“Mrs. Willoughby,” my mother introduced herself, steel lacing her tone. “And my daughter, Miss Violet Willoughby.”
The housekeeper met the declaration with her own steel. “A pleasure, ma’am. I am the housekeeper, Mrs. Harris. This way if you please.”
She led us past gleaming tables set with crystal vases full of roses, and up the carpeted staircase. Maids hurried up and down the hallway, which opened onto several chambers filled with chattering guests. Mrs. Harris marched into one of the open doorways and paused, waiting for us to catch up.
“Lord Jasper picked this suite especially for you, Mrs. Willoughby, and for your daughter.”
The sitting room was all pale pink silk and velvet, with plush chairs and damask curtains. The door to the left opened onto a bed chamber, also done in roses and cream, with flowers on every available surface. The other bedroom was slightly smaller, with walls papered in green silk and my valises already set by the wardrobe. It was easily three times the size of my room back home, with paintings, lush carpets, and my own mahogany writing desk.
“It’s beautiful,” I murmured, excited. I wasn’t sure but I thought Mrs. Harris might be trying to smile back.
“Lovely,” my mother agreed from the sitting room. “Quite suitable.”
I almost laughed. Our town house was decidedly sparse upstairs in the family rooms where no visitors went. We saved all of the best pieces for the parlor and the dining room, which, admittedly, looked well.
“Tea will be served shortly in the gardens,” Mrs. Harris announced. “Down the stairs and to your left, next to the conservatory.” Her boot heels clacked all the way down the hall.
Mother hugged me briefly, smelling of lavender water and sherry. “If we play our cards right, my girl, this week could change our lives.”
I knew what was behind that look she wore, smug as an alley cat with a bowl of cream. I smiled weakly and went to my room to change into a less-rumpled dress.
The gardens were immaculate, the flagstones swept clean and the potted flowers clipped neatly down. Women wore silk dresses and pearl brooches; men stood smartly by in their somber suits. Tea was served in china cups. Oil lamps burned on the tables and torches flamed at the edge of the lawns. It was like a fairy garden, and I was the changeling child. I tried not to look as nervous as I felt.
Mother pinched me. Hard.
Reverie broken, I curtsied to the guests who had just been introduced. I hadn’t been paying attention and had no idea who they were. Mother sipped her tea demurely after declining an offer of wine or champagne. I ogled the cakes with the thick cream icing and the little sandwiches filled with ham or cucumbers next to bowls of watercress salad.
“I once fit five of those little egg things in my mouth at once,” someone declared quite proudly from my right.
I laughed and turned to hug Elizabeth, despite our mothers’ disapproving glances. We should have clasped hands or curtsied, we should have been quiet and polite, but I would have been bereft and adrift in a sea of dull old people without Elizabeth. We had met only a handful of times at various séances and Spiritualist events but had since written dozens of long letters back and forth. She was Lord Jasper’s goddaughter and the most amusing person I’d ever met, not to mention my only true friend, since I wasn’t afforded many opportunities to meet girls my own age. I had never been away to school where girls became fast friends and learned how to pour tea. I couldn’t bear to think of how lonely I might have been without Elizabeth. Even if I did have to keep our secrets from her as well.
She was still grinning at me over the egg sandwiches. Her plump body had been stuffed into a steel-boned corset by her mother’s maid. She was pretty, in a wholesome, cheerful kind of way. “Have some of the watercress,” she said. “It’s lovely.”
I knew how watercress was grown in London, in the sewage run off in Camden Place. “No, thank you.”
“Just as well. I can’t wait another moment.” She took me abruptly by the hand, dragging me into the house. “I don’t know what I would have done if you’d decided to have a rest. I’m turning blue as it is.”
“Where are we going?” I asked as she pulled me through several sitting rooms and down a long corridor. She’d spent enough summers here to know exactly where she was going, but she stopped so suddenly that I crashed into her. She grunted as we stumbled into a tidy room with a massive desk in the center and books lining the walls. This was the only room so far that didn’t smell of roses. It was all ink and brandy.
“Oh, Lizzie,” I said, drinking in all the books.
“Yes, yes books,” she said, hardly impressed. “You should see the library. Anyway, who cares about that? Help me!” She spun around, frantically pointing to the back of her corset. “I feel like a bloody breakfast sausage,” she complained. “Untie me, won’t you?”
I knew the routine. This wasn’t the first time we’d been in this situation—in fact, the very first time I had ever met Elizabeth we had been at a tea dance, where she cornered me under a shadowy decorative palm and begged me to release her from “the dark chains that bound her,” her words exactly. It had taken me a moment to decipher what, precisely, she was asking me to do.
“Vi, stop daydreaming! I can’t breathe. I’m joining the Rational Dress Society the very moment we are back in London, and I fully intend to leave their pamphlets under Mother’s pillow and tucked into her corsets.” She claimed this in every one of her letters, in spite of, or rather because of, her mother’s vociferous protests. Lady Ashford was petite, barely reaching my shoulder, and still in possession of a decidedly girlish figure. She couldn’t understand how her daughter was plump as a cinnamon bun.