Chapter 34 #2
“The parlor?” Lucie glanced at the stove. “We could stay in the kitchen. There is something on—you have only just—it will want watching, surely, and—”
“It will keep.” Her mother said it gently but with the particular finality Lucie knew better than to argue with.
“I do not want half my attention on a pot, Lucie. I want to sit with you somewhere there is nothing to tend and nothing to stir and no reason for either of us to be forever getting up. I want you to have the whole of my attention.” A small pause.
“You have not had nearly enough of it this week. I am aware of that.”
There did not seem to be anything to say to this, so Lucie followed her mother through into the parlor.
They sat down together on the sofa and Lucie, who had been holding herself carefully upright since the garden a week ago, found that she did not especially want to hold herself upright any longer.
She reached for one of the small cushions and hugged it against her chest, and was visited, quite without invitation, by the memory of the night before the launch.
Of Kazrian arriving at the door, and of herself toppling over in her fright into a great soft castle of cushions and blocks.
She had been mortified at the time, but now she could not help but smile thinking of it.
The cushion was a comfort, and after a moment she did the other thing she had wanted to do in Lady Rivenna’s study and had been too well-bred to do there—she drew her feet up onto the sofa, tucked the cushion snug between her knees and her chest, and wrapped her arms around her shins.
Her mother watched her do it and said nothing, only shifted a little to make room.
“Part of the reason,” her mother began, then stopped and started again. “Part of the reason I have not spoken to you before now—it was not only the gowns. I have been trying to work out what to say. How to say it.” She smoothed a hand over her skirt. “How to apologize.”
Lucie’s head came up. “You? Why would you need to apologize?” The words came out half a laugh, incredulous. “Mother, if anyone in this house is to apologize, it is I. I am the one who—it should be me. It is entirely me.”
Her mother gave her a look. A long, level, faintly exasperated look. “For having fallen in love with someone?”
“With the wrong someone!” It burst out of her before she could stop it, all the pent week of it. “You have always made it so clear, Mother. Where the lines are, where our place is. You have said it my whole life. And I knew. I have always known exactly where the line was, and I—”
“Yes.” Her mother’s voice was quiet. “And that is rather the trouble, is it not.”
Lucie stopped.
“I have spent your whole life, Lucie, teaching you two girls to be perfect.” A rueful softening at the corner of her mouth.
“Charlotte, I grant you, appears to have slipped the lesson entirely and gone off to be exactly as much herself as she pleased, and I have long since given her up as a lost cause and a great trial and my own dear delight, all three at once.” The smile faded.
“But you. You took it to heart. Every word of it. You have been so careful, all your life. So very, very careful never to want the wrong thing, never to reach past where you were told you might reach, never to let a single soul down.”
“Do not be sorry for that.” Lucie freed a hand from around her knees, reached for her mother’s, and closed it tight. “They are good rules, Mother. They are good rules to live by.”
“They are.” Her mother turned her hand over and clasped Lucie’s between both of her own. “They are good rules. But even good rules can be carried too far. And I fear I taught them to you far, far too well.”
She was quiet a moment, looking down at their joined hands.
“I was always more careful than most,” she said.
“You know why. You know about your aunt.” A small, old grief moved across her face and was gone.
“What your father’s sister suffered—the way fae society spoke about her, about this whole family, over a match they decided was beneath them.
I watched it and I learned from it. I learned that a family like ours could not afford so much as a toe over the line.
That if we ever put a foot wrong, it would not be a small thing quietly forgotten.
It would be ‘that Fields family. Reaching above themselves again. Never did learn their place.’” Her mouth tightened.
“So I made very sure we always knew ours.”
“I know,” Lucie said softly. “I understand why.”
“But things are different now.” Her mother lifted her head, and there was something almost fierce in it.
“This is what I keep coming back to, Lucie, hunched over my stitching this whole week past, my mind going round and round. It has been more than twenty years, and things are not the same.” She pressed Lucie’s hand for emphasis.
“Consider only this. The most influential tea house in all of Bloomhaven, the very heart of fae society, is run today by a woman who is half human. I am well aware that society prefers to name her half fae, when it troubles to name her heritage at all, as though that were the only half that signified. But she is also, in fact, half human, Lucie. And when Lady Rivenna chose her, the whole of Bloomhaven was scandalized. But in time, they came round, and now no one thinks a thing of it.”
Lucie found she was holding very still, her heart beginning to pound faster.
“And the other matter—the matter that is different, the matter that is everything—” Her mother’s voice gentled.
“The Rowanwoods are not the Starspuns. They are not the family that told their son they would cast him off entirely if he dared to love a human woman. They are not going to do to your young lord what the Starspuns did to your aunt’s.
They support him. And in the world we live in, my darling, the support of a family like the Rowanwoods carries a very great deal of weight.
There is a shadow over their name, certainly—Miss Rosavyn’s manifestation has never come, and all of Bloomhaven knows it—but that is not nearly enough to diminish the Rowanwoods’ considerable influence. ”
Lucie stared at her. “Wait.” She sat up a little, the cushion falling to the side. “How do you know that? About the Rowanwoods supporting him? Where did you hear that?”
Her mother had the grace to look faintly, guiltily caught.
“Lady Rivenna came to the shop yesterday. For her final fitting.” A small pause. “She may have … told me a thing or two.”
“Yesterday!” Lucie let go of her mother’s hand to press both of her own to her face. “She came to the shop yesterday and told you … things, and you waited an entire day—more than a full day—before saying a single word of it to me?”
“I was assembling my thoughts!” her mother protested, with dignity. “One does not simply—Lucie, a thing of that magnitude wants ordering before it is spoken. I could not go blundering at you with it half formed.”
“And what,” Lucie demanded, “were these thoughts that Lady Rivenna gave you to assemble? What did she tell you, exactly?”
“Well.” Her mother settled back, recovering herself.
“Aside from informing me that you work yourself half to death and that she is still, to this day, waiting for you to arrive at that realization on your own and request a kitchen assistant to help you, because she will not be seen to be telling you how to run your kitchen. Aside from that—”
“Oh.” Lucie’s face warmed. “Yes. Aside from that.”
“Aside from that.” Her mother’s expression turned, quite unexpectedly, tender.
“She told me I was not to spend a single moment’s worry over any of the whispers.
That certain persons had suggested to her that she ought to return this year’s entire commission of masquerade masks and find some alternative at the last hour, on account of the scandal now attached to the Fields name.
” She paused, and to Lucie’s astonishment her mother’s eyes had gone bright and glassy.
“And that she had told those certain persons that she and Lady Lelianna intend to have their masks from me, and from no one else, for their annual masquerade, for just as long as I am willing to make them. That she considers me the finest dressmaker she has ever had the good fortune to commission, and shall go on commissioning gowns of me until the day she dies, at which point”—her mother gave a small laugh—“she expects me to fashion her something perfectly spectacular in which to be sent off into the next world. She said it, Lucie, at some considerable volume, on her way out through a shop full of listening ears. I do not believe it was an accident.”
Lucie laughed, startled and delighted. “No. No, I should think very little that woman does is an accident.” She shook her head. “There is truly no one else in all the world quite like Lady Rivenna.”
“No,” her mother agreed, dabbing discreetly at the corner of one eye. “There is not.”
They sat a moment in the warmth of it. And then her mother’s gaze drifted, snagging on something under the low table—a small scatter of wooden blocks that had escaped the great packing-up and been overlooked, left behind when the rest of the toys went home with Charlotte and Theo and the children. She looked at them a while.
“Charlotte,” she said, in the particular tone she reserved for her elder daughter, “drives me clean up the wall and halfway across the ceiling. I could cheerfully have wrung her neck a week ago, inviting a fae lord to sit at our supper table as though it were the most natural thing in all the world.” A pause. “And yet.”
Lucie waited.
“And yet I find I may be obliged to admit that I am secretly glad she did it.” Her mother’s mouth curved, reluctant and fond. “She knew precisely what she was about, that girl. She always does. And it worked.”
Lucie’s heart gave a small, careful thump. “Worked—because you think—” She hardly dared. “You think you rather liked him?”