“Why would he do that?”
“Who knows?” She waved a gloved hand. “Why was Richard the way he was? If one brother could willfully plunge us into poverty and bankrupt the title, how large of a stretch was it to believe that the other might ignore the title altogether?”
“But that would also mean ignoring the family, too.”
She faced him. “You must understand that Richard and William had an argument years ago—a nasty one in which Richard removed William from our house and prohibited him from acting as part of the family.”
Bradford frowned. “William wouldn’t blame you ladies for that.”
“I wasn’t so sure. I was there when it happened. Or at least, I heard the tail end of it. I was so shocked I couldn’t even utter a comforting word to William as he left. I just stood there like a useless, vapid thing. What must he have thought of me—of all his sisters—in that moment? We should have defended him. At the very least, we should have told him that we didn’t wish for him to go.”
“Certainly he knew that.”
“I understand that now. At the time, everything was so confusing. It was all so muddled by our collective fear.”
Bradford was studying her again. “How did you come up with the idea to become a governess?”
“I was going through an old trunk in the attic, unwrapping items, trying to see if any of it was worth selling. It wasn’t. It was a collection of my sister Winifred’s early paintings—absolute rubbish, but my mother loved them.” She flicked a gloved hand as if the topic was inconsequential. “Each was wrappedin newspaper, and I started reading the postings. So many of them weren’t in London, and I wondered whether I could get far enough away to be a governess where no one would recognize me.”
“Northumberland certainly is far enough,” he said, exhaling a laugh.
“Precisely. It was a short jump of reason from that idea to changing my name. That was Claire’s main problem with the idea—that people would connect the Preston name to employment, and none of us would ever be able to marry well.”
“How did you know Miss Sarah Hughes?”
Lily felt that old, familiar flare of jealousy. She pressed her lips together until it passed, then finally admitted, “She was the former pupil of our governess. Whenever one of us would misbehave, we were treated to a long lecture on all the merits of Miss Hughes, all the ways she was far more deserving of a life of luxury than we were.”
Bradford chuckled.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry if I sound bitter. I try, but I can hardly help it. You’d have a hard time keeping a rational view of someone if they’d been held over your head as the paragon through much of your formative years. We alldetestedMiss Sarah Hughes, though none of us had so much as laid eyes on her.”
“I suppose it’s understandable how you came to use her name. It must have been some thrilling sort of payback.” He grinned.
“It was terrifying. I kept imagining her finding me out, kept wondering what would happen if therealMiss Sarah Hughes showed up on your doorstep.”
“That visit would have been memorable, though it would have deprived both of us of hiking prime Northumberland countryside.”
Lily laughed ruefully and shook her head. “I know it wasn’t fair of me to involve her. She’d never hurt any of us directly.”
“I will concede that of all the people you could have chosen, she was the best. Not only were her qualifications excellent—and real—she was too busy having children to have ever found you out.”
“I don’t want you to get the impression that I intended her any harm,” Lily added, searching his face earnestly. “It was simple jealousy, nothing more, that caused me to think of her. When I reviewed all I knew, I thought that she would have precisely the qualifications one would want in a governess.”
“You were right. She was the best governess, on paper.” He nodded. “But as it turns out, I would have chosen Miss Lily Preston over Miss Sarah Hughes any day of the week.”
CHAPTER 19- LILY
“What is this, our twentieth ball?” Lily said, holding a benign smile upon her face with great effort.
“The twenty-third,” Beatrice supplied.
“It’s twenty-four,” Margaret said confidently. “And you may trust my number—I’ve been keeping a tally in my journal.”
They stood on the sidelines of the dancers. Laughter rang out, muted candlelight flickered, silk swirled. Even so, Lily felt very little enchantment. Though each hostess tried valiantly to outdo the others, every ball was starting to look and feel similar. There were small differences, she supposed—a larger musical group, better lighting, more flowers.
But the essence of every ball was the same: ladies stood until a man asked them to dance. Somewhere, there were trays of bite-sized sandwiches, cakes, biscuits, and the like, as well as punch and champagne. And each one had at least a hundred different people Lily would rather not have been required to brush against.
Claire was currently being swept around the floor by Lord Rutheridge as her sisters watched. Lily had just begged off from dancing another with a gentleman; her memory of him wasalready starting to bleed at the edges like a painting left out in the rain. It wasn’t because he was unmemorable that she’d turned him down—she was beginning to sweat and didn’t want her silk gown to darken beneath the arms. Now, her ash-brown curls flung back with every aggressive wave of her feather-tipped fan.
