“But things are different now.” Her mother lifted her head, and there was something almost fierce in it. “This is what I keep coming back to, Lucie, hunched over my stitching this whole week past, my mind going round and round. It has been more than twenty years, and things are not the same.” She pressed Lucie’s hand for emphasis. “Consider only this. The most influential tea house in all of Bloomhaven, the very heart of fae society, is run today by a woman who is half human. I am well aware that society prefers to name her half fae, when it troubles to name her heritage at all, as though that were the only half that signified. But she is also, in fact, halfhuman, Lucie. And when Lady Rivenna chose her, the whole of Bloomhaven was scandalized. But in time, they came round, and now no one thinks a thing of it.”
Lucie found she was holding very still, her heart beginning to pound faster.
“And the other matter—the matter that is different, the matter that is everything—” Her mother’s voice gentled. “The Rowanwoods are not the Starspuns. They are not the family that told their son they would cast him off entirely if he dared to love a human woman. They are not going to do to your young lord what the Starspuns did to your aunt’s. They support him.And in the world we live in, my darling, the support of a family like the Rowanwoods carries a very great deal of weight. There is a shadow over their name, certainly—Miss Rosavyn’s manifestation has never come, and all of Bloomhaven knows it—but that is not nearly enough to diminish the Rowanwoods’ considerable influence.”
Lucie stared at her. “Wait.” She sat up a little, the cushion falling to the side. “How do you know that? About the Rowanwoods supporting him? Where did you hear that?”
Her mother had the grace to look faintly, guiltily caught.
“Lady Rivenna came to the shop yesterday. For her final fitting.” A small pause. “She may have … told me a thing or two.”
“Yesterday!” Lucie let go of her mother’s hand to press both of her own to her face. “She came to the shop yesterday and told you …things, and you waited an entire day—more than a full day—before saying a single word of it to me?”
“I was assembling my thoughts!” her mother protested, with dignity. “One does not simply—Lucie, a thing of that magnitude wants ordering before it is spoken. I could not go blundering at you with it half formed.”
“And what,” Lucie demanded, “were these thoughts that Lady Rivenna gave you to assemble? What did she tell you, exactly?”
“Well.” Her mother settled back, recovering herself. “Aside from informing me that you work yourself half to death and that she is still, to this day, waiting for you to arrive at that realization on your own and request a kitchen assistant to help you, because she will not be seen to betellingyou how to run your kitchen. Aside from that?—”
“Oh.” Lucie’s face warmed. “Yes. Aside from that.”
“Aside from that.” Her mother’s expression turned, quite unexpectedly, tender. “She told me I was not to spend a single moment’s worry over any of the whispers. That certain persons had suggested to her that she ought to return this year’s entire commission of masquerade masks and find some alternative at the last hour, on account of the scandal now attached to the Fields name.” She paused, and to Lucie’s astonishment her mother’s eyes had gone bright and glassy. “And that she had told those certain persons that she and Lady Lelianna intend to have their masks from me, and from no one else, for their annual masquerade, for just as long as I am willing to make them. That she considers me the finest dressmaker she has ever hadthe good fortune to commission, and shall go on commissioning gowns of me until the day she dies, at which point”—her mother gave a small laugh—“she expects me to fashion her something perfectly spectacular in which to be sent off into the next world. She said it, Lucie, at some considerable volume, on her way out through a shop full of listening ears. I do not believe it was an accident.”
Lucie laughed, startled and delighted. “No. No, I should think very little that woman does is an accident.” She shook her head. “There is truly no one else in all the world quite like Lady Rivenna.”
“No,” her mother agreed, dabbing discreetly at the corner of one eye. “There is not.”
They sat a moment in the warmth of it. And then her mother’s gaze drifted, snagging on something under the low table—a small scatter of wooden blocks that had escaped the great packing-up and been overlooked, left behind when the rest of the toys went home with Charlotte and Theo and the children. She looked at them a while.
“Charlotte,” she said, in the particular tone she reserved for her elder daughter, “drives me clean up the wall and halfway across the ceiling. I could cheerfully have wrung her neck a week ago, inviting a fae lord to sit at our supper table as though it were the most natural thing in all the world.” A pause. “And yet.”
Lucie waited.
“And yet I find I may be obliged to admit that I am secretly glad she did it.” Her mother’s mouth curved, reluctant and fond. “She knew precisely what she was about, that girl. She always does. And it worked.”
Lucie’s heart gave a small, careful thump. “Worked—because you think—” She hardly dared. “You think you rather liked him?”
Her mother considered this, head tilted, as though weighing it fairly.
“I think,” she said at last, “that I do rather like him. Yes.” And then, with a small sidelong glance that was pure mischief: “And I think that he rather adores you.”
“Mother!” Lucie felt the heat rush up her neck and into her face. “You cannot possibly know that from a handful of glances across a table.”
“I most certainly can. I have been reading rooms since before you were born, my girl; it is half my trade.” Her mother’s eyes were dancing now. “And what is more, I believe you rather adore him too.”
“Mother!”
“Do not ‘Mother’ me in that scandalized voice. I have eyes in my head.”
Lucie buried her burning face in the cushion, which did nothing whatsoever to help, and her mother laughed softly and let her hide.
“The point of all of it, my darling—” Her mother’s voice came gentler now, and Lucie lowered the cushion enough to look at her over its edge. “The point of everything I have been trying and failing all week to find the words for, is only this. That you have our love. And you have our support. Whatever you choose, and whomever you choose. The Fields family will weather the storm, if storm there is to be, exactly as we weathered the last one.” A pause, and then, dryly: “Though I begin to suspect it may prove a good deal less of a storm than any of us feared. A brief squall, perhaps. A tempest that blows itself out inside the fortnight. Some will turn their backs on us, yes. But there are others who have quietly let it be known they are on our side.” Her mouth quirked. “And one or two who have let it be known a great deallessquietly.”
Lucie smiled, imagining Lady Rivenna’s loud proclamation, and then thought of Mrs Dunbar in the lane, planting herself square in Lucie’s path to say she did not believe the worst. One grudging inch.
“Yes,” she said softly. “There are others.”
For a moment they only sat, hands finding one another again, and her mother looked at her with something in her face that Lucie was not sure she had ever seen aimed quite so plainly at herself. A great, brimming, uncomplicated pride.
