Chapter 18
THE NOW INFAMOUS LADY’S WEEKLY SAT ON THE MARBLE WORKTABLE in the kitchen, open to Annabel’s first chapter, while she tried without success to write what came next.
The kitchen had become her refuge in the early mornings while Cassie and Billy slept, a place she could read and write without judgment or prying.
She still hadn’t told them that she was the author in question.
It was just as well that Cassie hadn’t paid attention when the subject arose at Norwood Manor, having no interest in any conversation having to do with books.
But the evening had so unnerved Annabel, she hadn’t been able to write a word since.
Harriet was clearly on a mission to destroy her, or at least her having any hope of securing D’Evercy’s trust and affection.
She fully expected to be outed as an “authoress” any time now.
But there was no turning back. She owed Mr. Bickles a second chapter, with only one day left to write it and not a mark on the page.
Mary stood at the other end of the long table plucking a chicken, having dunked it in scalding water three times. It seemed to Annabel an apt metaphor. She was the dead chicken being stripped bare, feather by feather.
“I can’t remember what happens next.” She put her elbows on the table, her forehead in her hands. “I thought I knew most of it by heart, but maybe it was a mistake, anyway, the waltz.” She was rambling but couldn’t stop. “She’ll have to be cast out for it, my heroine. I don’t see a way around it.”
“Captain Fowle will make things right, won’t he?”
“They only assume he has money, Mary. He doesn’t really.”
“Oh my. Bit of a pickle, that is.”
Mary tossed the naked chicken onto a butcher block and picked up a cleaver. Cassie burst into the room in her morning dress, holding a stack of letters. She seemed oddly cheerful.
“We’ve been invited to a picnic! At Ellesmere!”
“Ellesmere?” The word seemed to float on the air like a dream.
“Tomorrow!” said Cassie.
“Tomorrow?”
Cassie peeled the letter off the top and handed it to Annabel, who closed the magazine, not wanting to draw attention to it, and set down her pen.
“Mary, we must choose a distinctly summer dress, right away!” said Cassie. “Something floral and bright. Don’t you think?”
“Ooh, I’ve somethin’ in mind already!”
Annabel held the invitation, reading the words aloud slowly, written in D’Evercy’s confident hand.
My dear Misses Blake,
It is with great pleasure and anticipation that I extend to you and your cousin a cordial invitation to join me for a rather impromptu picnic tomorrow at Ellesmere.
Annabel looked at her sister, daring to hope again. “A picnic . . . at Ellesmere . . .”
“And mail. Lots of it! For us!” Cassie riffled the stack. “We must be very popular, indeed!”
Cassie handed over the stack. Annabel picked up a paring knife and began to open them, finding Cassie’s enthusiasm infectious. But with the first letter, she furrowed her brow, with the second, bit her lip, with the third, she paled.
“These are bills, Cassie. One pound forty . . . three pounds fifty . . . five pounds!”
Mary, pretending not to listen, turned her back to give the sisters some privacy, while whacking the bird into pieces. Thwump. Thwump. Thwump.
Cassie took the bills back to see for herself. Grocer, butcher, dressmaker, milliner. “That was me,” she confessed. “A really cute French capote.”
“You didn’t know,” said Annabel.
Cassie got to an unopened letter in the stack. “Bickles she owed Cassie better than that.
She picked up the magazine from the table and opened it to the first installment, handing it to her.
“What You Wish For, Chapter One. By Eliot Price-Bennet,” Cassie read aloud. “And?”
“It’s me. I wrote it.”
Cassie drew her chin back. It took a minute to process it all—the pen name, the chapter, the check—the not being told until now. Her lighthearted countenance turned dark. “You said we couldn’t have careers!”
“It’s not really a career.”
“You get to be a writer? What do I get to do?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She slipped the check gently from her sister’s grasp. “We can’t live on two pounds ten.”
Cassie crossed her arms and considered their predicament. “Well, can’t you write more? Faster?”
“Apparently not. I’m supposed to give Mr. Bickles a second chapter tomorrow, and I can’t write at all.
” She set the check down and touched the back of her neck the way she did when she worried.
“I don’t know what to do here, Cassie. People are bound to find out sooner than later that we’re . . . penniless.”
Thwump. Thwump. Thwump.
They’d both forgotten Mary was there. She turned to face them, her forehead in furrows.
“I do ’ate to see you sisters in such a state. Mind, I wasn’t meanin’ to listen, but ’ere I was, with two good ears wot couldn’t ’elp it.”
“It’s all right, Mary,” said Annabel. “I’m sorry you had to hear.”
Mary dipped her hands in the water and wiped them on her apron. “I ’ave to say, people like you, with fancy ’omes and such, don’t pay yer bills straight off. ’S not the way it’s done ’ere. Ya got yer good name!”
“See, Annabel!” said Cassie.
“Well, such as it is,” said Annabel, holding up the handful of bills. “But eventually, we have to pay.”
“In a few months’ time, maybe, but ya got Bloomin’dale’s—there’s yer promise to pay! Everyone knows about it.”
The mention of it reminded Cassie of the blunt reality of their situation. She looked on the verge of real tears. “Oh, Mary. Bloomingdale’s . . . is no more!”
Mary clapped both hands to her heart. She teetered a little on her worn-out boots and had to steady herself on the butcher block. “Not Bloomin’dale’s!”
Annabel didn’t know what to do. She looked between them. Cassie, genuinely upset, had blurted a truth that couldn’t be taken back. And now Mary knew. If only she could lessen the blow somehow, without giving them away.
“Well, perhaps not forever.”
“No, but for now!” said Cassie.
“This is true.” She looked at Mary. “We didn’t want to burden you with the terrible news.”
Cassie put her hands on her cheeks, losing it. “I’m afraid I’ll never see Bloomingdale’s again!”
Mary tried to comfort the sisters as best she could, though she, too, felt bereft on their behalf.
She assured them she would keep their secret safe; gave them the life-is-like-a-game-of-dice talk; put wine, lavender, and rose oil in Cassie’s bath to calm her; and made an extra-nice breakfast—cardamom buns were requested—though Annabel found she had no appetite at all.
For Billy, who was awoken with news of their “situation,” there was an extra-special head massage and breakfast on a tray.
Strangely, Annabel found new inspiration in their predicament.
She installed herself at the kitchen worktable and started in on the new chapter, hoping she could finish in time.
She wrote even when her hand hurt, quill flying—dip-write-dip-write—even once spilling ink across her title page.
She crumpled and handed it to Mary to toss in the kitchen waste, but Mary asked if she might keep it as a memento of their stay at Kidlington and ironed out the wrinkles with her hand against the edge of the butcher block.
***
If not for their dire situation, that evening in the Peach Blossom bedroom might have been a picture-perfect moment between two sisters dressed in white nightgowns—hand-tatted lace and crocheted edges—ready for bed, faces lit by candlelight, taking turns brushing each other’s hair.
“Ouch,” said Cassie. “You’re pulling too hard.”
“I’m sorry.” Annabel stopped brushing. “I forgot you were tenderheaded.”
“At the moment I’m tender everywhere.”
It was a rare admission for her sure-of-herself sister. “I know. It was a hard day.”
“So, it’s marriage, then, really? That’s the only way? I’m barely twenty-four!”
“Well, I guess there’s governess.”
“To some bratty pack of snot-nosed kids?”
“Who probably speak French and are working on passable Italian.”
“No thank you. What else?”
“Well, working in a shop.”
“I worked at a Gap one summer. I was folding T-shirts in my sleep, thousands of them. Plus, you don’t want to know what people do in dressing rooms.” She shivered, remembering. “Never again.”
“Seamstress?”
“That’s what an alterations person is for.”
Annabel exhaled. She was out of ideas.
“So, marriage, then,” said Cassie. “How long do you think we have? I need a timeline here.”
“Well, certainly by the end of the summer, at least a proposal, and we only have so many chances—a ball here, a dinner there.”
“So, carpe diem the day is pretty much what you’re saying.”
“Pretty much.”
Cassie sighed and looked out at the moon. “Don’t give in to Harriet. Not without a fight.”
“You told me to.”
“Don’t listen to everything I say. Just because I’m elder.”
Annabel smiled. “But you were right about her. She’ll eat us all alive. I think it’s best if I give her a wide berth.”
“Who else is there, for you?”
What came into Annabel’s head was something she could never confess—that there was no other man in this time or any other who could live up to the likes of Henry Leighton D’Evercy. The bar was now impossibly high. She felt ruined for love for all time. Instead of saying so, she shrugged.
“This is weird. Dating has never been a problem for me,” Cassie said.
“It’s called ‘courting’ here. And the men must choose. Women can . . . connive.”
“Okay, so not that much different, then.”
“I guess not. But at least we have the picnic tomorrow, to look forward to,” she said, hoping to brighten the mood.
“I can’t wait,” said Cassie, punctuated with an eye roll.
“You were excited before.”
“Before, when I thought we could have a fun distraction from all this really not fun shit, maybe for one afternoon?” She pulled a loose thread off her nightgown. “Plus, who has a picnic on a Tuesday?”
Annabel sighed. “Like I said, you don’t really see anyone working in the novels.”
“The novels, right,” said Cassie flatly, flossing between two teeth.
Annabel smiled. “Well, I guess you could hope for rain.”
“Why would I hope for rain during a picnic?”
“So you could get caught in it and catch a bad cold and have to stay over for a few days?”
Cassie stopped flossing. “How bad a cold?”
“Oh, you know, the kind that comes on suddenly, accompanied by a delirious fever, lasts three or four days, and isn’t usually fatal.”
Cassie glared at her.
“Sorry, Jane Austen joke.”
“I’m not an idiot. I saw the movie.”
“The book is even better.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
They sat in silence. Cassie finished flossing and discarded her loose thread. Annabel stood.
“I guess the good news is the sisters do end up with husbands.”
“Yay,” said Cassie. “Except I’m stuck here with no push-up bra, no mascara, pretty much one hairstyle that makes me look ridiculous, and I’m supposed to make up for all that with wit and irony and the occasional delicate turn of my head?”
“‘You bring about what you think about’?” Annabel said, trying.
With a huff, Cassie blew out her candle and climbed under the covers.
There was a fading blue dusk in the room, a thin reminder of daylight.
Annabel stood at the end of Cassie’s bed, seeing the faint outline of her sister, staring at the ceiling with her arms under her head.
She could just make out the rise and fall of her chest under the light summer blanket.
Cassie had been on top of her world, with everything she wanted, and in quick succession, on the cusp of even more.
Now she was captive, here, in a world she didn’t want at all.
And yet, she carried on somehow. Annabel admired it.
Finally, she turned for the door.
“Annabel?”
She turned back to her sister’s voice, which had a tremolo she wasn’t used to.
“I’ll rally for the picnic.”
“I know you will.”
“Did you pick your dress?”
“I will in the morning.”
“You know, I like the clothes. I do,” said Cassie. “The feel of the fabric, the attention to detail.”
“I do too.”
“I mean, I really miss my cell phone, a bunch of other stuff, and a mani-pedi would be nice. But sometimes I just miss . . . jeans and a cute top.”
Cassie could make Annabel smile, even in the dark. “I know,” she said.
She waited for the quiet rustle of Cassie turning onto her side, which she’d always done right before she went to sleep.
“Night, Cassie.”
“Night, A-bel.”