The Rose Bargain

Chapter Nineteen

It’s been an awkward morning. I was awoken by Olive huffing and dragging her trunk over the threshold of my room.

“Faith said we’re swapping,”

she explained, and went back to arranging a family of stuffed dogs on her pillow.

“Did she now?”

I marched across the hall to where Faith and Marion were unpacking Faith’s things. “No one thought to consult me about this?”

The truth is, I pity Faith. But I doubt she’d take kindly to me expressing that to her.

They looked up. At least Marion had the manners to look sheepish.

“Didn’t think it necessary,”

Faith answered for both of them.

She scares me too. She has all the same knowledge about Bram that I do, but with an angelic face and actual experience with boys. I bet Emmett didn’t have to teach her how to flirt.

Now we’re all crossing the wide green lawn over to the main palace residence in tense silence, heading to tea in the queen’s private drawing room.

A dozen of those strange, silent footmen are waiting for us in a parlor tucked away in the queen’s private apartments.

Viscountess Bolingbroke places her hands on her hips. “I hope you’re ready for another of Her Majesty’s lessons. I heard you all had such fun at the last one.”

I knew this was coming, but it still sends a chill down my spine.

“A good wife possesses many talents,”

Bolingbroke says. “She must be a perfect hostess, a dedicated bookkeeper, the very heart and soul of her household. She must provide her husband with comfort and understanding.”

“Is that what Queen Mor does for her husbands?”

Marion asks. She’s standing behind Faith, but her voice carries across the whole room, which settles into tense silence.

Viscountess Bolingbroke cocks her head, her face as stony as ever. “She is not a wife. She is a queen.”

Dread beads in cold sweat at the nape of my neck.

The viscountess stands and gestures to the footmen lined up along the wall.

They open a set of double doors at the end of the room, revealing another sitting room, this one even larger.

Emmy, perhaps emboldened by her status as the current leader, takes a step into the adjacent room. Greer, unable to turn left, has to make a full circle to follow us in.

Three large windows look out onto the park, where visitors and members of court stroll idly in the spring sunshine.

The sitting room is ordinary, save for its size. The wallpaper in hues of sage green and lavender matches the elaborately patterned carpet. There are a few distinct sitting areas, collections of chairs and sofas, a pianoforte, a whist table, a basket of embroidery supplies, and a roaring fire.

Silently, like she’s floating on air, the queen strides into the room and settles on a silk fainting couch. As if to discourage us from acknowledging her presence, she flicks open a peacock feather fan.

“What now?”

Greer asks.

A footman clears his throat, and we turn to him. “Per Her Majesty’s design, you will find six different stations.”

He gestures around the room to the golden pendant flags placed throughout. “You will complete the work of a station for ten minutes, then a bell will ring, and you will rotate. This will go on until there is only one young lady left, and she will be declared the winner and the recipient of the queen’s favor.”

It’s an endurance exercise, like the May Queen competition.

“Ready?”

the footman asks, and because we have no other choice, we say yes.

I sit first on the sofa by the basket of sewing supplies, figuring it’s a simple enough place to start. I’ve been sewing since before I could read.

Arranged in a row are six embroidery hoops, each tied with a silk ribbon that’s been embroidered with our names. I pick up the one that says Ivy.

Someone has already sketched the design in tracing pencil. I hold it up to the light to make out the letters. Brash and unrefined. A less pretty version of her mad, ruined sister.

My eyes well with tears as fury pulses through me.

At random, I choose another embroidery hoop, Greer’s. Traced on the fabric I find Destined to age as poorly as her mother, with half her social graces.

Emmy’s next. Untalented, unreliable, a blight on her family name.

“What is this?”

I ask in horror.

“Any bride of Bram’s will have to have thick skin. Don’t let the needle prick you, dear.”

The viscountess strolls casually into the other room, and I know this conversation is over. I swallow my anger and thread my needle.

Greer sits down at the pianoforte by the window.

Olive takes her place at a larger table covered with slips of paper.

Faith, Emmy, and Greer walk into an adjacent room.

It’s so ordinary, which makes it all the more sinister.

The footman rings a bell, and our ten minutes begin. The room is silent and uneventful for a few minutes, but then Marion misses a note and gasps, pulling her hand back from the keys as if she’s been burned.

In my distraction, I miss a stitch. There’s a sudden prick to my middle finger, like I’ve just been stabbed by an invisible needle. Blood beads on the tip and drips down the silver thread pinched between my fingers.

I glance at Olive, who is sitting with gritted teeth, bouncing her leg up and down uncontrollably.

From the other room comes the sound of voices, music, and then, suddenly, the smashing of porcelain. I keep my eyes down, terrified to miss another stitch.

I sew for another ten minutes, letting my eyes glaze over the horrible words I’m stitching, and then rotate to the next station, the pianoforte.

It doesn’t take long to realize why Marion gasped. I hit an incorrect A minor, and a sudden burn rips down my finger, right to the bone.

I jerk my hands back, and from across the room Olive cries out as the sewing needle pricks her.

The bell chimes after another ten minutes. A bead of sweat trickles down my spine. I’m stiff with terror, afraid of the pain that awaits me if I make a mistake.

My third station is the larger table. Scattered are lists of names—lords, ladies, other members of the peerage—and a diagram of a ballroom. She wants us to plan a seating chart.

I begin by arranging the names by seniority, bracing myself for whatever pain I’ll face if I get this wrong. I set down a name, and a shooting pain goes up my foot, through the joints of my ankle, then my knee, then my hip. I nearly buckle, but I’m too afraid to fall.

The bell rings. I rotate into the next room. The first task is to sit in a chair across from a footman who is playacting as a party guest telling an extraordinarily boring story about gardening. If you slouch or avert your eyes for even a second, an agonizing zip of pain goes down your spine.

The next rotation involves placing a porcelain plate on your head and walking the length of the room with perfect posture. Once you make one full lap, a footman places a second plate on your head, and then a third, and so on.

If you drop a plate, you must hold the shards in your hands as you make the next circuit.

The weight on top of my skull is heavier than I expected. I’m making my first circuit when the queen glides by, watching us. I don’t understand which part of this she enjoys. Is it our suffering? The power she has over us? Or is she just so bored after all this time, she can’t think of anything else to do?

She kicks up the corner of the rug with the tip of her silk slipper. My heel catches on it and I fall to my knees.

“That will never do, Lady Ivy. A princess must have perfect balance.”

I gather the shards in my hands and seethe. I make another turn, so angry I stumble again, and a second plate shatters at my feet.

The pieces leave tiny, stinging cuts along the edges of my fingers.

My final rotation is a solo country dance. The torture of this exercise is quickly revealed. If you miss a step, your knees buckle, sending you to the ground. I fall four times, each one harder than the last. Silent tears of pain stream down my face.

We must be halfway through the ten minutes when a shout startles me. I immediately fall to my knees as if cut like a marionette. The carpet bites into my skin through my thin stockings.

“Enough!”

Marion Thorne is standing in the other corner of the room at the porcelain plate exercise. A stack of plates lie shattered at her feet. The footman rushes to the shards and picks them up to place in her hands, but Marion doesn’t allow it. She sidesteps and, with one full swipe of her arm, topples the white porcelain plates stacked in the corner of the room. There must be hundreds of them, and they fall with a mighty crash that shakes the floor.

The music stops. The other girls rush in from the adjacent room. Our hands are bleeding. We’re sweaty with an hour’s worth of effort, all of us panting.

“Enough!”

Marion says once more. “If Bram wants me as his wife, he knows where to find me.”

She storms out of the room, leaving nothing but a swinging door and stunned silence in her wake.