You are more a mother to her than her own ever was.
Lily shivered and blinked at her reflection. Those words spoken in his deep timbre haunted her.
She closed her mouth, shook her head, and straightened her spine, giving her appearance one last inspection. Her new day dress was a sea-green-and-ivory stripe, with fluttering satin ribbons that drew attention to her narrow waist. Her ash-brown hair was flawlessly arranged in the latest coiffure that Mabel had picked up in their travels in Paris.
Lily was not ignorant of her appearance, as some of her sisters suspected. She knew that most onlookers found her very pretty to look at. However, Lily thought hers was an unoriginal kind of beauty.
She didn’t have the dramatic curves of her sister Margaret, or the interesting eye shape of Beatrice—all the more fascinating when Beatrice was scheming something, which was often. Even Claire had a sharpness to her features that made her beauty cold and cutting—much like the ice sculpture at Lady Beckwith’s last dinner party.
Lily was the kind of pretty that any inexperienced art student would have devised, had their painting master instructed him to paint a beautiful lady. Her blue eyes were large and framed with dark lashes, her lips perfectly plump, her skin the unblemished soft texture of an underripe peach. She even thought her figure quite bland. Lily would have traded her symmetrical curves for Claire’s elfin shape or Margaret’s abundance any day.
But some gentlemen didn’t seem to share Lily’s blasé self-assessment—some gentlemenstared.
Gazing in the mirror now, Lily could readily forgive her sisters for not realizing that she’d changed in her months away. Even she couldn’t see any difference. It was more an internal shift than an outward one. She still looked the same, sounded the same, perhaps even smiled the same.
Only Lily was aware that her heart had fractured.
It had been months since that terrible day she’d run from Lord Hayes’s study—more than enough time to recover if it had been just a glancing blow. Yet all throughout the myriad of pleasant distractions in Paris and now London, Lily had only become more convinced that part of her heart would reside within that great stone house in Northumberland for the rest of her life.
How was she to explain such a thing, when most of her sisters didn’t even know the truth? Except for Claire and Winifred, her sisters believed Lily had stayed with their Great Aunt Lucinda. As if that miser would have ever welcomed Lily for a visit!
How was she supposed to account for such an internal change when she hardly understood it herself? Claire and William both treated the entire episode as if it were something shameful to be forgotten, something never to be spoken of. And Lily forgave them for doing so, for she knew that what she had done had risked not just her own reputation, but those of her sisters as well.
There was a sharp rap on the door, and Margaret stuck her head inside. She was grinning, her round cheeks pink with whatever amusement she’d just enjoyed. Her excess of blonde hair was already playing truant from the pins that strained to hold it back.
“Are you coming, Lily? Claire’s waiting at the bottom of the stairs, probably tapping her foot.”
“I’m coming.” Lily took up her bonnet, tying it with a jaunty bow.
She followed her sister from the room, Margaret prattling about a new bookstore near the docks that Beatrice wished to visit. As she spoke, Lily did her best to shake off the melancholy that trailed after her like an invisible string tied to one ankle.
She knew better than to hope it would go away given enough time. All Lily could do was keep herself busy as much as she was able. Thankfully, London was an excellent place for busyness. There was always something to do, always something to see, and except for the early morning hours and late at night, the city was never silent.
Still, it was in those early-morning hours and the murky grey between wakefulness and sleep where Lily thought of the massive stone manor, of Rebecca, and then of him—the one she never should have missed at all.
The bookstore Beatricewanted to visit was barely a bookstore at all, a fact that she gave her sisters little time to realize. Nearly as soon as the black carriage stopped, Beatrice bounded down and shoved her face back into the open doorway.
“Well,” she said tartly, looking at Margaret and Lily in turn with wide eyes. Her ash-brown hair flicked in the wind. “Are you coming or not?”
“We’re coming at a slightly more sedate pace,” Lily said, the corners of her mouth twitching.
“Right.” Margaret gathered up her purse and then patted the tufted seat on either side as if she were checking to be sure she wasn’t leaving anything behind. “We’re only moving at the pace of a gazelle instead of your own wounded rhino.”
Beatrice frowned and her face disappeared from the opening, replaced by the silent offered hand of their groomsman and the faint scent of stagnant water.
“You had better hurry,” Claire said. “If you lose sight of her down here, she might board a ship and end up halfway across the world before anyone notices.”
“You just want us out and away so you can get to your mysterious rendezvous,” Margaret said, wrestling herself toward the door.
No matter how expensive and spacious the carriage, it was difficult to maintain elegance when entering and exiting. There was always a degree of stooping and the managing of skirts one had to do.
“It isnotmysterious, and it’snota rendezvous.” But Lily couldn’t help but notice that Claire adjusted her pelisse and didn’t make eye contact when she said so.
“Then why won’t you tell us where you’re going?”
“I have,” Claire said. “I’m meeting a friend for tea.”
“Agentlemanfriend. Otherwise, your sisters would have been invited,” Margaret grumbled, pausing in the doorway.
