Chapter 2
The band still played light airs, conversation hummed around her, but Allegra Constantine frowned darkly.
Even that was a small act of rebellion – showing unacceptable emotion in public.
Her mama had told her many times that her countenance became off-putting – ‘unnecessarily unattractive’ – when she was not making a conscious effort to appear cheerful.
But she didn’t feel at all like making such an effort at the moment, even if her mother scolded her for it, as no doubt she would later when they were alone.
If she was indeed scowling and looking unfriendly, even intimidating, this was a perfect reflection of how she felt.
She was vexed, and she did not care who knew it.
In fact, she’d rather people did. This was also unladylike, of course, and ill-befitting her rather lowly situation in life, hence the rebellion.
Her mother, the terrifying Mrs Constantine, had a few years ago become celebrated in society for her skill as a matchmaker, since she had somehow found a good husband for her first child and a stellar one – a duke!
– for her second. No doubt the polite world was watching and waiting with avid interest to see how she did with her more intractable third daughter.
Both the older Constantine girls had married at the end of their first Season, and this was Allegra’s second, so the clock was ticking in a very public fashion.
Mrs Constantine’s previous success had been providential, since she had given birth to six daughters and no sons.
As if this misplaced fecundity wasn’t bad enough, her husband’s modest estate was entailed in the male line, and would therefore pass to a cousin when he died.
This cousin had selfishly married young to a lady of his own choosing, which meant he couldn’t even be bullied into wedding one of the family’s many surplus daughters, very likely Allegra herself, to keep the property – their home – in the family.
Perhaps that was why he’d done it. It was a brave man who could contemplate Leontina Constantine as a mother-in-law without flinching.
The thought of having her live with you for the remainder of her days (and she was not yet five and forty and in excellent health), in a house that had for many years been hers, and in her mind no doubt always would be, was altogether too much for any sensible person to consider.
Allegra, for one, couldn’t blame her cousin John in the least for taking steps to protect himself and ensure a tranquil future; she only wished she might do the same.
She was the Constantines’ middle child, and it was lonely in the middle.
Her two older sisters had been inseparable as they grew up, excluding her even from their fights, and her three younger sisters were a barely distinguishable mass of shrill, annoying scrubs, now fifteen, twelve, and nine.
Obviously, she could not be expected to make friends of any of them; they were far too immature and silly.
As a result, she’d always felt something of an outsider in the family, and now it was worse.
Sabrina and Viola had babies to occupy them, and the girls were still in the schoolroom, thinking themselves terribly ill-used because they were forced to labour over their books and practise daily at the pianoforte, but really without a care in the world, if they but knew it.
She’d been desperate to escape their company, to be taken seriously as a grown-up, but now she was, she’d realised adulthood had its drawbacks.
Only she, currently, was out in the world and the focus of Leontina’s relentless matrimonial plans.
And she loathed it. It wasn’t the dancing and the parties and the fine new clothes she disliked – she was only human.
It was the underlying purpose of the whole exercise, which induced in her a sense of panic that sometimes threatened to overwhelm her.
She had suitors, three of them, and they were all here today, so that she might compare them if she wished.
She’d always wanted suitors – the mere word had thrilled her when she too was young and foolish and desperate to escape the schoolroom – but the experience was nowhere near as agreeable as it had been in prospect.
Partly this was Viola’s fault, and partly, of course, it was the fault of the suitors.
Three years ago, when Viola, Duchess of Winterflood, had found herself in a delicate condition after eighteen months of marriage, all her unmarried sisters, her mother, and Miss Naismith, the then governess, had gone to stay with her at her husband’s country mansion.
They’d spent several months there, supporting Viola through the early stages of her pregnancy, and when Mrs Constantine and the rest had been obliged at last to return home, Allegra had stayed behind to keep her sister company.
Nobody had consulted her – she’d been left like an unwanted parcel.
And as a grumpy sixteen-year-old who was always very quick to take offence, she had been disposed to resent it, and to sulk, until she’d realised with an unwelcome flash of insight that it would have been pure cruelty to leave Viola alone with Edward.
The Duke had quite evidently cared a great deal for the prospective heir in her growing belly but very little for the wife who carried that child.
She was a vessel, not a person, in his eyes.
He was thirty years his wife’s senior; they had nothing to say to each other and less than nothing in common.
Viola had confessed as much, in the first serious conversation the sisters had ever shared.
I don’t think anyone should marry at seventeen, she’d said, and her words had struck home.
It might be possible for you to wait, and look about you, and one day, when you are ready, choose for yourself.
Allegra had been struck forcibly by her words.
She had avoided Viola’s fate by putting up a strenuous if passive resistance to her mother’s plans for her over the past year, since her debut last Season, but it seemed to her that Mama was now losing patience with her delaying tactics, and had no inclination to let her look about any longer.
When she pointed out in casual conversation this lady or that lady who lived an independent life and seemed excessively content doing so, her mother would reply with heavy emphasis that Lady Louisa, or whoever might currently be under discussion, was an earl’s daughter with a fortune of her own, and thus was able to live exactly as she pleased when less fortunate females – the great majority, in which the Constantine women were most definitely included – could not.
Even in her confusion and anger, Allegra was obliged to admit that none of this was her mama’s fault.
It would be childish to blame her when the truth was that the way the world was organised did her family no particular favours.
Mr Constantine was not a wealthy or a robust man, and when he died his unmarried daughters would have very little to live on apart from what their married sisters gave them.
Her own future, she was therefore forced to recognise, held very few options.
These were:
1. Marriage. A simple word for a complicated situation, full of unknown perils – look at Viola, and she was a duchess, for heaven’s sake. If her happiness could not be guaranteed, whose could?
2. Spinsterhood and a life with her mother. Forever. Too hideous a fate to be dwelt on.
3. Spinsterhood again, but as a dependant on Sabrina or Viola.
She would be one of those rapidly ageing women who ran upstairs to fetch the shawl, sat in the carriage facing backwards, and always, always could be placed next to the most boring guest at dinner, because she was of no consequence.
She would very soon become poor Allegra.
4. Life as a lady’s companion, which was much the same, but in a stranger’s house as a sort of servant, and paid a pittance for her trouble.
5. Going as a governess. Not a realistic prospect for someone who had simultaneously no great interest in other people’s children and surprisingly few solid accomplishments to her name, given her extensive education.
6. An early death from some unpleasant disease (at which, naturally, everybody would be very sorry, apart possibly from Beatrice, who as the next oldest sister would inherit her clothes and bedchamber, both of which she had always coveted).
When she had cried passionately that there simply must be other possibilities, she had been invited by her fond mama to list them, and had fallen silent because she couldn’t think of any.
Some ladies wrote novels or painted, and scraped a living that way, but she knew herself well enough to realise that she had neither the inclination nor the aptitude.
To follow such an unconventional path required a passion and commitment she simply didn’t possess.
If it was true that everyone was good at something and everyone had a place in the world, as kind Miss Naismith had always told them, she hadn’t yet found out what her special talent was.
Perhaps she, uniquely, hadn’t got one. Certainly it wasn’t archery. Or flirting.