Chapter 1
It was a perfectly ordinary day a few weeks into the London Season. Not an exciting day, even, but a dull one. It was raining. And then the lawyer’s letter arrived at the shabby rented house in Bloomsbury, and changed everything except the weather.
There was a party that evening, and the three unmarried Constantine sisters were preparing for it with no marked degree of enthusiasm.
Already, flounces had become torn, muslins tired, and a dozen little repairs were necessary.
Wealthy ladies would have servants on hand for such work, and might even be contemplating exciting new additions to their wardrobes, now that they’d taken stock of the competition and seen their finest gowns. But the Constantines were not wealthy.
This was Cecilia’s fifth Season. If she’d ever felt any excitement about the prospect of coming out into the world, this had long dissipated.
She found herself in a sort of limbo, a situation neither agreeable nor disagreeable.
Miss Cecilia Constantine went to parties, so many parties, and sometimes, she enjoyed them, and sometimes, she did not.
She was two and twenty only; though she was not engaged to be married yet, she was not desperate.
The fact that she quite frequently told herself this might, in fact, signify that desperation hovered not so very far away.
She had three married sisters. The two eldest, knowing their duty, had accepted flattering offers for their hands at the end of their first Seasons, when they were just seventeen; Allegra, the third, had wed at the end of her second.
All three had attracted wealthy suitors, and by doing so, had lessened the pressure on the younger girls to accept the first eligible man who showed any interest in them.
And all three of them were happily married now, but that had not always been the case for Viola, the second oldest. Cecilia was beginning to think that her chances of meeting the perfect man for her, supposing such a mythical creature existed, were dwindling with every day that passed, and soon would have vanished altogether.
Cecilia too had had her wooers, gentlemen of middling rank and fortune, and might be married with a child by now, if she had taken Mr So-And-So.
But she had not. No one had captured her heart or even her interest, and at this distance, they rather blended into one in her memory, even the ones she’d kissed.
She was grateful not to have been obliged by pressure of circumstances to tie herself to one of them, but she could not delude herself that any other options lay in her future but these two stark choices: marriage, or spinsterhood with all its disadvantages.
This was the nature of a woman’s life; there were no other options.
Cecilia had never spent a great deal of time wondering what she’d do, what she’d feel, if matters were different, because they weren’t, and couldn’t be.
She did not have the luxury of holding out for love, none of them did, and so she had tried not to indulge her fancy in imagining what that might be like.
She’d read novels, of course, in which young ladies had been offered happy endings, but if she’d ever allowed herself to daydream on that topic, she’d ruthlessly repressed such unhelpful thoughts.
Before the letter.
She happened to be passing through the hall when the parlourmaid Amy answered the door; her mind was elsewhere, occupied with trivial matters she could not later recall, as anyone easily might be in the moment that their life changed forever, and so she didn’t note the messenger particularly.
By the time she’d opened the extraordinary missive and realised that it might be useful (though unladylike) to question the person who’d brought it, it was too late; he’d gone.
The communication had been addressed to Miss Constantine (that was Bea), Miss Cecilia Constantine, and Miss Bianca Constantine.
There had hardly been room for the house number and street name after that.
And this in itself was unprecedented. Apart from on her birthday, when her older sisters might write to her specifically to congratulate her, if they happened not to be in London at the time, Cecilia wasn’t sure she’d ever received a letter addressed to her before.
Bianca was positive she hadn’t. They didn’t know anyone outside their immediate family who’d be writing to any of them, least of all in this formal fashion.
It was from a lawyer in Lincoln’s Inn, a Mr Cotwin, Esquire, and, tangled up in a great deal of legal language, the bare facts of it were that Mrs Augusta Albery, of Suffolk, an aged widow who had apparently been born a Constantine long ago, had left them her fortune, to be shared equally between them, and also her home, Albery Hall.
Her fortune. It was almost impossible to take in.
They had an appointment with Mr Cotwin tomorrow, to sign papers and receive more details, including a series of mere formalities (as yet unspecified) that must be verified before they could take full possession of their inheritance.
Their inheritance. Beatrice, when she paused for a moment in her anxiety over whether the whole thing could even be true at all, was worried about the mere formalities; Cecilia and Bianca brushed them aside as minor details.
The letter said that Mrs Albery, despite being well on into her nineties, had insisted on being kept abreast of family events via her trusted lawyer, and this was why the three younger Constantine sisters were to be so favoured.
Apparently, she had followed their doings for years in secret, and had therefore been aware that their older sisters, Sabrina, Viola and Allegra, were not in a position to need such an unexpected windfall.
His now deceased client, Mr Cotwin had said drily towards the end of the missive, when he became slightly more human in his manner of expressing himself, had held decided views on the injustice of primogeniture, and indeed on many other topics.
Most of all, he wrote, she abhorred the notion of the family entail which, upon their father’s death a few years back, had deprived the Constantines of their home in Surrey – which now belonged to their cousin John – may his name be forever cursed and may all his toenails in-grow – and could easily have left them destitute.
This bequest was designed to rectify this manifest injustice.
This wasn’t the sort of thing that happened in real life, or not in their experience.
‘We do not,’ said Beatrice, for the third time, ‘have an Aunt Augusta.’ She didn’t seem to be able to get past this point.
‘Well, no.’ This was Cecilia, who had moved on some time ago, and was trying not to become impatient with her more painstaking older sister. ‘Obviously, we do not, now. You’ve read the letter. She’s dead.’
Beatrice all but growled, ‘We have never had an Aunt Augusta. Aunts don’t suddenly appear, alive or dead.
Especially dead. It flies against all reason.
’ Bea’s olive skin was unusually flushed and her brown eyes stormy; all three of the sisters, who greatly resembled each other in their dark good looks, were somewhat agitated this morning, and no wonder.
‘Do we care?’ Bianca was the youngest and the most impulsive of the sisters.
‘She must have existed – even if we’ve never heard of her – because she’s left us her home and her fortune.
We can’t ask her why, because she’s dead, but we couldn’t have asked her while she was alive anyway, even if we’d known anything about it, because it would have seemed excessively uncivil and ungrateful.
So we must just accept the situation, which I for one am quite prepared to do.
I presume you’re not saying that some strange old lady pretended to be our aunt, and then pretended to die, so she could leave us a large sum?
Because that really does make no sense at all.
And the money is real enough; the lawyer says so. As – I hope – is the house.’
Cecilia could see that Bea was allowing her worry over the sheer oddness of what had happened to destroy her pleasure in it.
Not, of course, her pleasure in the fact that this mysterious Aunt Augusta was dead; that would be a dreadful thing to feel about anyone, apart possibly from the tyrant Bonaparte.
But they should surely be permitted to take some delight in the fact that they, till now sadly impoverished and dependent on family assistance to sustain life, had quite unexpectedly been left money and property.
People could be excused, she thought, for saying things more than once, in their pleasurable shock.
Just now, their mama, Leontina, was telling them, again, that she’d had not the slightest notion of this generous lady’s existence.
‘She must have been your father’s great-great-aunt, I suppose – can that be right?
– though it seems incredible that she has lived so long.
By the time I met him, his parents were both dead.
He was in contact with his uncles and aunts and first cousins, but I seem to remember hearing that one of his forefathers had an enormous number of children by several scandalous marriages, and perhaps this lady was one of the younger offspring, and therefore he and his parents never knew her.
What is astounding is the fact that she made herself aware of our situation – your sisters’ circumstances, their marriages – and yet never thought to write to us, not even in condolence when your poor father died.
This reassurance, or a discreet promise of it, would have been of great help then. ’
‘I think the lawyer’s letter is implying that she was highly eccentric.
A recluse, even,’ Cecilia said. ‘Do you suppose Albery Hall can be a ruin?’ Cecilia, as all her sisters knew, had a deplorable addiction to the Gothic, and would not by any means object to possession of a picturesque tumbledown mansion, about which she might flit, candle in hand, in flowing white muslin or in a dark cloak and hood, depending on the season and the weather.
Beatrice, and even Bianca, were of a more practical bent, and would much prefer the chimneys not to smoke and the roof not to leak. Assuming there was a roof.
‘We must ask Mr Cotwin,’ Bea responded. ‘Along with a great many other questions. We should write them down now, so we don’t forget anything. I shall do so.’
There had been little time yet to discuss matters in any depth, but Cecilia had already been seized by an overpowering curiosity about the house that she and her sisters now owned, and most of all, a strong desire to see it as soon as possible.
She was reasonably confident that Bea and Bianca felt the same and, if money was in fact going to be placed in their hands, tomorrow, she was of a mind to pack a trunk, hire a carriage and four horses (because now they were the kind of people who could hire carriages and teams without blinking), and head to Suffolk immediately.
They had never been able to afford to travel on a whim, and now, if she understood correctly, everything had changed for the better.
Their mother, she knew, would point out that the Season was in full swing.
What of it? She was in no mood for such nonsense, when something far more exciting could be happening instead.
Cecilia was two and twenty, Beatrice was fully six and twenty – quite on the shelf, and excessively happy to be there – and Bianca was nineteen.
It was Bianca’s second Season. Or it would be, if Mrs Constantine got her way and their lives continued in the dull old pattern.
Mrs Constantine, as all six sisters could attest, generally did get her way.
They had not, as yet, had an argument about this, though they would soon.
When Bianca and Cecilia had tried to start one by hinting at how ridiculous it was to consider spending the rest of the spring and summer pointlessly in London when they could be exploring their new house, Mrs Constantine’s face had clouded with instinctive protest. But Bea had said firmly that it was the height of folly to make any plans until they knew exactly how they were situated, and they had all been obliged to concede that this was true.
Mr Cotwin had not specified how much money, precisely, they were to inherit, separately or together; he had used the phrase substantial assets, which sounded warmly encouraging, but none of them could guess what this actually meant, how these assets might be invested, and whether they were immediately accessible or hedged about with conditions and restrictions that would make their lives complicated in ways they couldn’t yet imagine. Tomorrow, they would find out.