Chapter Three
‘You look lovely!’ trilled Aunt Louise.
‘I would rather be looking at the ocean and deciding which paint to use,’ muttered Calliope.
That was perhaps not the most charitable thing she could have said.
After all, it was thanks to her aunt that she had been included in this invitation to the Duchess of Knaresby’s ball.
It had been a resplendent place to arrive at in their hired hansom cab, and Calliope felt more than a little underdressed, considering that she had not brought any diamonds or sapphires to Brighton.
Not that she owned any.
Her string of pearls, a gift upon her sister’s marriage, had been the only necklace she had packed in her trunk, so it would have to do. Even if Calliope looked around them and noted that every single young lady appeared to be resplendent in jewels.
‘How long, precisely, do we have to stay?’ Calliope muttered as she and her aunt stepped into the large ballroom. A long line of couples occupied the centre of the room enthusiastically participating in the steps of an English country dance. Calliope did not recognise a single person there.
Why would she? She had no acquaintances in Brighton, beyond her mother and her aunt.
Trying her best to push down the crossness that always rose whenever she thought about her mother’s sudden departure from the town before Calliope had even arrived, she forced a smile.
One never knew who was watching. When one was an orphan, to all intents and purposes, with no solid income until recently—one’s sister marrying a duke tends to make things easier—one always had to keep a smile for Society.
‘What do you mean, have to stay? It is an honour indeed to be invited at all,’ chided her aunt. ‘And I would have thought you would appreciate the opportunity!’
Calliope sighed. It was not that she did not wish to attend balls. For all she knew, they were very pleasant.
It was more that she had no experience with them. Her father had died so young, the family had been thrust out of the middle-class life they had previously enjoyed…and it had been her sister Ditty’s efforts as a skilled proposal planner that had kept the family from penury.
There hadn’t been many balls or dances in her past.
She had been but a child when Papa had died.
Well, not exactly a child, but she had been innocent in so many ways.
Just past her fifteenth birthday. A boy from the village had blushingly given her a Christmas gift at the town assembly and that had been the first time she had ever stood up with a boy to dance.
A man, really. She had been in the first blush of womanhood and young John—Mr Carter, as she had bashfully called him—had arrived at the ball after his first proper shave.
That had been her only taste of romance. Papa had died a week later, and the Olivers had left their home to seek cheaper climes. London had, in hindsight, been a mistake in that quarter.
But she couldn’t think of that now.
‘I just wanted to paint,’ Calliope murmured, trying not to move her lips in case someone realised she was complaining. ‘That was all!’
She had been in Brighton a day and a half and she had only managed about an hour of sketching.
When her mother had written praising the air, the light and the beaches, it had sounded like heaven compared to stinking streets and the Thames, which was more sewer than scenery.
Calliope had envisioned herself spending hours upon hours with her mother, the two of them talking properly for the first time in years, their laughter catching in the wind as their easels stood upon the golden sands.
As it was, there was little sand on the beaches, in fact they were mostly pebbles, and her Aunt Louise appeared to have no interest in wandering down to the shore and helping Calliope carry her paints.
It was most provoking.
‘How long do these things go on, generally?’ she whispered, trying to ignore the prickle of discomfort trinkling down her spine at her ignorance.
Well, fashionable young ladies would not have to ask, at the age of two and twenty, just how long a ball was to continue for. They would just know…wouldn’t they?
Her aunt fixed her with a glare. ‘It will go on until it’s over, young lady, and only then will you be permitted to retire home. Honestly, I thought you would appreciate being invited to a duchess’s ball!’
What Calliope did not say was that after one’s own sister became a duchess unexpectedly, it was rather difficult to see the title as anything more than…well, a bit silly.
If Ditty, of all people, could become a ‘Your Grace’, then it made all the other duchesses seem almost ordinary.
‘And you’ll want to dance, of course.’
Calliope sighed. ‘Aunt Louise, I have no intention of dancing with anyone.’
Her mother had ensured all three of her girls could dance, as was proper…but the opportunity to actually do so, and with a gentleman, had been far and few between. Calliope had practised with Thalia last Christmas but somehow it just wasn’t the same.
‘Not dance with anyone?’ Her aunt looked aghast. ‘Then what on earth are we here for, pray?’
‘That is exactly what—’
‘You will dance and you will enjoy yourself, I am sure,’ Aunt Louise said genially, grasping two glasses of wine from a tray as a footman passed them, thrusting one of the glasses into the hands of her niece.
‘And I am sure I will find you some very handsome partners. Now your sister is wed, it is high time you started looking for a husband.’
Calliope’s smile was weak. ‘I see.’
No wonder her mother had invited her to come to Brighton. If her aunt was this forward about her matrimonial matchmaking intentions, clearly her mother had something to do with it.
It was preposterous. The last thing she wanted was to be distracted from her art, her one true love, her calling.
Besides, Calliope could not help but think, as her heart was immediately irked by a recollection from just yesterday, that the gentlemen of Brighton did not appear to be in any way charming or respectable.
‘I thank you for your unwelcome offer, but I find myself easily able to decline it.’
‘Unwelcome offer? I think you’ll find you were quite tempted for a moment there, weren’t you?’
‘…plenty of gentlemen I can introduce you to and I’m sure you’ll enjoy meeting them…’
Her hands itched to sketch a particularly pleasing trio of gentlemen standing by a pillar. The way they stood, the taller in the centre…the way the one on the left was leaning, the archness of the hand of the one on the right as he smoked his cigar…
‘Calliope! Calliope, are you listening?’
‘No,’ Calliope said honestly, without a second thought.
Ah. That was not the correct response.
Aunt Louise drew herself up in a rustle of silk as her gown fought against her stays. ‘Perhaps I should have left you at home, young lady!’
It was on the tip of her tongue to say she wished she had been left at home, but Calliope managed to get control of her mouth before such rude words emitted from them.
After all, it was not her aunt’s fault that she had absolutely no interest in dancing, or balls, or talking with eligible gentlemen.
She wanted to paint. Oh, Calliope had never known anything like it; the lure of the pencil, the way she so desperately wished to replicate a vision before her onto a canvas.
When she was drawing, especially when she was painting, it were as though nothing else around her existed.
She could escape into the painting itself, far from real life, far from the boredom of their circumstances—thankfully now far more interesting after Ditty’s marriage to a duke—far from the chatter of the world and the nonsense it provided.
No, there was nothing like it. And she had given up an evening of sketching, Calliope thought darkly, to stand in a corner of a ballroom filled with people she didn’t know, forced to listen to her aunt attempt to make her a match with a gentleman who presumably had no desire to make one.
‘Besides,’ Aunt Louise said in a lowered tone, lifting her fluttering fan before her lips, ‘I heard tell that the Marquess of Laidley will be here tonight!’
There was such a gleam in her eyes that Calliope found herself curious, despite herself. ‘Indeed?’
She regretted the single word question immediately, for her aunt grinned and waggled her eyebrows in a most suggestive manner.
‘Ah, I knew I’d catch your interest!’
‘I am not interested,’ Calliope said hastily. ‘It is just—’
‘The man is not exactly a recluse, but it is very difficult apparently to secure the man’s attendance at any ball or dinner,’ her aunt continued happily, clearly delighted to have been proven correct. ‘A very charming man he is. And wealthy, too.’
Calliope tried not to snort. The only two characteristics her mother had ever mentioned when the rare occasion of her daughters’ marriage came up in conversation.
Is he charming? Is he wealthy?
Never mind that after their father’s death, Calliope and her sisters had been without fortune and without introductions.
They had slipped from good Society, not because of lost reputation but because of a lack of funds.
One could simply not attend the Season’s events without at least one new gown a month.
All that had changed, of course, when Ditty had wed.
Calliope sighed. It was not that she did not understand her mother’s concerns—of all the three Oliver sisters, it was she who was perhaps the most like her mother. Which worried her, sometimes. Passionate and artistic, yes…but flighty. Unsettled and uncentred.
Calliope tugged at the sleeve of her new gown. It was a deep rich red, not a colour she typically liked, but she hadn’t the heart to tell her sister that after Ditty had presented it to her with such joy when she had visited Brexley in May.
She would just have to hope no one noticed just how vividly similar the silk’s colour was to her cheeks when she flushed—though naturally there would be no reason to flush here. It was not as though she knew anyone…