CHAPTER 1
“Ido believe Sir Edmund noticed me this evening.”
Penelope Hartwell glanced up from her contemplation of the refreshment table’s thoroughly disappointing lemonade. Hyacinth Fairleigh stood before her, practically incandescent with satisfaction. Her friend’s cheeks held a becoming flush—whether from the exertion of three consecutive country dances or the triumph of masculine attention, Penelope could not immediately determine. Knowing Hyacinth, it was likely both.
“Did he?” Penelope kept her tone as cool as she could, though she could not quite suppress the twitch at the corner of her mouth. Sir Edmund Fairfax had been ‘noticing’ eligible young ladies with remarkable consistency throughout the Season. Last week it had been Miss Hammond and her considerable dowry. The week prior, Lady Catherine and her even more considerable connections. “How very fortunate for you.”
“Do not patronise me, Penelope.” Hyacinth’s eyes narrowed, though her smile remained fixed with admirable determination. “He enquired after my watercolours. That is practically a declaration of intent.”
“Or evidence that he possesses basic conversational skills.”
“You are utterly impossible.” Hyacinth snatched a glass of champagne from a passing footman’s tray with the practised ease of three full Seasons navigating London’s ballrooms. “Not all of us can afford to dismiss masculine interest quite so carelessly. Some of us actually wish to secure a husband before the entirety of the ton labels us hopeless spinsters.”
The words held no real sting—Hyacinth had been lamenting Penelope’s supposed indifference to matrimony since they had been young girls. The complaint had become something of a comfortable ritual between them, as familiar as Hyacinth’s annual predictions that this would finally be Penelope’s year to find a suitable match.
It never was. Penelope had stopped minding sometime around her second Season.
She sipped her lemonade and immediately regretted the decision. Sickeningly sweet, as though someone had emptied an entire bowl of sugar into the punch and hoped for the best. The ballroom pressed in from all sides—oppressive heat and cloying perfume and the relentless drone of conversation punctuated by bursts of laughter that invariably sounded slightly desperate. Overhead, crystal chandeliers threw fractured light acrosssilk and satin, transforming the assembled company into a glittering, shifting mass of social ambition and barely concealed pretence.
She had never quite belonged here. Not truly. Not in the way Hyacinth did, with her easy charm and genuine enthusiasm for the rituals of courtship.
“I am perfectly content being a hopeless spinster,” Penelope said, setting the offensive lemonade aside before it could do further damage to her palate. “In fact, I find myself rather looking forward to it. There is a certain freedom in abandoning all hope of matrimonial bliss, would you not agree?”
“Freedom.” Hyacinth pronounced the word as one might identify a suspect cut of meat at market. “You sound precisely like one of those dreadful reformist pamphlets Lady Ashford keeps hidden in her library. Next you shall tell me women ought to have the vote.”
“Why should they not?”
“Penelope.” Her friend’s voice dropped to a scandalised whisper, and she cast a furtive glance about to ensure no one had overheard this bit of sedition.
“People will hear you say such things.”
“Let them.” Though even as she spoke, Penelope felt the familiar weight settle across her shoulders—that constant, suffocatingawareness of being observed, judged, measured against the ton’s merciless and often contradictory standards. She was a gentleman’s daughter, youngest of four sisters, all of whom had married respectably if not brilliantly. The Hartwells occupied that particular stratum of society elevated enough that propriety could not be casually ignored, yet not quite elevated enough to flout it with any real impunity.
The orchestra struck up another country dance, and couples swept onto the floor in choreographed waves. Penelope edged further toward the wall, seeking the refuge of the heavy velvet curtains that framed the tall windows. She had always preferred the periphery of these affairs—close enough to observe the theatre of it all, far enough removed to avoid active participation.
“You are doing it again,” Hyacinth observed, following her strategic retreat with a knowing look. “That peculiar thing where you attempt to blend into the wallpaper.”
“I am not?—”
“You absolutely are. You have been haunting ballroom corners and hiding behind potted palms since your very first Season.” Hyacinth’s expression softened somewhat, losing its usual bright determination. “I am rather concerned about you, you know. What will you do when your parents finally insist you make a match? You cannot avoid it forever.”
“They will not.” The certainty in her own voice rather surprised Penelope. “They have already settled three daughters. I suspectthey are quite relieved to have one less matrimonial campaign to wage. Mama said only last week that she is perfectly content for me to remain at home as long as I wish.”
It was true enough. Her parents, whilst genuinely fond of all their daughters, had never possessed the sort of driving social ambition that consumed certain families of their acquaintance. With Caroline respectably married to a baronet, Catherine comfortably settled with a prosperous merchant, and Jane well-matched to a younger son with excellent prospects and a charming manor in Kent, the Hartwell family honour was more than sufficiently satisfied.
“And that is truly what you desire?” Hyacinth pressed, her tone caught somewhere between genuine concern and utter bafflement. “To remain at home indefinitely? To become your parents’ companion in their declining years, attending them through ailments and managing the household accounts?”
“Not indefinitely, no.” Penelope set down her glass on a nearby table, her fingers leaving faint marks in the condensation beading on the crystal. “In truth, I have been giving considerable thought to the countryside. Perhaps a small cottage somewhere quiet—somewhere with a proper garden and trees that are not confined to carefully manicured squares. I could take up painting in earnest, or keep bees, or... something useful. Something that does not involve navigating the treacherous waters of the marriage mart Season after interminable Season.”
Hyacinth stared at her as though she had suggested joining a travelling circus or taking up highway robbery. “You wish to keepbees?”
“I do not know. Perhaps. The specific occupation is hardly the point.” The words came faster now, driven by something Penelope rarely permitted herself to acknowledge—a deep, bone-tired frustration with the narrow confines of acceptable feminine existence. “The point is that I could do whatever pleased me without constant worry about securing a husband or producing an heir or any of the other delightful expectations society places upon women of our station. I could read what I wanted without someone commenting on its unsuitability. I could say what I thought without measuring every word against how it might affect my marriageability. I could spend my days in pursuit of something more substantial than determining which gentlemen at which balls are worth pursuing with feigned interest and practised smiles.”
There was a pause between them. Around them, the ballroom continued its relentless performance—music and laughter and the whisper of expensive fabric against polished floors.
Then Hyacinth’s lips curved into a true smile. “You are entirely serious about this, are you not?”
“Completely.”