Chapter Twenty-Four #2
The news of Dr. Gall’s proposal swept through the house like brushfire.
Mrs. Rose screamed and all but ran in circles with excitement.
Then she called them all into the dining room to celebrate, but the mood was hardly festive.
Elswyth sat, still in shock, as Mrs. Rose handed her a glass of champagne.
She’d insisted Elswyth bathe and dress, and now she sat in a pink gown, staring at a wall.
“My nearly perfect record remains nearly perfectly intact!” Mrs. Rose clapped and then raised her champagne in a toast. “To the future Lady Elswyth Gall!”
Percival shifted uncomfortably. “Hm. Hear, hear.”
Mrs. Rose ignored him. She poured more bubbling elixir into her glass and then fixed a second for Kehinde. He waved it away, instead looking curiously at Elswyth.
“Congratulations, Miss Elderwood,” Kehinde said. “Do you think you’ll say yes?”
“He is, well… He is about my age, you know,” Percival added. “This is not quite what I had in mind when I introduced you two.”
“I haven’t decided yet,” Elswyth said.
Mrs. Rose scoffed. “Of course she will. It’s not as though she has other proposals to speak of.
And Dr. Gall might not seem like it, but he’s one of the richest men in the city.
Medical patents, or something like that—a marriage to him is a dream come true.
I thought he was off the market completely after he lost his wife and son.
But it seems he has a soft spot for our Elswyth. ”
Percival sipped his champagne. “Yes, yes, all of that is true. But again, Elswyth, you have your whole life ahead of you… Are you sure you want a husband who may be dead by the time your children come of age? Will he make you happy?”
“I was not under the impression that my happiness was your concern,” Elswyth said. Venom seeped into her voice. More than she meant, anyway.
Percival bristled. “You know that’s not true—”
“Oh, I know very well that it is true, or you would not be sending me to marry Cousin Ficus. All you and my father have ever cared for is the financial future of our family. Well, handsome he is not, but Gall is here, and he is offering us a solution to our woes.”
Percival looked wounded. “I only want you to know your worth, Elswyth. You often follow your mind in situations like this. But if there was ever a time to follow your heart, it would be now.”
Percival looked at her significantly. Mrs. Rose broke in. “Perhaps if she had her eye on someone, but Miss Elderwood is not so easily seduced. No, Gall is the way. It solves all your problems quite neatly.”
Mrs. Rose looked at Elswyth, then to Percival, and her smile slowly faded. “No…”
Elswyth stood, turning her face away.
“Who? Who is it?” Mrs. Rose asked.
Elswyth turned to Kehinde, who stood behind her uncle. “How did you know?”
Kehinde smiled. He looked up at the wooden ceiling of the grand old house. “I did say the walls talk. That’s quite literal for a dendromancer. I know everything that happens in my house—that includes when Silas Blackthorn sneaks in through the window.”
Mrs. Rose gasped. “Blackthorn? Harrow’s bastard? Elswyth, you must be joking.”
Elswyth’s lower lip began to tremble, but she tried to hold it firm. “It doesn’t matter.”
Percival frowned. “Silas is a good lad. He might have a bad reputation… but reputation be damned. Do you love him?”
Elswyth hesitated, surprised by his bluntness.
“Of course she doesn’t,” Mrs. Rose said, “and I’m surprised you would suggest it!”
“I—I don’t know,” Elswyth whispered.
The words seemed to shake Mrs. Rose. Her face went blank and then filled with fury. “She cannot love him,” Mrs. Rose said. “He is a bastard. It’s improper, Elswyth. Perhaps it’s not wrong, not exactly, but society will turn their back on you. You’ll be outcasts!”
Elswyth began to speak, but Percival cut her off. “I have found that being an outcast is no matter, so long as you are cast out with the right people.”
Kehinde smiled, putting his hand on Percival’s shoulder. Percival found it there, taking it in his own. Mrs. Rose looked scandalized, eyes wide, but said nothing.
Percival stood. Kehinde took his other hand. “Come, my love. It’s getting late. Shall we retire?” he said.
Percival’s eyes shone. “I should like nothing more.”
And with that, the two left the room, hand in hand.
Mrs. Rose mumbled to herself, “The scandal! Well, that at least explains why I was never able to find him a match. I suppose this means my nearly perfect record is never going to be a perfect record again.”
“As if you didn’t already know,” Elswyth said. “And what of it? Why not just let people love who they love? And damn anyone who says otherwise.”
“But is that really what you want? To be an outcast? Silas is a bastard, Elswyth,” she said.
Venom dripped from the word. “And beyond that, he is of mixed blood. Wherever you go, people will see him, and you, and they will judge you both. Is that what you want? For your children? To be stared at wherever you go about, to be an object of curiosity?”
Elswyth turned her scarred side to Mrs. Rose. “I already am, Mrs. Rose. Why should it matter?”
“This will be different. You don’t know what it’s like to be outside of society. Even with your scar, you’ve always been a part of this world. This beautiful world.”
Mrs. Rose gestured upward, looking around the dining room, taking in the sight: the crown molding, the high ceiling, the art, and the splendor. Her voice was dreamy, almost frantic.
“And yet you have not?” Elswyth said. She meant it as a jest, but Mrs. Rose’s face fell. Elswyth realized then. She didn’t know anything about Mrs. Rose, not really. She was Mrs. Rose, not Lady Rose, so she wasn’t titled, but she lingered at the edges of nobility, always adjacent.
“Mrs. Rose, why do you hate bastards so much?”
“I never said that.” Mrs. Rose tried to laugh. What came out was a weak, desperate sound.
“You’ve judged Silas since the moment we met him.”
Mrs. Rose’s smile faltered. She cleared her throat. “I suppose I know a horrible story about a bastard. That’s all.”
“And you hate him because of a story? Stories are just lies with endings, Mrs. Rose. They’re not the truth.”
“Some are,” she said. Mrs. Rose stood, flattened her skirts, as if to excuse herself, and then turned away.
She moved to the piano, tracing her hand along the keys.
A bouquet of flowers waited there: white lilies and violet hyacinths, interspersed with a smattering of forget-me-nots.
“This one is about a little girl. She was born in a whorehouse, down in the Rows. Her mother was a singer who immigrated to London and fell on hard times… Her father was the son of a baron. When the singer became pregnant, the baron’s son told her to cut the baby out. But she didn’t.”
“I don’t understand,” Elswyth started.
Mrs. Rose sighed. She sat down at the piano and played a few keys; her voice was wistful. “The singer had a lovely voice. She used to sing to her daughter. Her favorite song was called ‘Rozhinkes mit Mandlen.’”
“Is that… German?” Elswyth asked.
Mrs. Rose shook her head. “Yiddish, dear. ‘Raisins and Almonds.’ It’s a song about a mother singing to her child, promising that one day, he’d grow rich trading raisins and almonds.
The singer raised her little girl to dream.
She raised her to remember who her father was. To remember that she was noble.”
Elswyth studied Mrs. Rose’s face. Mrs. Rose toyed with the bouquet of lilies and began to sing:
“Un az du vest vern raykh, Yidele, Zolstu zikh dermonen in dem lidele.”
She sang fluently. No trace of accent. Slowly, Elswyth began to understand.
“That wasn’t true, of course. When she was old enough, she went to find her father, now a baron himself.
He didn’t want anything to do with her, of course.
None of the nobility did. She stood on the street outside his house for hours one Christmas, looking through the windows at his gilded rooms, his true-born daughters in their gowns and flowers.
A perfect world, just beyond a pane of glass.
“When her mother died, she didn’t have any choice but to start paying rent to the brothel’s owner. She was a smart girl. She did what she had to. And then one day, a man came along who changed everything. A man who adored her.”
She smiled. “They fell in love. He came from money, like her father. He taught her how to dress and dance and all the proper manners. He helped her lose her accent. She sang for him, and he loved it so much that he put her on a stage. And then everyone loved her. For a brief, dazzling moment, she was a star.”
Her fingers traced over the piano keys, and she began to play. A sad little song, echoing the lullaby.
“She changed her name. Together, they wrote her a new story. A happier past. And then he married her. And for ten years, everything was perfect.”
She stopped playing. The song echoed for a moment before fading. “That couldn’t last, though. He died. And after a while, everything dried up. She was too old for the stage then. The people she called friends knew that she wasn’t really one of them. They cut her out. Like pruning a flower.
“But love had pulled her out of poverty, and love would do it again. So she remarried. An even richer man this time. But it wasn’t the same, not really.
She did love him, or she thought she did.
But nothing would ever be like her first love.
And when her second husband died, she cried much less. Her third, not at all.
“But no matter how rich her husband was, society never accepted her, not fully. She never let it cow her, though. She started a business. Took on a whole new persona. She became her own star. And all through the years, she thought if she could just be more like them—if she could remember the right spoon to use, remember all the names of flowers and the little social niceties—well, then they would love her, wouldn’t they? ”
Mrs. Rose shook her head. “But no. Even if they didn’t know where she came from, the stink of being a bastard would still be on her. She’d always be that little girl in the whorehouse. Looking through a window into someone else’s beautiful world.”
Mrs. Rose looked up from the piano. When she did, tears glistened in her eyes. “I don’t want that to be you, Elswyth. If you marry Silas, it will be. Everywhere you go, you will be Lady Blackthorn. And you will never outrun that name.”
“Mrs. Rose…” Elswyth said. “I—”
Mrs. Rose raised a hand to stop her. “It is just a story, dear. That little girl doesn’t exist anymore,” she said, forcing a smile, “and it’s not in good taste to speak of tragedies. A lady must always remain positive.”
Elswyth felt as though she would cry. “Yes, Mrs. Rose,” she said.
Mrs. Rose stood and walked over to her. She knelt before Elswyth and took her hands.
“But Elswyth… if I may say something, as someone who has had several marriages of convenience in the past… They are not all bad. When there is no pressure to love the other person, it’s easier to become fond of them.
And that can turn into love—not just passion, but real, solid love. ”
Mrs. Rose patted Elswyth’s knee. “It’s getting late. I should retire.” With that, she stood and moved toward the door.
“Mrs. Rose?” Elswyth said. Her voice trembled.
“Yes, dear?”
“The girl from the story. Did she love her first husband?”
Mrs. Rose smiled sadly. “More than anything in the world.”
“And if she had the chance, back then, to marry someone better… someone with more money, a better reputation… would she have? Would she have given up those ten years with him?”
Mrs. Rose paused for a moment. “No. Not for anything. Good night, Elswyth.”