Chapter 4 #3
“All these entertainments are quite wearying for you, aren’t they, my dear? Miss Gregoire’s seems a sober, gentle sort of place.”
Lucasta selected another piece, wrestling with the flash of acute longing for her school, her home.
At Miss Gregoire’s she spent her days in quiet industry, immersed in the sciences and music and art and books, and her evenings with the other teachers and their brightest students engaged in reading, painting, dancing, and discussing the latest publications on philosophy or travel.
Their evenings out consisted of a lecture, a concert, or a ball in the Bath Assembly Rooms, which were known for being so decorous that they ended at ten of the clock. Such a life would seem dull to the Cicis and the Rudyards of the world, whose entertainments were loud, bright, and costly.
No wonder Lucasta and her friends lacked that ephemeral quality called ton. He was right to call them the Gorgons. She would never be accepted among the great, and it was nonsense to try.
Cici swept away, tiny nose in the air like a sparrow sniffing out crumbs.
Lucasta hoped with all her heart that Cici would enjoy her Season and its pleasures and find an advantageous marriage at the end of it.
She hoped that her father, with all his calculation of advantages, would at least take Cici’s wishes into account.
Lucasta pulled out a stormy piece by Mozart that might relieve some of her tempestuous feelings.
She could only expect a future of misery if she were given to a man like Trevor Pevensey.
The prospect of becoming Lady Pevensey would cost her everything.
Unable by law to possess her own property or direct her own finances, she would live on whatever her husband allowed her, and whatever credit would be extended to them by resentful tradesmen.
Her husband would dictate where she lived and whom she associated with.
He would have complete control over their children.
There was no custom and no law to compel a man to show fidelity or respect to his wife.
He could gamble, drink, pursue other women, run the Pevensey estate into ruin and its tenants into starvation, and if the other young men of his birth and station that Lucasta had met were any pattern, that is exactly what he would do.
She could not vow to honor and obey a man such as that.
Perhaps this was why Aunt Pevensey had prevented Lucasta from taking music lessons. If she had any hopes at all of supporting herself on the stage, performing at courts and concert halls, then she might be in a position to decline Trevor Pevensey’s oh-so-generous offer for her hand.
She must deny him at any rate. She only needed to figure out how to do so without tying the noose around her own neck.
Some hours later, immersed in dolorous communication with Handel, Lucasta didn’t hear the knocker and was only warned by a lively tread on the stairs moments before the door to the music room flew open.
“He called you clever,” Selina announced, a grim set to her mouth. She wore a sumptuous evening gown of French satin in a deep silver hue.
“He called you interesting.” Annis tucked Lucasta’s violin beneath her chin and tuned it with a few brisk notes.
“He called you fascinating.” Minnie went to the harp and strummed a chord. Minnie’s robe à la francaise was a pale purple silk brocade with yellow and orange flowers swarming the bodice and skirts. Smart Jeremy would certainly have something to say about that eye-watering pattern.
“Aunt told me I am not at home to callers,” Lucasta warned. “I am in disgrace.”
Annis shook back the cascade of lace and ruffles at the sleeves of her damask robe, a shimmering pale blue. “We are family, and so I told Possett when we climbed over him to get in. Don’t you want to attend the Skylar rout? Rudyard will be there.”
An odd jolt went through Lucasta at the thought, as if her friend had struck a string that sounded both dissonant and resonant at the same time. That momentary press of their bodies had been an accident, a stumble.
But there was that other odd moment when it felt he was drawing her to him, trying to convince her of something. Unlike other men who wore too much powder or cologne, Rudyard had a light, clean smell like pine and the outdoors, and that marvelous liquid voice. A thrill went through her again.
“I most emphatically do not want to see him,” Lucasta said. “He overheard my epigrams and challenged me about it. Then he gave Clara Bellwether charge to make fun of me.”
“Or make something else,” Minne remarked. “He said Miss Thomasina Brentleigh possessed elegance of mind and manner, and now the Earl of Avon is paying her his addresses, and she is nothing but a squire’s daughter from Shropshire.”
“Did he also observe that Mina has the most brilliant mathematical mind ever seen at Miss Gregoire’s? The man is nothing but a narrow-minded peddler of trumpery. He called me a Medusa, which I am sure Lady Clara has also taken pains to mention.”
“Then we ought to run him to ground, so you might turn him to stone.” Minnie plucked out a tune on the harp.
“Is he the reason you are mewed up here like Rapunzel in her tower?” Annis played back Minnie’s impromptu melody, then gestured with her bow toward Lucasta’s worn day gown and old apron.
Lucasta slumped on the stool. “I learned this morning why my aunt brought me here for the Season.”
Selina sat on the stool beside Lucasta, peering into her face. “Not for Cici?”
Lucasta shook her head. “The baron seems to believe that I will be heir to my great-aunt Cornelia’s estate. And that makes me, therefore, a suitable bride for Trevor Pevensey.”
Minnie drew a crashing chord from the harp. “Trevor Pevensey is the worst ne’er-do-well you can imagine. He gambles, he drinks, he consorts with common women—”
“Yes, I know all that. He conducts himself exactly as a son of the nobility is expected to do. And my supposed inheritance is desired to fund this lifestyle, I presume.” Lucasta rubbed her sore fingertips.
“Fustian,” Annis announced. “You simply decline the honor. They can’t force you. You are three-and-twenty, well past the age of consent.”
“Can they not? Force me?” Lucasta’s laugh sounded shaky to her own ears. “I can imagine all manner of threats they might make.”
A silence prevailed in the room for a moment, beyond which the traffic from the street outside could be heard: peddlers crying their wares, cart wheels and horse hooves, pedestrians hailing one another, the busy industry of the city.
If she married Trevor Pevensey, Lucasta would be trapped in this room, or one just like it, for the rest of her life.
“What shall we do?” Selina whispered.
Lucasta forced a smile. “I have failed to generate any adequate ideas. Nor have Bach, Mozart, Handel, or Scarlatti, though I’ve been consulting them all day.”
“We know what you need.” Annis clapped her hands together and struck an operatic pose. “Signor Marchesi.”
“But you all have invitations to the rout, and besides that, my aunt has forbidden me…” Lucasta trailed off, hearing how feeble her excuse sounded.
Minnie looked around with lifted brows. “Is her ladyship here? I see no sign of her.”
Annis pulled a handbill from an interior pocket.
“To be performed this evening at the King’s Theatre in Haymarket: Ifigenia in Aulide, a serious opera, with music by Signor Bertoni, and Signor Marchesi to sing at the end a few Italian words set to music by himself.
” She gave Lucasta a pointed look. “Now will you dress?”
Lucasta’s heart dashed against her ribs. Her aunt would be furious if Lucasta disobeyed her.
Furious enough to entomb her within the house for the remainder of the Season.
Perhaps furious enough to convince the baron that the last thing Trevor Pevensey needed was a disobedient wife.
“I’ve nothing suitable,” Lucasta warned.
Among milady’s outmoded cast-offs, the only frocks fit for the opera were a muslin robe with narrow stripes of alternating yellow and lime green or a sack back of grey silk that made her look like a plague victim.
The stripes occasioned much hilarity when Lucasta remarked for certain no one would accuse her of being fascinating in those.
But without much loss of time she was robed, her hair dressed, and grinning at her three friends in her tiny handheld mirror.
“Miss Gregoire’s girls,” Minnie proclaimed. “We shall be a toast.”
“Gorgons,” Annis said grandly. “We shall terrify everyone. I confess I look forward to the prospect.”
They squeezed their skirts into the Luneburg town coach and headed to Haymarket. Selina leaned over and whispered in Lucasta’s ear.
“Are you certain Smart Jeremy is teasing you? For I do not think his remarks were meant to be unkind.”
Lucasta’s heart gave that odd patter again, and it was more than simple guilt.
She did want to see Smart Jeremy again. For all his faults, the man had fascinated her in return.
His voice, his looks, his dry wit and unfathomable expressions, all combined to make an impression that no man yet had made on Lucasta Lithwick.
All the more reason to stay as far away from him as possible.