Chapter 2
Sandwiched in between her two best friends at the British Museum, Ruby considered the soulless eyes of a stuffed golden-crested crane.
There was a three-foot radius of empty space around her. Complete social ruin came with one silver lining at least—it was certainly easier to talk.
“Ruby, dearest,” Alice said delicately, “are you entirely certain you wish to be out and about?”
Ruby turned to face her friends. Lady Alice Eppington—only child of the disgraced Marquess of Rosthwaite—gazed back at her, dark-fringed cerulean eyes very soft.
Tamsin Drake, by contrast, appeared barely able to smother her fury.
Her freckled face was pink with outrage, which made an interesting aesthetic contrast with her cropped auburn hair.
Ruby’s chest felt tight, and she reminded herself very firmly of her resolve. This was going to work. It was going to be wonderful.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m certain. I’ve asked the two of you here because I have an idea. One we could not discuss in my drawing room.”
Unfortunately, Alice and Tamsin looked more dismayed at this pronouncement than Ruby might have wished.
“Do you?” Alice said. She sounded extremely polite. “Is this similar to the time you had us dress up as the Three Fates at the Yardsleys’ ball?”
Ruby hid a wince. That had not gone well. She’d taken the outfits rather far, and it had not been a masquerade.
“Not like that,” she said. “Much better than that.”
“Perhaps more like the time you staged a reenactment of the Battle of Thermopylae in Kensington Gardens?” Tamsin asked.
“Of course not, because that was for a paper I was writing, as you know perfectly well, and—”
There was a small commotion at the entrance to the avian exhibit, and Ruby felt her words die in her mouth. At the door stood a handful of familiar ladies, dressed in pale summer colors and delicate straw hats. Ruby knew each one; they’d all debuted the same year as herself and Alice.
At the sight of Ruby, Alice, and Tamsin, the ladies’ eyes widened. Their cheeks went pink and their gloved hands went to their mouths. And then, like a flock of birds, they all rushed as one in the opposite direction.
Ruby’s heart beat hard against her ribs.
Tamsin’s face went even redder. “This is absurd,” she snapped. “I don’t understand why everyone is acting as though Ruby pissed on Gravesmuir’s sculptures in the drawing room.”
“It’s not so bad,” Alice murmured. She was looking down at her gloves, and her dark curls had fallen across her brow. “It will be forgotten in time, Ruby. I’m certain it will.”
Ruby took a breath. For all her friends’ reassurances, she knew precisely why her revelation in Gravesmuir’s gallery had proven so disastrous.
It was not just that Gravesmuir had been revealed as a gullible fool to the ton.
The discovery of how thoroughly and expensively he had been hoodwinked had also drawn the attention of Gravesmuir’s creditors—to whom, it turned out, Gravesmuir owed a very great deal of money.
The marquess could no longer shop on Regent Street or fence in his parlor. His social invitations had dried up. And Ruby’s father, who had relied on Gravesmuir for political support, had lost one of his most important allies.
Tamsin was still shaking her head. “There’s nothing to forget!
Ruby didn’t do anything wrong. She has a brain in her head, that’s all.
My God, don’t tell anyone a woman is able to possess such a thing, or they’ll start a petition to drain them out through our noses for the benefit of medical science. ”
As she always did, Ruby felt a surge of gratitude for Tamsin’s bloodthirsty defense, for her stout rejection of their society’s hypocrisies.
Tamsin had courted scandal from her very first day in society.
She gambled for money and wore her hair cropped; she was, as everyone knew perfectly well, a sapphist. Her parents, the Viscount and Viscountess Drake, had despaired of their unconventional eldest daughter, who never seemed touched by the censure heaped upon her.
But at this particular moment, Ruby’s attention wasn’t fixed upon Tamsin—nor was it fixed upon herself.
Ruby was thinking about Alice.
Alice—endlessly hopeful, impossibly kind—had brightened when she’d seen the women who’d once been their friends. And when they’d turned away, Alice had flinched.
Ruby’s heart was still beating too hard. But for the first time in what seemed a very long parade of conversation and card parties and failures, Ruby knew the right thing to do.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “About them. About any of them. Let me tell you why I asked you to come.”
She gestured with the reticule in her hands. It was the same one she’d brought with her to Gravesmuir’s disastrous dinner party, gold-spangled to match her ill-fated pineapple gown.
It still had the folded newspaper inside. And for the thousandth time since Gravesmuir’s dinner, Ruby pulled the paper out.
PRINCESS SERAFINA’S CORNWALL VISIT CANCELED!
Beneath the headline, some breathless journalist had related a lengthy description of Pomeroy House, the holiday home of the Monfalcone princess.
Princess Serafina had not set foot in Cornwall since she’d acquired the estate two years ago in 1815, but the English public’s ardent enthusiasm for the exquisite, fashionable, and extremely wealthy princess seemed to bring the mansion to public attention every time she was rumored to be visiting.
This time, the visit had been canceled due to some new outbreak of political discord in Monfalcone.
Given the sheer number of royal siblings and cousins, infighting seemed to be the norm, rather than an anomaly—a situation that perhaps explained why the princess had not left the Continent in a decade.
“Pomeroy House,” Ruby said as she brandished the paper in Tamsin and Alice’s direction. “I think we should go there.”
Tamsin and Alice did not seem instantly won over by the brilliance of the idea. In fact, they both seemed to be looking at Ruby as though she were back in the pineapple gown.
“You think we should go to Cornwall?” Alice said after a moment. The expression of puzzlement on her face did not in any way detract from her extraordinary beauty. “Can I ask why?”
“Because,” Ruby said, “London is not . . . is not . . .”
Is not working out. Is not going to work out. Is never going to be anything but the place where I am a disappointment.
“Is not hospitable,” she said finally. “In Cornwall, we could do as we like. I can write my papers. Make art. Tamsin can play cards and read mathematics books and wear trousers. And Alice, you can be in nature. I’m certain Cornwall is home to all manner of butterflies you can catch or pin or . . . breed, is it?”
The vision had begun to fashion itself inside her head a week after Gravesmuir’s dinner, when her father had left her alone—again—as he attempted to repair his social standing among the powerful and well-connected members of the peerage.
Ruby had been by herself at the table. Her sister Cassandra had very properly married a viscount two years earlier, and so when her father went out, Ruby dined alone.
The footmen still set an elaborate table; there were five elegant courses, and for once, Ruby didn’t feel up to pretending that there was a room full of people she was meant to impress.
She’d been tired of pretending that she could ever impress a room full of people. Tired of pretending that there was any way she could be like Cassandra: polite and soft-spoken and acceptable.
She’d brought a battered copy of Thomas Hope’s Household Furniture and Interior Decoration with her to the table. And as she’d gazed into the familiar black-and-white etchings—at Hope’s elegant, esoteric designs—she’d lost what remained of her good sense.
She’d dipped her finger into her wine, and, very carefully, painted the page of illustrated draperies red.
She’d glanced up.
Not one single footman acknowledged what she’d done.
She stuck her fork into the sorrel puree on her plate and then used it to shade in a pattern of stripes on Hope’s engraving of a settee.
And when the footmen brought out partridge with roasted carrots, and maraschino jellies, and coffee cream, she’d festooned each stark engraving with vibrant and deliciously scented color.
She’d felt a hot, burning kind of freedom as she’d painted the riot of hues into her very favorite book.
No one cared. She was ruined now. It no longer mattered that her enthusiasm and her absurdities and her intense passions were at odds with what society thought a proper lady ought to be.
She could make something beautiful, something ephemeral, just because she wished it, and no one was there to laugh or tell her she was strange.
Her father’s grim, disappointed gaze was somewhere else—some distant house on Portman Square that she, Ruby, would never be invited to.
She’d imperiled her father’s career. She’d proven to him that she could never be trusted to assist him, never be worthy of his respect as an equal.
And because of that, she didn’t need to try any longer.
Ruby was sick to her soul of trying.
Now, inside the British Museum, she looked at the rows and rows of colorful birds from all across the globe, sitting frozen on their perches, decidedly and indubitably dead.
And then she looked at Tamsin and Alice. “I think we should go to Cornwall for the summer,” she said. “And I think we should move into Pomeroy House.”
Alice’s black lashes were performing some very expressive acrobatics. “Move into Pomeroy House? The princess’s country estate? What would we do there?”
“Whatever we please,” Ruby said. “That’s the whole point. We can leave all of this behind. We can forget about the Season, about all these people. We can live for ourselves.”
“How?” Alice asked.