Chapter Ten
Dorothea entered Molly’s room without knocking, a gown of pale-yellow muslin folded over one arm, and announced before the door had quite closed behind her, “You are coming to the Assembly Rooms tonight. You are going to dance. And you are going to wear something that does not look as though it was packed by a woman escaping through a window.”
The gown was simply cut and considerably finer than anything Molly possessed. It had been pressed recently, which was more than could be said for most of her belongings, and all its fastenings appeared to be present.
“I cannot borrow your gown.” Molly held up both hands, as though Dorothea had brought her a live snake.
“You can, and you will.” Dorothea laid it across the bed with the briskness of a woman closing an argument. “It is a little short for me and a little long for you, which means it offends us both equally. Put it on.”
“Dorothea.” Molly sat on the edge of the bed, leaning away from the gown as though distance might make it less real. “The Assembly Rooms are for people who belong in Bath. People with proper addresses, proper introductions, and wardrobes that do not depend upon the charity of their friends.”
“You will have a proper introduction. You will be with me.” Dorothea shook out the muslin with mild offence.
“And as for charity—nonsense. I am merely correcting an offence against yellow, which has been neglected in my wardrobe for three years and deserves a better fate. I bought this for a concert I never attended because the soprano was intolerable. It has been waiting for a purpose, and the purpose is you. Put it on, or I shall put it on you, and I am stronger than my constitution suggests.”
Molly put it on.
It was too long, as Dorothea had predicted.
The waist sat a little higher than it ought, and the sleeves required adjustment, but when Molly looked at herself in the small mirror above the washstand, she saw a girl in a borrowed gown, in a borrowed room, in a life that still felt borrowed—and the girl was smiling.
She had been in Bath long enough now for the city to have begun making room for her.
Not officially. Not in any manner society would recognise as secure.
But in the way places sometimes do when one pours oneself into them completely, spending energy, charm, and stubborn hope upon the daily work of belonging.
She had become known. The pretty young woman at the milliner’s who arranged the windows.
The cheerful girl at Mr Swifton’s wine shop who could make a bottle sound like an adventure.
The young lady from Somerset who had arrived with very little and moved through Bath with such determined warmth that strangers became acquaintances, acquaintances became allies, and allies began, dangerously, to resemble family.
Mrs Bramble had extended the arrangement without fixing an end to it.
“You are good for business,” she had said, which Molly understood perfectly to mean, I have grown accustomed to your noise, and the house would feel wrong without it.
Wellington had long since transferred his allegiance from the windowsill to Molly’s lap, which Mrs Bramble regarded as treachery and Molly as the highest possible honour.
Mrs Holt had quietly allowed the milliner’s post to become less temporary than it had first appeared. The regular girl’s continued absence and Molly’s success with the window displays were not, Molly suspected, entirely unconnected facts.
And Teddy paid her three shillings a week for afternoons at the wine shop, where Molly had discovered that selling wine was simply telling stories with a glass in one’s hand—an occupation for which, apparently, she had been training all her life without knowing it.
She had sold Madeira to a retired admiral by making the voyage sound heroic, and claret to a young wife by discovering that the vintage matched the year of her marriage.
Both customers had left pleased, which Teddy declared the only sensible measure of success.
She had money now. Not much, but enough to pay for her board, buy bread and tea, and set aside a few shillings each week in a little tin beneath her bed, which she had privately named the Future.
What the Future contained, she did not yet specify.
Specificity invited worry, and worry invited fear, and fear was the enemy she fought each morning by getting up, dressing, and speaking before silence could take command.
The lending library knew her by name. Invitations had begun to arrive with surprising frequency. Mrs Dalrymple expected her every Tuesday for tea and had taken to calling her “my young friend from Somerset” with the proprietary pride of a woman who had discovered a protégée.
And through all of it—at the edges, in the pauses, in the moments she pretended not to be looking—there was Cillian.
He remained at the White Hart. She saw him sometimes from the milliner’s window, crossing the end of the street with his hands behind his back, and she had begun to recognise the difference between the empty silence of a man who felt nothing and the crowded silence of a man who felt too much and had no practice in saying so.
Cillian lingered with her more than he ought. His face returned to her at night, in her narrow bed with the lamp turned low, and felt like standing near an edge in the dark, knowing one step would alter the whole landscape.
She told herself she was not falling.
But the edge was giving way by inches.
“You look lovely,” Dorothea said, adjusting the waist of the borrowed dress with a pin she produced from somewhere in her bonnet. “The yellow suits your colouring. You look like a buttercup.”
“I look like a girl in another woman’s gown.”
“All women are in costume to some degree. The successful ones merely refuse to apologise for it. Now. The Assembly Rooms.”
“I have been to assemblies, Dorothea.”
“Yes, in Somerset, where everyone knew whose daughter you were before you entered the room. Bath is less forgiving. Here you are not a baronet’s daughter, attended by neighbours who have known your family for generations.
You are a young woman newly arrived, with uncertain connections, a borrowed gown, and a talent for making people notice you. That combination requires management.”
Molly made a face. “I dislike being managed.”
“I know. That is why I am calling it instruction.”
Dorothea briefed her as a general might brief an officer before hostile engagement.
The Assembly Rooms were not merely rooms; they were Bath’s theatre of consequence.
There were balls, concerts, card tables, and, circulating through them all, a population prepared to measure a newcomer by her dress, her connexions, her manners, and the particular confidence with which she crossed a crowded floor.
“I know how to behave,” Molly said. “That is not the difficulty. The difficulty is behaving while also remaining myself.”
“Yes,” Dorothea said. “That is always the difficulty.”
“I shall speak too much.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“I shall laugh too loudly.”
“Almost certainly.”
“And if someone asks too many questions, I shall answer at least one of them too honestly.”
“That,” Dorothea said, “is the danger for which I am attempting to prepare you.”
Molly looked at herself in the glass again. The yellow was softer than anything she would have chosen, and the girl looking back at her seemed both familiar and newly invented.
“What if they see I do not quite belong?”
Dorothea’s gaze met hers in the glass. “Then you will stand beside me, and they will remember how difficult I am to question.”
Molly turned from the glass. “That sounds almost like a threat.”
“It is a social fact,” Dorothea said. “Though the effect is often much the same.”
***
The Assembly Rooms were beautiful.
Molly had seen them from the outside, grand and columned, but within they were something else altogether: candlelight, pale walls, high ceilings, and music filling the rooms with a brightness that seemed to enter the very blood.
For one suspended moment, she stood beside Dorothea and thought, quite simply, I am here.
In a borrowed gown, in a city that had begun to make room for her, with music playing and no father at her shoulder to tell her she was too much.
She danced nearly every set.
She was not ignorant of assemblies. She had been taught how to enter a room, how to accept a partner, how to move through a country dance without disgracing her family.
But Somerset assemblies had been filled with people who knew her name before she arrived and knew her history before she spoke.
Bath was different. Bath watched. Bath weighed. Bath decided.
Still, if Molly lacked the polished ease of those young ladies who had been schooled to make elegance appear effortless, she possessed something livelier and harder to resist. She danced with spirit.
She laughed when a figure went astray, apologised with such good humour that the apology became part of the pleasure, and talked between movements with a warmth that left her partners amused, surprised, and generally disposed to admire her.
They came in turn: a young officer who blushed when she complimented his posture; an elderly gentleman who said she put him in mind of his favourite granddaughter; a merchant’s son who attempted to dazzle her with Italian opera and found himself, instead, receiving an animated opinion on Turkish-prison narratives, a subject Molly somehow made seem not entirely unsuitable for a ballroom.
Joy, she had always believed, was catching.
One did not need to command a room to alter it.
One only had to enter it feeling something honestly.
Feeling drew people as surely as warmth and light drew them in a dark house.
Molly danced with joy, and by degrees that joy gathered company.
The corner of the Assembly Rooms in which she moved became not the grandest part of the evening, nor the most elegant, but the part to which eyes kept returning.