“Think of your children.” Aunt Thompson glared at her daughter.
“I haven’t got any—”
Aunt Thompson raised her voice. “You think this information is too dull and plebeian for your sensibilities, but money and the way your husband chooses to use it is going to define the rest of your life. It means—”
“Socrates said—”
“Your precious Socrates!” Aunt Thompson threw up her hands. “Do you want to teach your daughters about Socrates, or do you want them to be taking piecework at ten years of age?”
“I want to teach them that they are more valuable than wearing the right dress and going to the right party!”
“Then marry a husband who can support you!”
The two Thompson women stared at each other, arms akimbo, breathing hard, both so sure they were right. Like most arguments, they were each talking about themselves.
After a long moment, Rose turned back to the piano. She shuffled through her music, settling on a section with some detailed fingerwork.
Aunt Thompson sighed, staring blankly at Celia.
“You have a chance,” she said, a long moment later. “Your dowry.” Her voice dropped even lower. “You are of the nobility.”
“We all have a chance.” Celia felt responsible for her cousins, but she didn’t like feeling separate from them. The difference was the Westhavens had a family home. “Rose’s dowry is equal to my own.”
“But she won’t understand.” Aunt Thompson glanced at the piano. “You do, Celie, don’t you?”
Celia waited, again, for her aunt to share the truth.
“You’ve always been close to Marianne, haven’t you, dear?”
Celia tensed, startled.
“Almost more of a mother to her than I have been. With the two babies in the churchyard, I was so tired when Marianne was born. And one a son.”
Celia waited, braced and wary. She could have more empathy if her aunt was more open.
“I always figured that she would… choose to go with you. When you marry. That you would…”
So, that was the answer about what the Thompsons meant to happen to Marianne? Mr. Thompson’s diary saidRose—Henrietta—Celia, and Celia was meant to bundle up her baby cousin along with her paints and her silk threads and her musical scores. She wanted to care for her cousin, but it pained her that Marianne’s parents were willing to discard her so easily.
Celia stared at her paint tray, purple tendrils spreading in slow rivulets through the sunny yellow she had mixed so carefully. She listened to the shuffle of her aunt’s skirts, backing away without finishing her sentence. She could not even ask Celia directly to care for Marianne.
When the door clicked shut, Celia reached for her papers again, this time studying each number, considering even the gentleman who had sent flowers twice but never spoken to her. His income was enough to support Marianne without qualm, and despite all of Rose’s passionate rhetoric, that was all that mattered.
Chapter Thirteen
Swirling, Skirling, Low Dark Beams
He had answeredto “Peter Alcott” in a crowded ball. He had confronted someone who knew him from school days. He needed to stop taking risks and finish the Pipperly report before anyone started looking too hard at who Peter Hughes really was—this disguise had only worked because people see what they expect to see. Out in public, he hummed arias and kept a brandy in hand and chuckled at the wrong jokes, projectingHughes Hughes Hugheswith all his force of will.
Still. He went to call upon his uncle.
An hour of tea and stories, sitting on the ottoman while his uncle patted his hand. The parlor was all tarnished gilt, rococo furnishings, too dim and too cluttered, yet soothing some restless place in Peter’s chest. So familiar.
He fled the city and rented a hack, galloped through the yellow-green fields until his thighs were shaking and he was blinded by the fine misting rain. I never have to go back, he told himself. I don’t have to see my uncle again. Celia will marry John Cade and have a dozen fine babies. Pipperly will go to the gallows and his mother will be brokenhearted but at least Henrietta will not marry into the family. It’s no affair of mine and I will take a job in Bruxelles or Harlingen or bloody Calcutta.
Instead of checking what shipment Pipperly took that night, Peter went to bed.
The next night, he met up with Pipperly, but only after he dropped by the party where he knew Celia was going to be. He shouldn’t have done it. Last year, he had attended only the largest events, a crush of people where it was easy to avoid the ones who knew you from the wrong life. This was getting dangerous, and he didn’t even have any right to her. It was a lie, the whole courtship he explained to his uncle.
