Chapter 1
One
Miss Bennet,
Have you ever wondered whether the life you are expected to live is truly the one you would choose for yourself?
H.
Victoria Bennet blinked and read the line twice.
Then she set the letter down on the breakfast table, picked up her teacup, and read it a third time over the rim.
It was not a long letter. It was, in fact, barely a letter at all — one line, one question, and a single initial that told her absolutely nothing.
No family name. No address. No polite expression of hope that this correspondence found her in good health.
Nothing that resembled the sort of careful, formal introduction a gentleman was expected to offer before presuming to address a lady he had never met.
And yet whoever had written it seemed to feel that one sentence was quite sufficient.
She put the teacup down and looked toward the door. "Thomas."
The footman appeared promptly. "Miss Bennet?"
"This letter." She held it up. "When did it arrive?"
"Very early this morning, miss. Before the household was properly up. A messenger brought it."
"Which messenger? From which family?"
Thomas shifted very slightly. "The messenger wouldn't say, miss. Wouldn't give his name, either, or the name of the party who sent him. Left it at the door and was gone before Mrs. Hatch could ask him anything further."
Victoria looked at the letter again. Have you ever wondered whether the life you are expected to live is truly the one you would choose for yourself?
Irritation moved through her, clean and clarifying.
It was an impertinent question — pointed in a way that assumed rather too much about a woman the writer had apparently never spoken to directly, and rather too little about the common courtesies owed to a stranger.
She was not some heroine in a circulating library novel, to be intrigued by mysterious correspondence and a single inscrutable initial.
She was also, she noted with some annoyance, still holding the letter.
"Thank you, Thomas."
He withdrew. Victoria folded the letter along its original crease, smoothing it flat with one deliberate motion, and was just considering what to do with it when Emily appeared in the doorway with her hair half-pinned and a piece of toast in her hand.
"Good morning." Emily dropped into the chair opposite and reached for the teapot. Then she stopped, teapot in hand, and looked at Victoria. "What is that?"
"Nothing."
"You're frowning at it."
"I am not frowning."
"Victoria." Emily set the teapot down with the patience of a younger sister who has had considerable practice.
"You are holding that piece of paper as though it has personally offended you, and your eyebrow is doing the thing it does when something has caught your attention and you don't want to admit it. "
Victoria looked up. "My eyebrow does not do a thing."
"It absolutely does a thing." Emily leaned forward. "What is it? Is it a letter?"
"It is nothing of consequence." Victoria folded it again, which she immediately recognized as a mistake, because folding it a second time only demonstrated that she had already folded it once and was now folding it again, which was not the behavior of a person for whom something was nothing of consequence. "It was sent in error, I expect."
"Let me see it."
"Certainly not."
"Then at least tell me what it says."
"Emily."
"You look far too interested in nothing for it to actually be nothing," Emily said, and reached for her toast with the air of someone prepared to wait as long as necessary.
Victoria held the letter for a moment longer, which she recognized was also a mistake, and then she stood and crossed to the small writing desk in the corner of the room. She opened the drawer, placed the letter inside, and shut it again with a definitive click.
"There," she said. "Nothing."
Emily watched her return to the table with the expression of a person filing information away for future use.
Victoria picked up her teacup and said nothing further, which she was perfectly entitled to do.
The letter was a peculiarity, nothing more.
Someone had written a vaguely philosophical question and signed it with a letter of the alphabet, and she was not going to spend any further portion of her morning thinking about it.
Have you ever wondered whether the life you are expected to live is truly the one you would choose for yourself?
She had chosen her own life quite deliberately, as it happened. She had done so in full view of everyone who had opinions about it, and there had been no shortage of those. She did not require a stranger and the letter H to imply otherwise.
The door opened again, and Mrs. Bennet entered the breakfast room with the expression she wore whenever she had decided something, which was to say with considerable momentum.
"Girls." She sat, accepted the teacup Emily immediately poured for her, and fixed them both with a look of bright determination. "We are attending the Hargrove riding party this morning. Out toward Richmond. Half past ten."
Emily sat up straighter. "A riding party?"
"Sir Edmund Hargrove's. He has invited several families, I understand, and there are to be any number of— well." Mrs. Bennet smoothed her skirt with both hands. "Any number of very agreeable people."
Victoria reached for the toast rack. "Agreeable meaning eligible."
"Agreeable meaning agreeable, Victoria, though I see no reason why those two things cannot coincide." Her mother looked at her steadily. "You used to enjoy riding."
"I still enjoy riding."
"Then you will enjoy this morning."
There was, Victoria reflected, very little to be done with logic of that particular shape. She took her toast.
"Will there be other young ladies my age?" Emily asked, leaning forward. "Lady Arabella Ravenscroft mentioned something about a riding party last week — do you think she might be there? Her father has an estate near Richmond, I believe."
"Quite possibly," Mrs. Bennet said, in the tone of someone who had already investigated this thoroughly.
"I cannot wait until I am out properly," Emily said, sitting back with the deep longing of someone temporarily barred from everything interesting. "Riding parties, assemblies, dinners — you see everything, and I am always at home."
"You were at the Alderton dinner last month," Victoria pointed out.
"That was different. That was family." Emily waved this aside. "I mean real society. Parties where things actually happen."
Victoria looked at her sister. Emily was sixteen, bright-eyed, and utterly convinced that the world beyond their drawing room was composed entirely of romance and adventure. It was, Victoria supposed, a reasonable thing to believe at sixteen, before one had actually spent sufficient time in it.
"Society," she said, "is largely a great many people standing in rooms asking each other the same questions they asked the last time they stood in a room together. You are not missing as much as you imagine."
"You only say that because you've decided not to enjoy it."
"I enjoy it perfectly well. I simply have no illusions about it."
"Victoria." Her mother's voice carried the particular note it produced when she was choosing her battles carefully. "Half past ten. Your blue habit, I think."
Victoria did enjoy riding, which was the trouble with objecting too strenuously.
And there was nothing specifically wrong with a riding party in Richmond.
The air would be good, and the company could be tolerated.
She would go, she would be polite, and she would come home again, and nothing would have changed in any direction that mattered.
"Very well," she said.
Emily beamed at her as though she had made a great concession.
The morning was clear, the kind that appeared in late spring with a frankness that felt almost like a personal reassurance after a damp week, and the road toward Richmond was pleasant enough.
Victoria sat across from her mother in the carriage and watched the city give way to open country and thought, against her better judgment, about the letter in her writing desk.
It was the phrasing that bothered her. Not the question itself — she had no patience for the question itself, which was the sort of thing that sounded meaningful and dissolved into nothing when you pressed on it — but the confidence behind it.
Whoever had written it had not been tentative.
There were no apologies for the intrusion, no careful preamble, no suggestion that they were uncertain about putting such a thing on paper.
They had simply asked, as though they already knew her well enough to know she would not dismiss it immediately.
Which she had not, she admitted privately, though she had tried.
Have you ever wondered whether the life you are expected to live is truly the one you would choose for yourself?
She had wondered, of course. She had wondered at length, over many years, and the wondering had produced a series of decisions that her mother found baffling and her acquaintances found eccentric and she herself found entirely sensible.
She had wondered, and she had concluded, and she was quite satisfied with where she had arrived.
So the letter was nothing. It was a peculiarity, probably a mistake, possibly a jest. She would forget it entirely.
She straightened her gloves and looked out the window.
The riding party, when they arrived, was already well underway — perhaps twenty people spread across the lawn and the gravel drive in front of a handsome house, horses being led about, voices carrying cheerfully in the clear air.
A groom came forward as the carriage stopped, and Victoria stepped out after her mother into the pleasant noise of it all.
She was scanning the gathering in the mild, automatic way one did at such things, noting the faces she recognized and the ones she did not, when something made her stop.
A man stood slightly apart from the main group, near where three horses were tethered at the edge of the lawn.
He was tall, dark-haired, and completely still in the way of someone who was paying a great deal of attention to his surroundings without appearing to do so.
He was speaking to another gentleman beside him, but even as she watched, his gaze moved across the gathering in a slow, deliberate survey — the kind that belonged to a person accustomed to assessing a room.
Then his gaze reached her, and stopped.
Victoria held it for exactly one second before turning away to take her mother's arm, her expression perfectly composed.
But the back of her neck was warm, and she had absolutely no idea who he was.