Chapter 2 #2
She continued to her own room, her hand hesitating on the door handle.
Within these walls, she could predict every facet of her life down to the minute.
Dressing for dinner, helping her sisters with their embroidery patterns, perhaps reading a few pages of a novel before sleep claimed her.
It was a familiar routine, but even the familiar eventually grew uncomfortable.
Tamsin stepped inside. As she unbuttoned her day dress, her thoughts drifted to her morning walk with little Henry. He had been so certain those dogs were lions. She smiled, shaking her head. Henry’s question about whether lions were larger than Lord Hartwell’s dogs had given her great amusement.
At least she had that to share at dinner. Even if it wasn’t anything particularly exciting, she had still interacted with one of York’s more interesting civilians.
Lord Hartwell himself had been exactly what she might have expected from the town’s most notable defender of all things old and worth preserving.
Composed. Deliberate. The sort of man who did not need to raise his voice because the people around him already paid attention.
Tamsin had recognized him immediately, of course—one could hardly live within walking distance of York and not know the handsome Baron Hartwell on sight. She had curtsied and thanked him and managed Henry with reasonable efficiency, and doubted she’d left any lasting impression whatsoever.
Which was exactly as it should be.
What stayed with her, oddly, was not the man but the dog.
The female—Athena, he had called her—had pressed her nose into her gloved hand with a kind of quiet curiosity, and Tamsin had scratched her ears without thinking, the way she might have done with any creature who asked politely for attention.
The massive dog had a gentility and a gentleness about her Tamsin could not help admiring.
It had been a small thing. A morning’s interruption. The city going about its business and she going about hers. Only for a moment had her path crossed with another’s.
She draped her day dress over the foot of her bed and crossed to her wardrobe. What would it be like to have news of her own to share? To be the one stepping through the doors of York’s bustling society, engaging in discussions that extended beyond domestic duties and sibling squabbles?
Perhaps it was ungrateful to even think such a thing.
Selecting a dinner gown from her modest wardrobe, Tamsin’s reflection in the looking glass above her dressing table stared back at her. Is this all there is? Is this all you want?
Tamsin tightened the ribbons of her gown, her fingers lingering on the soft material.
She had yet to find any answer but the questions, insistent as they were, refused to be silenced.
With a final, uncertain glance at her reflection, she left her room and took a deep breath as she prepared to join her family for dinner.
In the dining room, Tamsin had barely settled into her chair at the table before her oldest brother Leopold spoke.
“I had a letter from Augusta’s mother this morning.” He said it the way one announces a minor grievance, folding his arms over his chest and glaring at the cutlery. “She is sending Augusta to Scotland. She writes that Augusta’s grandmother intends to keep her through Epiphany.”
“January?” Tamsin said, with exactly the right amount of sympathy. “That is a long time.”
“It is entirely unreasonable. That is nearly a quarter of a year, gone.” He reached for his wine.
Leopold was a peacock, according to their father.
Proud. Dramatic. Perhaps a little too obsessed with the knot of his cravat.
But always deservingly so. “Her grandmother is a selfish woman. I have said so before.”
“You have,” Charles agreed pleasantly, helping himself to a second roll. “Many times. With great consistency. At length.”
Leopold shot him a dark look. Charles smiled into his wine.
“I am sorry, Leo,” Tamsin said, and meant it. “I am sure she is equally frustrated by the separation and necessary pause in your courtship. She will be missed.”
Leopold’s expression suggested he found this moderately comforting, yet he immediately set it aside in favor of further complaint. “I think her mother and grandmother are doing it on purpose.”
Across the table, Daphne leaned toward Seraphina and inquired, in a whisper loud enough to carry the length of the room, “Do you think the white muslin or the overlay of lace for the Christmas assembly?”
“The lace,” Seraphina said immediately. “Unquestionably the lace. White muslin is for debutantes.”
“She is a debutante,” Pearl pointed out with a raised eyebrow.
“Yes, but she needn’t look like one…” began the chatter.
The trio were her father’s starlings. Small, quick, and inclined to cluster together as they chirped about whatever matter captured their attention in the moment.
Tamsin glanced at Daphne, frowning down at her dress as she imagined the colors and fabrics. “You would look lovely in either,” she offered.
The family’s newest debutante brightened immediately. “Do you think so? Truly?”
“Truly. Though the lace would be a greater expense to have it by December. Bring me the designs tomorrow, and I will help you decide.”
“Oh, Tamsin, you are wonderful.” Daphne returned to her chatter with Seraphina, the compliment already absorbed and forgotten.
Charles had skipped the next two courses and requested the chocolate cake, which he ate with focused devotion, like a man fulfilling a sacred obligation. “Mrs. Godfrey has outdone herself,” he announced to the family. “I might need to marry her.”
“She is sixty years old,” Pearl chirped, as though this were the only hindrance to that idea.
“I have great respect for experience…”
Leopold was still clearly thinking about Augusta.
Tamsin could tell by the way he was eating; in slow, mournful bites.
She watched him for a moment, this eldest brother of hers, handsome and slightly burdened by his own importance, and felt the familiar complicated tenderness she had for all of them.
She saw so much good in him. His devotion to Miss Augusta Despencer, only child of a baronet, was what many would call romantic, even if it kept him from truly engaging with the rest of the family. He wasn’t a bad man. He simply occupied his own life very thoroughly.
The conversation turned, as it always did, back to December.
The assembly. The gown. Whether Pearl’s hair would suit a certain style Seraphina had seen in a fashion plate.
Charles offered an opinion that was immediately rejected, given it lacked all seriousness.
Leopold finished his wine in morose silence and refilled his glass.
Tamsin thought, briefly, of the morning. Of Henry’s upturned face and the great dog leaning into his small hands. Of the still September air near the walls. The brief, uncomplicated pleasure of being somewhere that was not here, doing something that was not this.
She could mention it. I took Henry into the city this morning. We met Lord Hartwell’s dogs. Henry asked if lions were larger. I felt—
“Tamsin,” Seraphina said, interrupting her thoughts, “do you think we ought to have new gloves made before Christmas, or will our current ones do?”
Tamsin looked at her sister’s hands, then Pearl’s, then Daphne’s. She calculated the cost with the automatic speed of long practice. It always seemed better to save a shilling than not.
“Your current ones will do perfectly well,” she said with a smile. “And we will have them cleaned.”
Seraphina accepted this. Pearl was already asking Daphne something about dancing slippers. The sacrifice went unnoticed.
Tamsin reached for her wine and let the thought of the morning go quietly.
No one at the table would think it significant.
It had been a small thing anyway. A child and two large dogs and a baron with composed dark eyes who would not remember her name by morning—if she’d bothered to give it. Which she hadn’t.
Charles pushed back his chair. “Magnificent cake,” he said, with obvious satisfaction and crumbs around his mouth. “I must be off. Bolton thinks he can beat me at piquet. He cannot, but I intend to let him believe it for at least three hands.”
“Do try to come home at a reasonable hour.” Tamsin bit her tongue immediately after saying it. She was not her siblings’ mother, as she was forced to remind herself on countless occasions every day.
“I make no such promises.” He kissed the top of her head as he passed, the casual warmth of it habitual.
She sat for a moment after he left, listening to her sisters chatter about December, watching Leopold pour a third glass of wine and stare at nothing, presumably the place where Augusta Despencer lived in his imagination. The chairs set aside for their parents were unoccupied.
Her father had called her his wren since her youth. Perhaps because she was quiet and went to great lengths to keep out of trouble, darting around, never settling, never gaining anyone’s attention. Now it suited her for other reasons. Plain. Quiet. Overlooked even by her family at times.
She loved them. Every one of them, completely and without reservation.
Although it would be nice, she reflected, if every once in a while someone asked her about her day.