Chapter 1
Her mother’s scream cut through the early morning air of the Penrose estate. Genevieve sat bolt upright in bed. She quickly grabbed a dressing gown to cover her nightdress, not bothering to smooth her auburn hair as she raced down the stairs, the old wood protesting under her feet.
There is an assumed level of stress when there is an imminent wedding. Genevieve had witnessed it first-hand as the day of her sister Clarissa’s wedding grew closer. She had not, however, expected quite so much stress.
She did her best to slow herself and walk with decorum as she passed the kitchens. She knew well enough that the kitchen staff would be in there by now, and the door had splits in the wood large enough for one to look through. The servants, as few as there were, did not need any encouragement to peep through them all. Once she had passed by, she glanced over her shoulder once more, before breaking back into a run.
“Mother? What is—” Genevieve ran into the parlor where the scream had come from, only to be met with the sight of her mother sobbing and her father rubbing her arm.
“Genevieve,” he said, looking at her. “I cannot apologize enough for the disturbance. We have been unable to find Clarissa, and your mother is getting hysterical…”
“It is not hysterics!” her mother cried out. “Clarissa would not just leave on such a day! What has become of my daughter?! What if something dreadful has befallen her? What if we are late to the chapel? What—”
“Breathe, my dearest wife,” Mr. Penrose said, rubbing her back in soothing circles. “Our dear Clarissa may be of an excitable and flighty countenance, but she knew the importance of this day as well as the rest of us did. She would not have been so rash as to leave without notice.”
“Would she not?” Mrs. Penrose sobbed. Genevieve watched her father tense. He greatly disliked platitudes and empty words. As a merchant, actions had always served him in a greater capacity. But faced with his wife in such a state…
“I am sure she is fine, my darling,” he said, before turning to his daughter. “Could you check Clarissa’s chambers for us?I looked earlier, but perhaps as her sister you shall see something I did not.I shall calm your mother.”
Genevieve nodded and ran up the stairs to Clarissa’s chambers.
Inside, one would not have known that her sister had left. Clarissa’s vanity still had her comb on it, but Genevieve could see spaces where items should have been. She frowned and moved to the wardrobe, her fingers hesitating on the handle for just a moment before she pulled it open.
Her heart stuttered.
Empty.
Or near enough to it, only the gowns Clarissa had deemed unfashionable remained, hanging like ghosts of the sister who had left them behind. They had yet to pack her trunk, as that would be handled by the staff later. She stood there for a moment longer than was necessary. It was not that she had expected to find Clarissa still tucked into her things like a child hiding in plain sight.
She had known, from the sound of her mother's voice alone, that something was genuinely wrong. And yet the wardrobe said it with a finality that the scream had not. Clarissa had not been taken. She had chosen. Genevieve's eyes swept back to the vanity.
The silver perfume bottle that had been their grandmother's gift was gone. The small jewelry box. The ivory hairpins Clarissa had been so proud of.Small luxuries, symbols of the status their family so desperately needed.Taken with the careful deliberation of a woman who had planned this for some time.
She wheeled around, her eyes searching for anything that would indicate her sister’s presence, or told the family where she had gone. Her eyes landed on her sister’s desk.
There was a fresh ink pot and quill resting next to a folded letter. She picked up the folded paper. For a moment, she hesitated, not wishing to invade her sister’s privacy. Then the thought of her mother’s anguish rippled through her and she unfolded the paper. Her heart thundered as she read the first line.
She immediately closed it again. It was not that the words were a surprise, exactly. It was that they rearranged something. She had spent years understanding that Clarissa was the one things happened to, the bright one, the wanted one, the one around whom the world obligingly organized itself. Genevieve had never minded.
Or she had minded, occasionally, in the small and private way one minded things one had no right to resent. But she had never imagined that Clarissa's story would reach out and become hers. She swallowed hard, her heart thudding so loud it was a miracle the servants had not heard it. For a moment, she simply stood there, the folded paper held between her hands as though it might burn her.
Clarissa. Of all the things her sister had done in her years of impulsive, flighty, brilliant chaos, and there had been many, Genevieve had never imagined this. She had never imagined that Clarissa would look at everything Thomas Harrington was offering her and simply...
She needed to show her parents, but nobody else. Taking a shuddering breath, she rang the bell for a maid. After a moment, the maid stepped into the room.
“Would you please get my parents for me?” Genevieve asked, trying to keep her voice steady. The maid nodded and stepped out of the room.
For a moment, Genevieve was left alone. She was the only one to know of the contents of the letter, and she wished she had never known it. She heard her parents upon the stairs, their footsteps urgent against the wood.
“What have you found?” her father asked as he pushed into the room. Her mother followed behind him, still tearful.
“Close the door…” Genevieve whispered. Her parents shared an anxious look before her father gently closed the door. Genevieve took a breath and quietly began to read them the contents of the letter…
Dearest Mother, Father, and Thomas,
By the time these words reach your eyes, I shall be far removed from the home that has sheltered and shaped me these many years, and I confess it is with a trembling hand that I commit this confession to paper. I can only beseech your forgiveness for the distress and dishonor my absence must inevitably cast upon our family's name, yet I find I cannot, in all conscience and in all feeling, proceed with a union that my heart so strenuously refuses.
To marry a Harrington would have been, in the estimation of the world, a most advantageous and respectable match. I do not seek to diminish Thomas's many fine qualities, nor to be ungrateful for the honor his attentions have conferred upon me. I know well what society would say, and what you would say, and it is precisely this knowledge that has tormented me these past weeks beyond all reasonable endurance.