CHAPTER ONE #3
Her reflection stared back at her from the glass, dark chestnut hair escaping its pins as it always did, those rebellious curls that no amount of pomade could tame, green eyes that looked older than her two and twenty years, shadowed with exhaustion and something harder.
A stubborn jaw that her mother had called her best and worst feature.
You will never learn to yield, Lyssi, her mother had said once, laughing, brushing a curl back from Lysandra’s forehead with gentle fingers.
That chin of yours won’t let you. It will serve you well someday, I think, or it will destroy you. Perhaps both.
Both, Lysandra thought bitterly. Definitely both.
She touched the locket at her throat, feeling the worn gold beneath her fingertips. Her mother’s face was inside, painted in miniature by an artist whose name Lysandra had long since forgotten, forever young and forever smiling and forever gone.
What would you tell me to do? She wondered, pressing the locket against her palm until the edges bit into her skin.
But she already knew. Her mother had been practical above all things, practical and protective and utterly devoted to her children.
She would have told Lysandra to survive.
She would have told her to do whatever was necessary to keep her siblings safe, to preserve what remained of the family, to endure.
Endurance. That was what women like Lysandra were born for, wasn’t it?
Not happiness, not affection, not the romantic dreams that filled Arabella’s head, just endurance.
Just the grim satisfaction of getting through another day, another crisis, another impossible situation, still standing at the end of it.
“When?” Lysandra asked without turning around, her voice steadier now.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The wedding. When does he expect it to take place?”
A rustle of paper as her father consulted something on his desk. “His solicitor suggests… within the fortnight. The duke wishes to return to Yorkshire before winter sets in fully.”
Yorkshire. Stormhaven Hall. She had heard it described once at a house party, by a woman who had seen it from a distance during a tour of the moors, a great gray fortress rising from the heath like something from a Gothic novel, isolated and wind-battered and utterly remote.
It looked like the sort of place where someone had been murdered, the woman had said, laughing nervously. Or where someone might be murdered yet.
Miles from London. Miles from her kindred. Miles from the world and everything she had ever known.
Her hands clenched in the fabric of her skirt, the thin muslin crumpling beneath her fingers, but she did not allow herself to tremble. She would not give her father that satisfaction. She would not give anyone that.
“Lyssi.” Her father’s voice cracked on her name, splintering like ice beneath a boot. “Lyssi, if there were any other way…”
“But there isn’t.” She turned at last, and whatever he saw in her face made him recoil as though she had struck him.
“There isn’t any other way, is there, Papa?
There hasn’t been any other way for a very long time.
I have simply been delaying the inevitable, pretending that if I managed carefully enough, if I economized cleverly enough, if I held everything together tightly enough, it would somehow be sufficient.
” She drew a breath that felt like swallowing glass, sharp and cold and painful.
“I was a fool. I see that now. A fool who thought she could hold back the tide with nothing but her hands.”
“You were magnificent. You are magnificent. Everything you’ve done for this family…”
“Is apparently worth twenty thousand pounds and a duke who kills people.” She moved toward the desk and picked up a sheet of paper, clean and blank, one of the few luxuries they still permitted themselves because a gentleman, even a ruined one, must be able to write correspondence. “I will need a quill and ink.”
Her father stared at her, his eyes wet with what might have been tears. “You’re accepting?”
“Did you imagine I would refuse?” She set the paper down and reached for the inkwell, testing its weight in her palm.
Nearly empty, of course. Everything in this house was nearly empty, the inkwell, the larder, the coal scuttle, her father’s soul.
“Did you imagine I would condemn my sisters to ruin and my brother to a life without prospects, all to preserve my own comfort?” She dipped the quill and held it poised above the paper, watching a single drop of ink fall and spread like a dark bloom, like blood pooling on white snow.
“You do not know me at all, Papa, if you thought that.”
“I know you,” he said quietly, and there was something almost like pride in his voice, though he had no right to it. “I know you better than you think. And I know this is breaking your heart.”
The words hit harder than she expected, slipping past the armor she had constructed around herself, and for one terrible moment she felt the sting of tears behind her eyes, hot and traitorous.
But she had learned long ago not to cry where anyone could see, had learned it at fourteen, standing over her mother’s grave while her siblings wept and her father stared into the middle distance, and she was not about to begin now.
“Hearts mend,” she said instead, and began to write.