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Viola
“If music bethe food of love, play on!” I waved my hand dramatically, as if an actress on a stage, and my body rocked slightly with the movement of the carriage as it hit a rut in the road. “But in all seriousness, I’m no musician. Nor am I interested in love or marriage or mating… Not today, tomorrow, or next week. So neither love nor music, dear sister. I must find some other occupation to keep me busy while I stay in London. Shall I write scandalous pamphlets?”
“Dear Goddess, what am I to do with you?” my twin sister Iris groaned with ill concealed weariness. We looked remarkably alike, with the same dark hair and medium build. The defining difference was that my eyes were violet, and hers a pretty brown. Still, we could fool people who did not know us well. Then there was the fact she was an alpha, free to do as she wished, and I an omega constrained by society’s strictures. “Be serious, you can’t engage in politics so publicly! Don’t look like that, Vi. The law prohibits omegas from entering politics. You don’t even have the right to vote. Better marry and mate an alpha with political ambitions and be the power behind the throne.”
“Never!” I laughed. “Tie myself to an alpha? To quote Beatrice, ‘not until a hot January.’ No, I want to change the law under my own name. Didn’t Papa—an omega though you need no reminder of that—make a mark under his own name? All I require is a clever tongue and willingness to go as far as I can, do whatever it takes.”
“By the saints, but you are a madcap. Do you want to make another scandal for our family?”
I shrugged. “Beatrice created a scandal because she was caught. How could she not be when she submitted her paintings to the Summer Exhibition as an omega! I don’t plan on getting caught.”
“Sister,” Iris said with all the severity an alpha could use against an omega. However, it could hardly succeed. I was older by fifteen minutes. She’d only presented as an alpha four years ago, there were a further sixteen years of my being the elder twin. “Vi, please… I am leaving you with our uncle. In London, no less, where I am sure you will be a cat amongst pigeons. Promise me that when I go to Oxford you will behave? Until Christmas? A few short months…”
A grin tugged at my lips. Nothing like Hartwell alphas worrying what we Hartwell omegas could accomplish if given the opportunity. “I make no promises I can’t keep. I’ll try to be circumspect.”
“Circumspect. You’ll look around for trouble?” my twin teased.
“But I won’t go looking for it,” I stuck out my tongue.
“I give up. Game of chess?”
“Done,” I pulled out the board and began setting the counters. Half the fun would be keeping the pieces on the board, for despite the good weather, the roads were rough. Then again—thatwashalf the fun.
* * *
As our carriage pulled up in front of the house on Weymouth Street, memories of my childhood in Edinburgh came flooding back. To the time when our parents had been the toast of Scotland’s intellectual establishment and had introduced their daughters to those great minds with no consideration for our dynamics. We’d lived there until I’d turned sixteen. Then my father, a notorious omega scholar and trouble maker, died in his sleep at the age of forty-three. My alpha mother, devastated by her mate’s early death, had packed us up and brought us to England and her estate in Hertfordshire. Though a pretty house, with a large garden, I longed for the greater freedoms afforded omegas in Scotland and the anonymity of a city. In the countryside, your neighbours knew your secrets before you did. In the countryside, no scholars visited us. In the countryside, omegas stayed home, quiet and wholly concerned with domestic arrangements. London, however, promised a change. A wider circle of acquaintance. And surely my uncle, who was a member of Parliament, would host his friends and discuss the issues of the day late into the night. I’d be able to talk with men and women whose liberal minds matched my own.
But, on stepping into the narrow hall, I saw my mistake. The house was as quiet as a church. My aunt Maria, my father’s younger sister, stood at the head of the stairs looking down at us. She dressed demurely and clutched a handkerchief in one hand, which she often brought to her mouth in a strangely child-like gesture. Her greeting was not cold but neither was it welcoming. Distant, rather. I knew there existed a tension between our families—Mama openly disliked my uncle and disliked more that I would be spending time under his roof while she took up a diplomatic posting in Paris. They’d never travelled to Scotland to visit, and we rarely saw them in Hertfordshire. Still, I was taken aback by the strange household I now found myself a member of.
After settling, Iris and I joined our aunt Maria in the drawing room. This was an unexpectedly cosy chamber, with an overflowing work basket by a chair full of cushions next to the cold fireplace—the room gave the impression of a nest, my aunt’s retreat. I liked it, my first positive impression since arriving. My optimistic smile was quickly wiped away as my aunt began to outline my stay.
“Now, I must explain the conditions of your visit,” she said in that soft omega-like voice of hers. “You shall be presented next Spring per your mother’s instructions. In the intervening months, you’ll be fitted for a new wardrobe. As you aren’t formally out, despite your age, we will not have many social engagements. Visiting, receiving callers, and some small omega only private dances. My health is indifferent, but I shall endeavour to find a chaperone for you if you desire to go out more. Otherwise, you can read and write as much as you choose. Your mother says that you are much like my brother, rest his soul.”
“That ain’t bad, is it!” Iris smiled encouragingly.
“No political dinners?” I breathed. The one thing I’d looked forward to about living with these strangers. “Surely my uncle must host…”
“My health is indifferent, and I dislike noise,” my aunt snapped, a spark in her otherwise gentle eyes. “When my husband desires to spend time with his political cronies, he visits his club or dines out. Thankfully, that is often.”
“But…”
“I will do my duty and bring you to events I deem appropriate. Do not fight me on this, Viola.”
“But…”
“Viola, youwilllisten to her,” Iris barked. I didn’t need a mirror to know the look of horror on my face.
“Did you just...?” I blinked. My sister had never alpha’d me before. “I can’t believe you!”
“Vi… You haven’t been presented. You are an omega,” she tried to soothe me with a purr.
“You barked at me!” I cried. “You barked and then you purred! How could you?”
Nearly tripping on the stairs, I ran up to my small bedroom, locking the door behind me. What had happened to my sister that she now used her dynamic’s power over me? We’d never, ever made distinctions in our household. Ever. And now, within a heartbeat, my closest friend turned into a stranger seeking to manipulate me, to bend me to her will.
I glanced about me, helpless to understand my situation. The room was stuffy, and even when I opened the window there was no breeze. Not in the city, I realised. I looked at my little desk, already covered with books and scraps of paper with my various thoughts sketched out, ready to be refined and prepared for the book I intended to write. But it might as well be thrown in the fire. Without an audience for my work, how would it ever get out into the world? No one would read the political scribblings of an unknown omega—no alpha would take me seriously, and betas had their own worries. Even my father had written under a pseudonym before he had married my mother.
The lock clicked, the door opened, and I recognised the scent of another sister—mint and something that could only be described as frosty mornings. Since I’d last seen her, my middle sister Hippolyta had chopped off her red hair, allowing it to curl prettily about her head giving her a cherubic countenance. But it would be a mistake to assume Polly was meek or mild. More correctly, she was lethal, dangerous, and wonderful. Despite being the smallest of us, Polly carried herself with cat-like grace.
