21. March 6, 1714 London, England
Beatrix moves deftly around the chamber she has known for nearly eight years.
She packs a lone leather traveling bag in the dark, afraid even a single candle flame will arouse the suspicions of the housemaids or the butler or, heaven forbid, the earl.
She gathers only the most necessary belongings to keep the bag light and the travel easy.
It’s a good night for escape, the waning moon hidden by a heavy cover of low clouds, the ground still hardened by frost. She stuffs another pair of wool stockings into the bag and fastens it closed with a snap. A pang of sadness rings through her at the finality of the sound.
She thought she had more time. She hasn’t even spent eight years at the manor.
Jane has never once commented on how she has grown and aged, while Beatrix hasn’t.
The earl has never given her a sidelong glance.
Even the gossiping scullery maids haven’t whispered about her yet. She should have had years left.
Lady Kendall has ruined any chance of that.
She could have been a marble statue, towering over Beatrix with skin as pale as milk. Her black hair was swept back in a tight bun, and her green eyes darted around the drawing room, as if she could see every speck of dust the maids had missed. Beatrix was wary of her. She was wary of Beatrix.
“May I ask who’s calling?” Beatrix asked the woman.
The corner of her mouth lifted, and she twirled on the spot, sending the skirts of her black mourning gown swirling around her ankles. “Don’t you know?”
Beatrix shook her head.
“I wasn’t aware there was more than one tragically widowed lady just come to town.”
Beatrix stared at her blankly. The woman stepped closer. “Oh, how interesting. Everyone is talking about it. All the lords and ladies and their servants. But evidently, not to you.” Her gaze bored into Beatrix’s. “Lady Kendall.”
Beatrix bobbed a clumsy curtsy and hurried from the room. She found Jane reading on her bed. “You have a visitor, m’lady.”
Jane didn’t look up from her page. “How horrible is he?”
Beatrix was caught in the middle of the bargain struck between Jane and her father after that first miserable spring.
He could parade any suitor he wished in front of Jane, and she had to humor the man for a single evening, but she would decide which one to marry.
The earl agreed, with one condition: that if she didn’t choose by her twenty-fifth birthday, he would.
Her father was relentless in his attempts to secure her a husband.
Jane was relentless in turning the men away.
But she was almost twenty-five. In a few weeks, the game would be over.
“A woman, m’lady,” Beatrix said.
Jane sat up at once.
“A Lady Kendall.”
“Prudence?” She leaped from her bed and dashed out of the room.
Prudence.
Beatrix laughed at Jane’s audacity. The engraving on the bracelet. She had puzzled over it, the night she stole it, but now, it finally made sense. Not a virtue her father wished her to aspire to. A name.
Beatrix has learned time’s greatest trick.
Not its ability to slowly take everything from you—your youth, your loves, your life.
It is the ease with which a single moment can change the course of history, a world turned upside down in a heartbeat.
Jane’s toppled the moment she walked into her drawing room and saw Prudence—Prue—sitting on the striped sofa.
They sat close, talked for hours over tea.
Jane was reluctant to let Prue go, but Prue took her hand and assured her she would return for dinner that evening.
Her touch lingered on Jane’s bare wrist until she turned a pretty shade of pink, and Prue’s lips curved into a secret, satisfied smile.
Beatrix offered to walk her to the door.
“You don’t like me,” Prue said, dropping what little pretense she had left.
“An odd thing for a lady to say to a maid,” Beatrix answered. Not that she was surprised. Lady Kendall wasn’t like any other lady she’d met.
“Oh, honestly, you are more than Jane’s maid,” she said. “It’s obvious she adores you, which means I value your opinion. Go on, spit it out.” She fixed Beatrix with a pointed stare as she tugged her gloves on.
“It’s obvious Lady DeSallowe adores you, too, m’lady,” Beatrix said carefully. “So where were you when she was so unwell?”
Lady Kendall’s lips twisted at the corner. “I asked you to get straight to the point, and you did. Admirable.” But then she turned serious. “If you must know, I was in Scotland, in the middle of bloody nowhere, with my husband. I came as soon as I could.”
“It’s been nearly eight years.”
“Believe me,” Prue said. “No one wishes my husband would have hurried up and died more than I do.”
She was reaching for the door when Beatrix decided she had nothing to lose, except another few years with a roof over her head and hot food in her belly and a soft bed to sleep in every night.
But she hadn’t been hiding away in Scotland eight years ago.
She had been here, with Jane, watching her waste away. “Don’t you dare hurt her again.”
Lady Kendall turned back to her. She didn’t deny the accusation. “You were a seventeen-year-old girl once, weren’t you? I was reckless.”
Beatrix had been both things, too. Was still reckless. Hadn’t she just threatened a lady?
“But as you say, it’s been eight years. I have no intention of ever hurting Jane again. I swear it.”
She believed Lady Kendall’s oath, believed in the honesty of it. She didn’t swear to never hurt Jane again. That was naive, not to mention impossible. She swore she would never mean to, a promise she would need to strive to keep every day. A promise of time. Of love.
Beatrix reaches for her cloak. She has mended the black wool a few times, but it isn’t threadbare yet. It will last through the cool damp of spring, at least. She folds it neatly and drapes it over the leather case.
It is time for her to go.
She takes Jane’s traveling cloak from the wardrobe, the vibrant green of oak moss in summer. It will be warmer than her own but more noticeable in a crowd. She pulls the hood over her braided hair, down low over her face. She’ll sell it the first chance she gets.
Beatrix grabs the old black cloak and travel case from the bed and slips through the door into the hall. The clink of utensils on fine china pierces the heavy silence. She slinks down the back staircase and out into the night.
Beatrix deposits the case and cloak into the back of Lady Kendall’s carriage, just as they discussed. Soon, the earl would retire to his study with Jane’s latest suitor, and Prue and Jane would escape the manor and the city and the country, all the way to the-middle-of-nowhere Scotland.
Beatrix doesn’t know what her future holds.
Maybe she’ll find another job as a maid, or set herself up at a tavern, challenging hapless travelers who think they can outdrink her.
If she is lucky—if the plan works—they’ll bring gossip of Lady Jane DeSallowe’s impending marriage to a reclusive Scottish laird no one has ever heard of, but whom everyone will pretend they have.
And then, she hopes, she’ll hear nothing.
The news will turn stale. The earl will go along with it, to be free of his burdensome daughter, to save his reputation from hers.
He’ll let her go. She’ll live happily ever after.
It’s the sentiment of fools, but then again, this entire plan hangs on a fool’s hope.
Two fools’ hopes.
Three.