting in lush forests, their bare feet crushing flowers in their wake.

And at the end of the room is her. We’ve all learned the stories in school, how Queen Mor saved all of England, how she ushered in the longest period of peace for any nation in earth’s history, how she’s kept our little island safe and prosperous for over four centuries.

Seeing her in the flesh is profoundly surreal. No portrait could do her justice. She’s lounging casually on her throne, which is a piece of art in and of itself: a massive bouquet of orchids shaped, impossibly, into a chair rendered in gold and a rainbow of gemstones.

Her dark hair is wound into a coronet of braids, and atop that sits a crown of diamonds and turquoise stones as big as chicken eggs.

Her gown is the same blue as the jewels, radiant silk that falls wide at her wrists. But it’s her face I can’t stop staring at.

It’s said that she hasn’t aged a day since she first appeared on King Edward’s battlefield, that she exists outside the bounds of time itself. Her immortal skin is unmarked by freckles or lines. She could be a debutante herself, if not for her sharp, ancient eyes.

I think of my sister at home in her bed, of my father’s misfortunes, of my mother’s missing finger. White-hot hate pools in my belly at the sight of her.

“Welcome.”

She greets us. Her voice is cool, but easily fills the cavernous space. I can feel the nerves radiating from the girls who stand beside me as we all curtsy the way we’ve practiced our entire lives.

I cross my left leg behind my right and bend my knees nearly ninety degrees. I keep my eyes focused on a point a few feet in front of me, a golden star embroidered into the carpet, to keep from wobbling, just as Mama taught me to.

There’s a commotion from the left side of the room. A gasp. A thud. Then Opal Fitzherbert rushes out of the room, limping slightly, her mother at her heels.

Poor thing must have stumbled during her curtsy. People thought she’d do well this season, snag a baron or better, but news of a public humiliation like this will spread quickly. Now she’ll be lucky to get a second son.

The air is thick with tension. Queen Mor watches on, bored by all of us, I suspect. How could she not be after four hundred years?

“I’m sure you’re all wondering why this break in protocol,”

she begins. “I assure you we will commence with the Pact Parade shortly, but first I must beg you to allow me this indulgence.”

After an agonizing moment of silence, a hidden door, one painted to blend in with the lush murals, swings open next to the throne.

The entire room takes a small gasp as Prince Bram strides in and steps onto the podium to stand at his mother’s side. He enters the room like he’s straight from a brisk walk in the forest.

Like his mother, he is inhumanly beautiful. Broad shoulders, a wide smile, a mop of wavy brown hair run through with rays of gold bleached by sunlight. His gray eyes glint like steel, but there’s something about him that feels more tangible than his mother, like he’s of this world and not floating above it. Maybe it’s the dip of the dimple under his left cheek, and the way he doesn’t have a matching one on the right.

He greets us all with a welcoming smile. “Seems I’m right on time.”

Beside me, Olive Lisonbee’s mother catches her by the elbow as Olive swoons at the sight of him and her knees give out.

I don’t blame her. They’re the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen.

People. My mind snags on the word like an errant piece of thread. Prince Bram and Queen Mor aren’t people, not really, not like us.

Queen Mor clears her throat, and the room snaps to attention. “I don’t intend to waste anyone’s time. I’ve summoned you all here today for the joyous announcement of a mother who loves her son deeply.”

She straightens in her throne and casts a loving glance at Bram. “This will be the season my son, His Royal Highness Bram, Prince of Wales, will select a bride.”