The Rose Bargain

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“No,”

I whisper. I turn to Olive, who looks stricken, her face parchment white as she stares down at the paper. On each newspaper is a number written in the corner. Mine is emblazoned with a bold 1, though what I did to win, I don’t understand.

Someone is weeping across the hall. I race to Marion and Faith’s room to find Emmy in tears and Marion holding Faith in her arms.

“She killed her?”

Emmy asks.

“All because of a stable boy?”

Faith adds.

Greer wouldn’t have done this, so it must have been the queen, punishing us for disrespect just like she promised she would.

“We can’t let this go on—”

I manage through my tight throat.

Without another word I race across the dew-damp lawn on my bare feet and in my nightdress.

My lungs scream as I climb the stairs to Emmett’s room two at a time. But the physical pain is nothing compared to my breaking heart.

I burst through the painting on the wall and find him tying his cravat in the mirror.

He jumps as I barrel in. “Ivy?”

For a moment I say nothing. I just stand there, trying to catch my breath, and end up sobbing instead. Big, hiccupping, body-racking sobs. Emmett races across the room and catches me in his arms before my knees hit the carpet.

“She killed her—”

I gasp. My tears leave splotches all over his freshly pressed shirt. “She killed her.”

“What? What are you talking about? Breathe, please.”

He lowers me to the edge of his bed. “Put your head between your legs, it will help.”

He gently guides me into the position, but Pig keeps trying to climb on my lap, making it near impossible. Emmett scoops the tiny dog under one arm and with his free hand, he brushes the tears from my cheeks.

“That’s it.”

He takes a deep breath. “Just breathe.”

“The—”

I mean to say the queen’s lesson, but it’s as if my tongue has suddenly inflated and I’m choking on it. In my panic, I’ve forgotten I cannot tell him outright. I’m going to have to be clever about this.

Wait. “Get Faith,” I demand.

“What?”

“Just do it.”

Fifteen minutes later, Emmett comes back through the tunnels, Faith beside him. She’s still wrapped in her dressing gown, her eyes made an electric blue by the ring of red around them.

I stare pointedly at her. “She said we couldn’t talk to anyone else about her lessons, but she said nothing about speaking to each other.”

I’m angry that it took me this long to put it together.

“What?”

Emmett mutters, confused.

“Faith,”

I begin. “I desperately want to tell Emmett about the private lessons the queen has been giving us.”

Her eyes light up as realization dawns on her. “Yes, of course. We’ve been so stupid.”

I tell Faith everything I want to tell Emmett, while he listens silently behind us. I go through lesson by lesson, the maze, the etiquette class, the tea party, the way we’ve been ranked and wounded. Emmett looks as if he might be sick as I recall the way she showed up at the cottage and threated to kill us if we stopped cooperating. Faith chimes in occasionally with her own details. Finally, we reach the subject of Greer. Faith was clever enough to bring the newspaper along with her. She drops it on Emmett’s lap.

The blood drains from his face as he reads the headline. “She killed her for this?”

“It has to be her. I promise you it wasn’t Greer,”

I answer. There’s so much regret weighing heavily in my stomach, I fear I might be sick with it all over the floor. I should have been kinder, more forgiving. I should have asked her more questions when she brought up Joseph. I could have done more for her yesterday.

Emmett pulls on his coat. “Then I have to tell Bram. He won’t let this continue.”

On the way back across the lawn, Faith reaches over and squeezes my hand. “I might owe you my life.”

I feel dead inside, like all my sorrow has burned through me, leaving nothing but a husk. “Don’t mention it,”

I say flatly.

Viscountess Bolingbroke and Queen Mor leave us alone in our cottage for the rest of the day. If I had to guess, she’s letting us stew in our fear and agony over the loss of Greer.

It’s long dark when a footman arrives with a summons for dinner. No lady’s maids come to get us. We dress each other in sorrowful silence and cross the lawn hand in hand, all five of us in a line.

The candlelit dining room goes deadly silent as Queen Mor strides in and takes her place at the head of the table. She’s wearing a gown of forest-green silk, her hair in an intricate pattern of braids. She doesn’t sit down.

I hate her, violently. I ball my hands into fists under the table to keep from launching myself across the table and hitting her.

All my hope now lies in Emmett’s plan, and the thought that soon I will have the power to punish her as thoroughly as she deserves.

“I thought we’d all agreed to keep our time together between us.”

Her voice booms across the space, vibrating at a frequency I feel in my rib cage. “Today my son came to me and insisted I put an end to our lessons. He’s got such a soft heart, that boy. He doesn’t share my revulsion with having a group of snotty little aristocrats make demands. While we may disagree on this, it simply isn’t worth the trouble. I’ll do it better with the next batch. Fifty years passes by so quickly.”

We shift uncomfortably at the reminder of how disposable we are to her. “Your season is coming to an end early. Without any more lessons, I see no reason to prolong it. Bram will propose at the Kendalls’ ball Saturday evening.”

That’s the day after tomorrow. I thought I had twelve weeks to make Bram fall in love with me. We’ve had only five. Panic rises in me. I thought I had more time.

Emmy’s grip on her knife tightens. Faith and Marion share a tense glance.

“I hope you’re pleased with yourselves. I won’t forget this,”

Queen Mor says.

She sweeps out the door. “Have a pleasant dinner.”

I can’t stand it anymore. I wait a minute or two, just long enough to be sure she’s gone, then push back from the table and walk out the door, down the stairs, and into the twilight.

I’m waiting for the guards to stop me, but no one says a word as I stride out of the gates and onto the street. I’m not naive enough to imagine it won’t get back to her, I simply no longer have it in me to care.

There’s a patter of footsteps behind me. I turn to find an out-of-breath Faith. “Ivy, slow down!”

She pauses to hike up the heavy silk skirts of her evening gown, and then falls into pace by my side “Damn, you’re a fast walker. Where are you going?”

“To see if Greer is really dead.”

“All right, then,”

Faith says.

We walk a minute or two, until we hear more running, quick on our heels. “Wait!”

Olive calls, her ginger hair flying behind her. “Wait for us!”

A noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob escapes my mouth as I see Olive, Marion, and Emmy jogging up the street.

“What are we doing?”

Emmy asks.

“I’m following Ivy to make sure she doesn’t get herself killed,”

Faith replies.

“I’m following Faith,”

Marion says.

“I’m not letting you go on an adventure without me,”

Olive says.

Emmy gestures to herself. “Typical middle child, can’t bear to be left out. She can’t kill all of us, there has to be someone left for him to marry.”

I’m properly crying now, both in sadness for Greer and overwhelmed with the rush of love I feel for these girls.

I keep walking, feeling braver and less hollow than before. “Let’s go, then.”

It takes about a half hour to reach Belgravia, and though we keep anxiously glancing behind us, no one follows. It’s a quiet night in London, with just a few carriages trotting past us into the blue spring evening.

We don’t bother knocking on the door of the Trummers’ grand limestone mansion. No one we’re looking for would be inside.

The girls follow me around back, to the mews where the horses are kept. I knock on the side of the stable, but the door is already open. “Hello?”

I whisper. “Anyone in here?”

A stable boy no older than fifteen jumps in surprise out of one of the stalls.

He wipes his dirty hands on his apron. “Miladies.”

He offers us a startled little bow.

“We’re looking for Joseph,” I say.

The boy takes off his cap and fidgets with it. “I’m sorry I can’t be of help. He didn’t show up for work this morning. Is he in trouble?”

“Did he leave anything?” I ask.

The boy looks confused. “Just a few of his tools.”

“But not all of them?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t think so, no.”

“Thank you. That’ll be all.”

“I thought you were going to speak to her parents,”

Faith says as we walk back to the palace.

I shake my head. There’s nothing the Trummers could say to me. If I know anything about them, they’re probably inside, mourning not Greer, but the loss of their social standing.

A weak smile spreads across my face. “What if they got out? What if they’re together?”

“Or what if she killed him too?”

Marion replies. Faith elbows her.

It’s a possibility as well, one I’ve considered. “But now we have hope. We didn’t have that before.”

I tip my face up to the stars and send a wish to my friend, wherever she may be, that she is safe and whole, in the arms of a boy who loves her. I picture her halfway to Gretna Green by now, in the back of a carriage, in love and free. That is how I’ll choose to remember her.

The guards offer no hint of displeasure as they open the gates to welcome us back to the palace grounds. The rest of the girls go back to the cottage, but I wave them on, too restless to sit inside in front of the fire.

The gravel path is lit with torches that offer only flickering views of the expansive green lawn.

“Ivy?”

a voice whispers in the dark.

“Bram?”

He comes striding up the path, smiling that heartrending Bram smile, the one that makes him look lit from within.

“Terrible day,” he says.

“The absolute worst.”

He opens his arms, and I fall into them, burying my head against his chest. For a long while he just holds me. For once, I’m not thinking about making him fall in love with me, I’m just letting myself be held when I need it so badly.

He pulls back and picks up a loose curl that has fallen over my shoulder. “I’d do anything for you, Ivy.”

I can’t help the blush that rises in my cheeks.

We crunch down the gravel path to a copse of trees by the edge of a pond, far enough from the torches that the light doesn’t reach us.

He leans in, and in that split second, all I can think of is Emmett. I’ve been trying desperately not to think about that night at the inn, but I can’t help it. It comes back to me in flashes. His hands in my hair, the hungry pressure of his lips, the solid planes of his body against mine.

Bram’s lips brush mine, and I banish all thoughts of Emmett. Bram is good and kind and wants me.

I pull Bram closer to me, gripping the width of his shoulders. The kiss grows more urgent, and he slips his tongue behind my teeth.

He’s kissing me like he means it. My veins thrum with the knowledge of his want. Bram may be a prince, he may not even be human, but I have all the power here.

I pull back and look at him. We’re both panting, and he’s nearly unbearably pretty in the moonlight. I reach up and trace the line of his perfect eyebrows, his sharp jaw, the hollows of his cheekbones. I tuck a lock of hair behind his ear to get a look up close at the slightly pointed tip.

“That’s a start,” I say.

He smiles, and I can’t help but poke his dimple. He presses his face into my hand. “Good. Because I do not intend for it to be the end.”

“Where is Emmett? I didn’t see him tonight,”

I ask Lottie later as she takes down my hair.

Her fingers hesitate. “He’s left. Gone on a hunting trip or something.”

He said he never had the stomach for hunting. Gone. Why didn’t he say goodbye?

“When will he be back?”

“Not for a while, I presume. He took enough clothes for a month or two. His valet was complaining about it all afternoon.”

“When his brother is about to get engaged? That seems odd.”

Lottie just shrugs. “Classic Emmett. Never found an important event he couldn’t weasel his way out of. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you,”

Lottie says. “He wrote a note to Faith. I delivered it this morning. Perhaps she has more details.”

I frown at myself in the mirror. “Perhaps.”

“Oh!”

Lottie exclaims. “Speaking of De Veres.”

She pulls my note, the one addressed to Emmett’s father, out from the front pocket of her apron.

“Prince Consort Edgar is also away, has been for weeks apparently.”

“Why?”

Lottie’s brows furrow. “You know, it’s the strangest thing, absolutely no one knows. No word has come from him at all.”

A cool breeze comes from the cracked window, but that’s not why I feel suddenly cold. I’m hit with the realization that the season is nearly over and I have been left completely on my own.

Faith Fairchild

The first time I realized my mother was lying to me, I was four years old. She tucked me into bed, kissed my forehead, and whispered to me what she always whispered.

“Good night, my sweet girl. Say your prayers, and may your papa in heaven watch over you.”

I had been aware for some time that my family was different from other children’s families. My mother and I lived on the top floor of a boardinghouse, just the two of us. Other children had siblings and fathers and big green lawns to run around on, but I had only my mother and the little world we created.

But that day was different. The first thing I noticed was that there was a man in our flat. I don’t think a man had ever been there before. There were always boarders in the house. They taught me to play chess in the shared parlor downstairs or let me help them hang their laundry in the garden outside, but inside our attic, it was always just my mother and me.

The man was tall and broad, with a sneering sort of face and big, blocky eyebrows.

The second thing I noticed was that the man was making my mother cry.

The memory is fuzzy now, fourteen years later. I think I must have just woken up from a nap. But I do remember what the man said when I climbed onto my mother’s lap to wipe away her tears. “I just wanted to see my daughter.”

“You can see her whenever you like,”

my mother replied.

He paced the room, too large for it. I worried that he was going to knock over the wooden cradle where my doll slept. “You know that’s not true,” he said.

I realized at once that this strange man was my father—that my mother had been lying to me my whole life. She had told me my father was a sailor who died at sea. Every night I prayed for him, but my father was right here in front of me.

I learned a valuable lesson that day: no one is to be trusted, anyone could be lying at any time, even the people you love most.

I wasn’t brave enough to confront my mother about it until I was ten. She crumpled like a house of cards and told me everything, explaining that my father was a lord of a nearby estate. When my mother was in his employ as a maid, they had an affair. Affair wasn’t the word she used, but I was old enough to glean her meaning. He was unwilling to claim me, and he sacked my mother unceremoniously the moment she told him she was with child.

Still heartbroken after all these years, my mother cried as she spoke about him. I feel guilty about the disdain I felt for her in that moment. I vowed I would never be that pathetic over something as trivial as a man. My next thought was about burning his estate to the ground. We weren’t very much alike, my mother and I.

I left home a few years later, moving to London all by myself at fourteen to study full-time at the Royal Ballet School.

Dancing calmed my racing thoughts. I couldn’t control much about my life, but I could control my body. I loved the rules of ballet, how concrete they were. The ballet mistress hit the backs of my ankles with rulers until I could do the perfect tendu or frappé or plié, and I never could explain to anyone else how I relished every moment.

I worked for hours in front of the mirror, until my muscles were burning and I was soaked through with sweat, but it was all worth it for those few moments onstage, when it truly felt like I was flying.

The days were long and lonely. I missed my mother, we were too dependent on each other, and even though I knew it was unhealthy, I longed for her.

She got sick when I was sixteen. I took six months off from school to return to Brighton and care for her in that attic room of ours. But no amount of love or warm broth could fix her lungs. I soothed her as she coughed so hard her ribs broke, hacking up clot after clot. I held her as she took her final, rattling breaths, and then I returned to London and danced until my feet were bloody and I couldn’t feel anything.

I met Emmett the next summer. He was sitting in the front row, watching me with those big, wounded deer eyes of his.

I found him waiting in my dressing room backstage with an armful of two dozen red roses. I kissed him before I even told him my name. Kept kissing him until the roses were dropped on the ground, forgotten.

Emmett continued attending shows and meeting me in my dressing room afterward. He begged me to let him take me to the theater or buy me extravagant gifts, but I didn’t want things like that from him. More than anything, I think we both needed someone to talk to about our unyielding grief. He held my hand as I cried about how much I missed my mother, and I pushed his hair out of his teary eyes as he told me about his governess and the father he couldn’t speak to.

It wasn’t love—neither of us held any illusions about that—but it was a life raft when we both desperately needed something to cling to.

Sometimes we’d kiss until our lips bruised and we felt nothing at all. But more often than not, we didn’t touch each other at all. We sat on opposite ends of the room and listened while the other spoke. Emmett had walls a thousand feet high, and I wasn’t much of a climber, but we were there for each other.

I’m still not sure how my father found out about my dancing career, but I suspect it had something to do with the rumors that started flying about me and Emmett.

It had been six months since we’d met, and my name was now regularly whispered in clubs and drawing rooms around town. Prince Emmett and that ballerina, they’d sneer.

Men sent flowers to my dressing room, hoping to steal me away from the prince as a point of pride, but I never answered the door for any of them.

Then one night my father turned the knob without knocking. I hadn’t seen him in fourteen years, hadn’t thought about him in nearly as many.

It took me a moment to recognize him, but that sneering expression was unmistakable. Sometimes I saw the same look on my own face in the moments I hated myself the most.

“You will stop this now,”

he boomed. “You have disgraced our family enough.”

I genuinely had no idea what he was on about, and my blank expression served only to enrage him further. “No daughter of mine will make her living as a dancer and a mistress.”

He spit the words out like curses.

“The dancer part is true, but I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re referring to when you say mistress,”

I answered coolly, eyeing him behind me in the mirror.

“Are you telling me the rumors of you and Prince Emmett De Vere are unfounded?”

“I can’t be his mistress, he’s unmarried.”

He didn’t think my joke was very funny.

“You bring disgrace on this family.”

“You made it clear that I wasn’t a member of your family. You wouldn’t even pay for Mother’s headstone.”

She wouldn’t have one at all if Emmett hadn’t paid for it behind my back after listening to me cry about it one night.

“Don’t insult me with your insolence.”

“I’m the one being insulted.”

Just then there was a knock at the door, and a ruddy-faced woman in a high-necked blue gown poked her head in. Behind her skirts peeked two little girls, no older than eight and ten.

A mask fell over my father’s face, and he smoothed out his suit jacket. “I thought I told you to wait outside for me, sweet,”

he said to the woman.

“I tried, but they had other ideas,”

the woman answered with a smile. The two little girls pushed past her, giggling, and stormed into my dressing room. Their hair, the exact same shade of brown as mine, was tied back in ribbons. They had my eyes too; the resemblance took my breath away. It was like looking at myself as a little girl.

“Can we get her autograph, Papa, please?”

they whined, jumping from foot to foot.

Too stunned to speak, I grabbed a fountain pen and scrawled my name on their programs.

“You looked just like a princess up there,”

the little one whispered to me.

I couldn’t answer. My eyes burned with tears, and I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, all that would come out would be a sob.

“We’ll meet you in the lobby,”

the woman said to my father, and she herded the two little girls out behind her.

“Your sisters,”

he said tightly once they were gone.

“I gathered.”

My voice cracked. “What does your wife think you’re doing back here with me?”

“I don’t keep secrets from my wife. She knows who you are, as does half of town, it seems.”

I was surprised to hear him say it. I’d only been vaguely aware of the rumors. “Your status as a particular favorite of Prince Emmett’s has gotten people talking, and because of your clumsy affair, tongues are wagging all over town about your parentage. We lived in peace before your selfish scandal.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“No, but it is your problem.”

“What do you expect me to do?”

“You’re going to quit the ballet; you’re going to stop seeing Prince Emmett, and you’re going to enter the season as a respectable debutante and make a suitable match.”

The air left my lungs. I couldn’t stop dancing. The idea of it felt like dying. “You can’t make me do that.”

“As it happens, I can. You’re looking at the newest patron of the Royal Ballet. As your employer, I’m sorry to inform you that your contract is terminated. My mother will pose as your godmother and sponsor your coming-out in society this spring. I am sorry. It gives me no pleasure to do this.”

Tears had begun to fall at this point and I loathed myself for it. I vowed I’d never let him see me weak. I felt ten years old again, wanting to burn his fancy house to the ground. I felt selfish bitterness toward those sweet girls in the hall who had the same face as me, who got to be children in the way I was never allowed.

“You can’t make me participate. I’ll smash glasses at dinner. I’ll be a wallflower at balls.”

“That is your choice, but know that if you don’t cooperate, you will never see those girls again. Your sisters will want a relationship with you, Faith.”

I’d had no family since Mother died.

“I’ll consider it,” I said.

“I’ll be in touch.”

He strode out of my dressing room, leaving me in pieces in his wake, just as he always did.

I took a carriage directly to Kensington Palace and screamed at the guards until they let me in to see Emmett.

As I told him all that my father had said, he paced on his long legs, making big figure eights, Pig nipping at his heels.

“I’m so sorry, Faith,” he said.

I stood and crossed the room to him. “Marry me.”

It was a little satisfying to see Emmett shocked. He stopped dead in his tracks and turned to me. “What?”

“Marry me, please, Emmett.”

“Why?”

“Because I know you. I like you. Please don’t leave me to the horrible men of the ton. I can’t bear the thought of being the second wife to some half-alive duke, shuttled off to a country house so my new husband can keep his mistresses in London. Please, Emmett, I can’t bear it.”

I nearly collapsed in his arms, crying, but kept my dignity.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

I snapped.

He looked so full of pity as he replied, “Because we do not love each other.”

I wouldn’t deny it. I did not love him, and I knew he did not love me. “But we like each other. That’s more than most people get.”

“Be honest with me, Faith. Do you think you could ever love me?”

There was no sense in lying. We didn’t do that to each other. There was so much I admired about Emmett. He was generous and funny and thoughtful. But it had been clear for months that he was never going to truly let me in. I couldn’t love someone content to keep me at arm’s length like that. We didn’t fit together as we should. “I don’t think so, no.”

He shook his head sadly. “Then I cannot marry you.”

He was a romantic in the way only men can afford to be. In that moment, I hated him for it. I picked up a crystal goblet from the table at his bedside and hurled it at him. He ducked, and it shattered against the wall.

I stopped in the doorway. “I’m going to hate you forever for this.”

Emmett’s eyes welled up with tears, like he had any right to be sad. “I hope that’s not true.”

I slammed the door without another word, and he didn’t chase me. I hated him for that too. Some part of me still does.

He called to see me at my father’s home three days later with an unexpected proposal. “Bram is going to take a bride this season. It should be you.”

“Me?”

“Bram is kind. He’ll be a good husband.”

I knew Bram a little from my time with Emmett. He had accompanied us sometimes on walks around the grounds or games of croquet. He was good-natured and easy to be around. He always treated me with respect. I could do much worse than having him as a husband. Even if he didn’t choose me to be his bride, my father couldn’t say I didn’t try at having a proper season. It was my favorite kind of gambit, the kind I won either way.

“With my help, he’ll pick you.”

We shook on it like we were old pals, and for the first time, I felt hope bloom within me. I wished I could speak through time back into that little attic room and tell my mother her only daughter was going to be a princess.

I met with Emmett for a month leading up to the season and learned all of Bram’s likes and dislikes, practiced making conversation and dancing. Emmett had an odd hyperfixation on a maypole, but if there was one thing I was confident about, it was my dancing, so I didn’t worry much.

I dressed for the Pact Parade, certain that the winner was going to be me. I wore my confidence like armor, waiting until the last possible second to sign my name, just as Emmett had instructed me. He’ll want to feel as if he’s earned you. Bram is noble like that. Along with Emmett, my grandmother—posing as my godmother—put me through a gauntlet of lessons regarding society manners. I had a new trousseau of dresses and diamonds in my hair.

The two bright spots of my days were Hattie and Bea, my sisters, who had lit up the dark corners of my life. I despised my father with every fiber of my body, but he had made good on his promise of a relationship with my sisters.

I fought as hard as I possibly could during the May Queen competition, but was satisfied with second place. Emmett was adamant that I win, but what did it matter in the end, when I was prepared to shape myself into Bram’s perfect girl.

Later that day, when I entered the queen’s throne room to make my bargain, I felt very clever indeed.

“I want to know when people are lying to me,”

I told her. I thought of me as a little girl and the lies my mother told me about my father. I hated dishonesty above all things.

The queen smiled a knowing smile. It looked unnatural on her sharp face. “In return, you may never tell a lie again.”

“Deal,”

I said. I wasn’t a hypocrite. It seemed an easy enough bargain, better than giving up a toe and never being able to dance properly again.

“Is that what you’re afraid of, dishonesty?”

she asked as soon as the deal was done. I thought on her odd question for a moment.

“I’m scared of all sorts of things. Of losing my freedom, of my body failing and having to stop dancing, of loving someone again and losing them like I lost my mother.”

“My, you are honest,”

the queen replied.

I didn’t know exactly what form my bargain would take, but I soon found out.

Emmett came to me that night in the garden of my grandmother’s house. “It can’t be you. I’m sorry. I’ve changed my mind.”

He stood with his hands in his pockets and had the audacity to look sad for me.

A little ping went off in my head. “You’re lying.”

“I’m sorry.”

He was gone in the dark before I could argue further. Emmett was always slippery, too hard to pin down, but I think he liked it that way.

We moved into Caledonia Cottage for the remainder of the season, and on the first day, all of Bram’s suitors went around the table and shared their bargains. Marion Thorne made up some half-hearted lie about giving up the ability to smell flowers so that she would experience no more headaches. Another little ping went off in my head, and I knew for certain she was lying. But why?

Then Emmett started flitting around Ivy Benton, who wasn’t nearly as good at sneaking out at night as she thought she was.

If he wanted to ignore me? Fine. Wanting to replace me was unforgivable.

For weeks, it was only Marion who seemed to notice or care. I couldn’t lie to her about why I was upset, so I told her the truth.

“He’s an idiot,” she said.

“You’re right.”

It didn’t change anything, but it felt better to no longer be alone.

At first it was small things, the way she laid her hand on my knee or her head on my shoulder. I’d never felt butterflies like that before. I thought everyone else was being dramatic when they’d described it, but with Marion next to me, I suddenly understood.

Marion kissed me for the first time in the garden of Caledonia Cottage under the big weeping willow tree, and it wasn’t until her lips touched mine that I felt it, that feeling that had always been missing with Emmett.

“I’ve wanted to do that for so long,”

she whispered against my mouth, and I didn’t need the queen’s bargain to know she was telling the truth.

“I wish you would have done it sooner.”

From that moment on, we were inseparable.

I was stupid to ask Emmett to kiss me at Count Doncaster’s ball. I was so mad for Marion, I thought maybe the pressure of the season had warped my sense of reality and I was imagining the force of my feelings for her. I pulled Emmett into a drawing room and begged him to kiss me.

“Why?”

he asked, his eyes soft. He always was exceptionally pretty.

“I need to compare it to something else.”

He leaned in slowly, reluctantly, overthinking everything as usual. Emmett and I are good at kissing each other, we’ve had plenty of practice, but that kiss in the Doncasters’ drawing room felt nothing but hollow.

I pulled back, smiling. “I felt nothing.”

He grinned. “I should be offended.”

“But you’re not.”

“I’m happy for you, I hope you know that. I’ll do all I can for you both.”

“What about Ivy?”

I asked him. “What will you do?”

“I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”

His voice turned remote.

I walked toward the door. “We don’t do that. Don’t start lying to me now.”

“There’s never going to be anything between Ivy Benton and me.”

And my gift from the queen told me he thought he was telling the truth. I didn’t feel jealous. I just felt sad for him.

Later that night, I told Marion about my silly kiss with Emmett and all that it confirmed for me. She trailed her finger over my leg, and I finally worked up the nerve to ask her the question I’d wanted to since the first time I saw her at the Pact Parade.

“Is there a reason you pretended we’d never met?” I asked.

Her finger stopped. She looked up at me, brown eyes wide with shock. “What?”

“That first day of the season, you introduced yourself to me like we’d never met before.”

“We hadn’t.”

Marion’s brows were furrowed as she searched her memory. “I would have remembered, I’m sure of it.”

I knew she wasn’t lying; I would have been able to tell if she was. I was hurt that she didn’t remember.

It was a few months before my father had arrived in my dressing room and mucked everything up. Marion, her mother, and her sister were in their private balcony box for a performance of La Sylphide. Her mother, a patroness of the ballet, brought her daughters backstage after the performance to meet a few of the dancers.

Marion looked so confident, that was the first thing I noticed about her. She held her head like she knew she was the kind of person who mattered. I curtsied as I met her family, and her mother smiled warmly and said, “Oh, no need for all that.”

Marion’s sister was chatty, but Marion said hardly a word, just looked at me with those clever eyes of hers.

“It was nice meeting you,”

she said in a voice softer than what I’d expected.

“You as well, Lady Thorne.”

And then she was gone. I didn’t see her again until the Pact Parade, where she introduced herself. It was silly of me to think she’d remember the meeting, no matter how significant it felt to me.

“I would have remembered meeting you,”

Marion says once more.

“You did, at the ballet with your mother and sister.”

“I haven’t been to the ballet since I was a child.”

“That’s not true, you came last fall to La Sylphide. I played a witch.”

Marion sits down and puts her head in her hands. “What else happened?”

“I made polite conversation with your family while you stood staring at me, completely silent.”

Marion groans in embarrassment.

“No, I found it rather charming,”

I say with a laugh. “I complimented your necklace, which you tried to take off and give to me. I politely declined, but the next day, there it was in my dressing room, wrapped in a bow. I wore it the day of the Pact Parade, but you didn’t even remember me, so I got too embarrassed to wear it again. I have it upstairs.”

Marion looks up at me, tears welling in her eyes. “I know what she took from me.”

I sit down next to her and put my head on her shoulder. “What?”

“Queen Mor, my bargain. I traded away my happiest memory in exchange for writing talent. Faith, meeting you must have been my happiest memory.”

She was telling the truth.

I blink away the memory and come back to the downstairs drawing room of Caledonia Cottage, where Ivy Benton sits next to me, her lips bruised like she’s just been kissing.

Ivy is always lying; I’m sure it’s Emmett’s doing. It’s why I had to move out of that room with her and in with Marion. I don’t regret that decision at all now, even though Marion drives me mad, staying up all night, scribbling in her endless notebooks.

I feel a little guilty that Ivy thinks I don’t like her because of her feelings for Emmett. I actually think she and Emmett would make a good match. How unfortunate that it’s impossible for them to be together.

It seems only determined anti-romantic Ivy Benton was strong enough to scale bleeding-heart Emmett’s thousand-foot-high walls. I don’t even know if she’s realized yet just how devoted he is to her. He never looked at me the way he looks at her, not even close.

That was part of Emmett’s and my problem. He was never practical enough for me. Marion is all practicality. Shoved under her mattress is a timetable of ships leaving London for ports all around the world. At night, we pore over it and dream about the places we could go together. Next to the timetable are the half-finished manuscripts along with lists of publishers and the price they’ll pay per word once they’re finished.

It’s easy enough to leave England. Queen Mor takes pride in telling her subjects we are not her prisoners. But returning will be difficult. Once we leave, the ports will be shut to us, by any legal means, forever.

The last day before the queen’s announcement of the winner feels like the stillness just before a thunderstorm rolls in on the horizon. None of us quite knows what to say to each other. We pack our trunks while Emmy and Olive crack jokes; we’re all moving out of this cottage regardless of what tomorrow’s results are.

We did the calculations last night, all gathered around the sitting room fireplace. Ivy Benton is winning, barely, with a score of 3.3. Marion and Emmy are tied at 3.6, and Olive and I are tied with 4. The queen never said explicitly that our scores would determine the winner, so it could be anyone’s game.

If it’s Marion or me, we’ll run.

I hope it’s Olive, for her and Bram’s sake. She’s been pacing up and down the halls, ranting that the scores could mean nothing, that it doesn’t matter that she’s losing.

All day, we wait, yet no footman comes to gather us. No one has the stomach to eat, despite Olive carrying tray after tray of tarts and scones and puddings from the kitchen. Just when we think she’s done, she comes out with another.

It isn’t until I’m in bed that I’m shaken awake by a footman. “Come with me, miss.”

It’s the grand finale. I can hear the orchestra reaching its final crescendo. It’s nearly time to take my bow. I am nothing if not a seasoned performer.