Tell Me Sweet (Ladies Least Likely #9)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

There must be some advantages to being a poor relation.

At the moment, Lucasta Lithwick couldn’t think of a single one.

Poor relations could be summoned to London on the whim of a lady aunt who had never liked them, yanked from their cherished position teaching music at Miss Gregoire’s Academy for Girls in Bath to chaperone a cousin they barely knew through her first Season.

Cici had turned out to be delightful; the London Season, less so.

Of course, music abounded at the routs and ridottos, masques and balls, exhibitions and promenades. Even for one standing idle night after night on the fringes of fashionable drawing rooms, London flowed with music like wine at Carlton House. Lucasta drank it in like a satyr.

But poor relations were presumptuous if they expressed an interest in taking music lessons, or calling on musical personages, or attending one of the many private concerts that seemed always on offer and in which the lady aunt had no interest. They were not in London for their own amusement, mind, but expected to focus their entire attention on the duties for which they had been summoned and to which the claims of family obliged them, all while showing some gratitude for the condescension of said family to notice the offspring of a mother who had sunk herself beyond reproach.

Also, it was expected that poor relations would meekly appreciate the ill-fitting gowns that the lady aunt so kindly provided from her wardrobe, since, as her ladyship saw fit to observe, Lucasta had only the poorest, meanest possessions of her own.

Lucasta yanked at one side of her ruffled petticoat, which didn’t want to hang properly over the outmoded pannier.

“Denied,” she informed her friends, crowded with her near one end of Lady Clara Bellwether’s drawing room. The conversational evening was giving way to dancing, and the young women without partners were obliged to make way for those with. “Expressly forbidden.”

“She couldn’t.” Minnie jostled Lucasta’s elbow as she flipped open her fan. “Signor Marchesi is the darling of Italian opera. He’ll only be in England a few months.”

“One of the finest voices on the European stage, and I cannot take lessons from him. He is too much admired, in my aunt’s opinion, and I should look silly dangling after him.”

Minnie smirked. “They say castrati are skilled in the amorous arts as well as the musical. She ought to be glad you have chosen such a safe target for your infatuation.”

As the daughter of the Duke of Luneburg-Zuwecken, a high-ranking and wealthy official in the Hanoverian court, Minnie would never be a poor relation. She was also, given the great liberty of not living much in her home country, prone to speaking her mind.

Lucasta snorted. “Oh, certainly, I shall present that argument to my aunt. She will take it so well.”

A quartet appeared and began tuning their instruments. Lucasta itched to lay her hands on one of the violins.

“Cici is such a taking little thing, she will have an offer soon.” Selina watched with longing as the dancers formed squares for a cotillion. “Then perhaps Lady Pevensey will allow you more freedom.”

Upon his retirement to Britain with his Bengali wife, John Humby of the 1st Bengal Light Calvary had been granted a knighthood and a pension that made Selina highly attractive to admiring suitors.

That was, before an unfortunate event earlier in the Season had quite sunk her in the eyes of the beau monde.

Annis watched the dancers with cool disdain. “Has your aunt said why she wanted you in particular to chaperone Cici, when she hasn’t given you a thought for years?”

Anastasia Voronska, Annis to her dearest friends, was the daughter of Count Voronsky, the Russian ambassador to Britain, and her aunt, a Russian princess, was one of Catherine the Great’s closest confidantes. Annis would never be a poor relation, either.

“She called for me out of pity, poor orphan that I am, and she hopes some time in London might give me polish, and perhaps a chance at a husband,” Lucasta said. “You should have seen her face when I informed her that, upon my return to Bath, I am hunting up premises for my musical conservatory.”

Minnie laughed and linked an arm with Lucasta’s. “I hope she will keep you through the Season, at least, for what a treat to have us all together again! Miss Gregoire’s girls, unleashed on London. Did you hear they are calling us the Gorgons?”

“What?” Selina exclaimed. “Who would say such a thing?”

The second violin in the quartet came in half a beat behind the rest, and Lucasta set her teeth. “Smart Jeremy, milord Rudyard, of course. Who else?”

“The insult isn’t even fitting,” Minnie remarked. “The Gorgons were three sisters. We are four.”

“Are there any mythical groups of four women?” Annis wondered. “There always seem to be three. Fates. Furies. Harpies. Graces. Norns, in Norse mythology.”

Lucasta considered. “The Hesperides?”

“Hesiod only mentions three,” Minnie said. “So does Apollonius of Rhodes.”

“I’m quite sure some of the later vase paintings show four,” Lucasta said. “The collection at the British Museum—”

“Gorgons?” Giving a low cry, Selina drew back her skirts as a dancer twirled by. “I suppose this is because Minnie insulted Lord Ashley at the Queen’s drawing room. Or because Annis did not invite his cousin and aunt to the Count’s dinner?”

“His aunt and cousin are still in half-mourning,” Annis replied. “I did not imagine they could accept.”

“This is because it is now the fashion to regard the utterances of Lord Rudyard as the proclamation of an oracle,” Lucasta said. “And to believe because he has exquisite taste in dress, he is wise in other matters.”

Selina forced a smile. “My striped robe d’anglaise did make me look like a zebra, I suppose.”

Selina had begun the season as a prime catch, gracious, educated, the daughter of a distinguished officer.

Then Rudyard called her a zebra. The gossips picked up the slur about her parentage—not black, not white, but something in between—and Selina dropped from favor like a coin tossed into the Thames.

“He told me my mink pelisse made me look sallow,” Annis offered.

“He informed me I was too tall to wear heeled slippers,” Minnie said. “I wish he would ask me to dance, so my heeled slippers might tread on his toe.”

Selina fussed with the lace at her sleeve. “If we are laughed at, there will be no more offers of marriage. Mama will be so disappointed.”

Despite Selina’s brave face, Lucasta knew Rudyard’s remark about her gown had cut her friend deeply. Lucasta slid an arm around the girl’s waist and squeezed.

“I am very glad to have these weeks with you all, and I expect that by the end of the season, you will each have a proposal in hand. Or several.”

Minnie shrugged. “If Gorgons they wish to call us, then Gorgons we shall be and turn any man who looks at us into stone.”

“I propose a forfeit for the first of us who accepts an offer of marriage and thereby breaks up Miss Gregoire’s Girls,” Annis suggested.

“Oh, a forfeit.” Minnie’s eyes lit. “If it is Selina, she must write up her experiments on animal surgery.”

“Oh, no, I could not presume.” Selina glanced around in alarm, though as usual no one was taking any notice of them.

“Annis has to give a lecture on astronomy and the celestial mechanisms,” Lucasta said, for the Russian girl had her head always in the heavens.

“With pleasure,” Annis said with a slow smile.

“And mine?” Minnie demanded.

“You will publish your translations, of course,” Lucasta said. “What are you working on at present?”

“A long chivalric poem in Middle High German, but it is not complete,” Minnie said. “Nevertheless, I accept. And you, Lucasta?”

Lucasta watched the dancers move in their figures.

She stood in the shadow of her more confident, more accomplished friends, her role in their group undefined.

The four of them had come together at Miss Gregoire’s because they felt outcasts everywhere else, in Lucasta’s case because she was an orphan, and the other girls because they were thought foreign.

But in standing together against indifferent assessments of their worth, beauty, or right to belong, bonds had formed, deeper than blood.

“You shall sing,” Minnie said. “In public. For money.”

Lucasta’s heart sank like a stone in a still pool. “Great-aunt Cornelia says it is vulgar, and Aunt Pevensey agrees. I won’t be allowed.”

Annis lifted a dark brow. “The rest of us have accepted our forfeits.”

Lucasta swallowed the bitter taste in her mouth, left by the most recent row with her aunt. In the Pevensey’s rented townhouse, Lucasta was nothing but the daughter of an obscure vicar and a well-bred young woman whose family had disowned her upon her low marriage.

Vicars’ daughters were not invited to sing at courts or theaters or the finest concert halls of Europe.

She was not to dream of stepping onto a wooden stage beneath glittering chandeliers and gorgeous art, nor imagine she could hold an audience in thrall with her voice alone.

It was not for vicars’ daughters to lift hearts, wring tears, or transport their listeners to a place of perfect beauty, just this side of heaven.

Besides, a musical vocation demanded long study and constant practice. But Lady Pevensey would not permit lessons in London, and great Continental music masters did not linger long in Bath.

After years of spinning wild hopes, Lucasta was shut out of her great dream, just as she was shunned from the world of London’s fashionable. Forced, like now, to stand on the periphery looking in, the spectator and never the subject, her spirits as heavy as her skirts.

Forced, as she always had been, to expect little, make do with less, and be grateful for the scraps doled out to her.

She summoned a smile. She would not pity herself when there were real misfortunes in the world, and she would keep her spleen to herself, let it poison her own breast and not that of her friends.