Chapter 5
L’Académie Culturelle de la Grande-Bretagne
Mayfair, London
“He winked at me!”
Three voices at once clamored through Madame Dupré’s drawing room. “No!”
“Yes,” Calliope assured them. “Of all the no-good, rotten things he could have done, the scoundrel winked at me as if he and Lord Wellesby were in on some joke together and I was the punch line!”
Mina March clasped her hands in front of her, the white lace of her delicate gloves stark against the tanned, olive skin of her wrist. She’d gone outside without a parasol again, bronzing the small slice of flesh visible between glove and sleeve. “The scoundrels! What did you say?”
“I told the earl I wouldn’t marry him if I were marched to the altar at gunpoint.”
Rose Carrington gasped. “Oh, Calliope, what were you thinking?”
Daphne North clapped her hands delightedly, a ringlet of honey-colored hair slipping out of her bun to bounce against her cheek. “Oh, lay off, Rose. He deserved it.”
“Well, yes,” Rose said, eyeing Daphne’s hair, which was so naturally curly, it never wanted to stay put in any sort of fashionable coiffure, no matter how many pins Daphne’s maid crammed into her skull.
“But if anyone overheard her, it would cause quite the scandal. And besides, isn’t that why we’re here?
To find English husbands? Here, Daph, I’ll fix it for you. ”
Daphne sidled her chair closer to Rose, who immediately started fussing with her overzealous curls.
“Just because we’re here to find husbands,” Daphne argued, “does not mean we have to accept the first horrid offer that comes our way.”
“Here, here,” Mina agreed.
Out of the four of them, Mina was the most outraged at the marriage mart scheme their mothers had foisted upon them, and she let everyone know it.
Back home, Mina was progress personified, never looking into the past but always ahead to the future.
She was on the council of the New York Suffragettes Club, wore pantaloons on a regular basis, spent her free time writing political columns she then submitted to magazines under male pen names, and she had even been out hunting in Montana with her father and brothers.
The thought of coming to England to be paraded around like a china doll had been sheer torture for her, especially since she did not see the point in saving old, rundown country houses when the land could be used for more prosperous, progressive aims.
Aside from their shared dislike of being in England to find husbands, and for the fact that Mina and Calliope both liked to express their interests through writing, they could not be more opposite of each other if they tried.
Where Mina lived a full-steam-ahead-into-the-future sort of life, Calliope had been an avid lover of history since she was a little girl.
Perhaps it was because her father had fanned the flames of her curiosity when she was young, telling her stories of medieval knights protecting their ladies fair; of American legends such as Samuel Adams and Paul Revere; of the pyramids of ancient Egypt and the mysteries entombed in their depths.
Or maybe it was her father’s fit-to-bursting library shelves, crammed full of historical works that had daily accompanied her since she was old enough to read, such as Plutarch’s Lives and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Whatever it was, Calliope was utterly enchanted by stories of the past and lives lived long ago, and she felt a deep inclination toward protecting the land and the buildings where their history had unfolded, which was why she had joined the New-York Historical Society last year, to preserve them from people like Mina.
It was also why she had begun writing an account of her own, Historical Landmarks of New York and The Importance of Their Preservation, which Charlie had insisted on publishing as a serial through his father’s newspaper.
Unlike Mina, however, she did not have to use a male pseudonym, as Charlie had fought for her to be published under her own name.
She had been publishing her weekly article for nearly half a year before her mother had surprised her with two tickets to Southampton.
That had been another sore point between them—Calliope had told her she couldn’t possibly travel abroad whilst still in the middle of her research.
She had another six months to go at least before finishing her work, which, after being published in the paper, would be bound into a book of dark green leather with silver lettering on the front and gilded edges, complete with a thick, golden fabric marker delicately stitched with a silver rose-and-leaf pattern, all chosen by Calliope at Charlie’s request when she visited his publishing house.
But her mother, who had complained throughout Calliope’s childhood that the shape of her nose would suffer from the hours she spent cramming it into books, did not find Calliope’s ‘hobby’ (as she so kindly put it) amusing.
To Mrs. Hart, it was nothing more than a regrettable way for Calliope to pass the time until she found a husband, and while Calliope did very much look forward to the day when she might fall in love, get married, and start a family of her own, her desire was to find such a man in New York, where she could continue her research and write the other books waiting patiently at the back of her mind whilst her future children played at her feet.
Not in England, where the men barely tolerated her as it was, and where she highly doubted any potential husband would support her writing career, especially not when it was so early in its infancy.
That was why Calliope wasn’t worried about the possibility of someone having overheard what she’d said to the Earl of Hayward, nor to Lord Wellesby, for that matter.
Not only would it have been featured in the London Ladies’ if they had, along with the news of her “incident” on the side of the road, but she also did not care because she had no desire to marry an English lord.
This entire scheme was her mother’s doing, and Calliope would leave London husband-free if it killed her.
The only unfortunate thing about her episode being recounted in the paper was that her mother would be monitoring her actions very closely for the remainder of their stay.
Any small bit of freedom Calliope had possessed to walk home with her friends from Madame Dupré’s, or to take a stroll through Hyde Park, or even to wander through a crowded ballroom on her own, had been cast to the wind along with Calliope’s dinner.
“Was the earl handsome?” Rose asked now, slipping Daphne’s hair back into place.
Calliope rolled her eyes. “Not in the slightest.”
She must have been terribly drunk to find him so appealing. In fact, she was quite certain the next time she saw him with clear, sober eyes, she would find an ogre in his place, for only such an abhorrent creature could say the things he’d said to her that night.
But then there was his strong jaw, and those eyes, and that smile—
“Oh, she’s biting the inside of her cheek,” Daphne said. “She only does that when she’s lying.”
Calliope puffed out a breath. “I do not.”
“Do too.”
She sighed. “All right, I guess in the right lighting, and if I were standing very, very far away from him, I would say he’s not completely horrific looking.”
Rose and Daphne exchanged a look. Mina had taken off her gloves to stare at her fingernails, working the dirt from her cuticles as if she couldn’t think of a more boring topic.
“Well,” Rose said. “‘Not completely horrific looking’ is better than nothing.”
The clock above the mantel struck one as Madame Dupré strolled into the drawing room.
“Bonjour, mes filles,” she chirped, her mahogany cane held out in front of her.
“Good afternoon, Madame Dupré,” the four girls replied, their backs ramrod straight, hands folded in their laps.
“Today, we shall resume our lessons on the Wars of the Roses, followed by an oral exam on proper presentation at court, and finish with a lecture on British Impressionists. Miss Carrington, it is your turn to host the afternoon tea, so start preparing your topics of conversation now.”
As Madame Dupré began her lecture, Calliope turned her thoughts away from the Earl of Hayward and back to the diligent task that had marked her days since she’d set sail for England: making up arguments in her head that would finally convince her mother this was a fool’s errand and that they should return home, to New York.
Home. She nearly sighed at the thought of it. Good thing she hadn’t, though. Madame Dupré could be ruthless if she thought her students weren’t paying attention, as witnessed several minutes later when Madame caught Mina sleeping and startled her by giving her chair a solid thwack with her cane.