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She stood with it for a long moment, the cold of the stone creeping up through her slippers.

Half of it she could read. Her doing well was a grievance, and the campaign to keep her a drudge had failed, and she had been the one to spoil it. There was a hard sort of comfort in that.

The rest she could make nothing of. Her coloring. The Ashbys. One scarcely knows whom she has to thank. Selina was casting about for sticks and had found the oldest one, which was that Rosalind favored her mother. Well, and it was true, and she had always been glad of it.

So she told herself, and so she believed.

Rosalind rubbed her gloved thumb over the seam at her wrist. Selina had always disliked that she favored Cecily. Tonight’s words sounded like one more cruel way to say it.

Augusta came out to her soon after, and when the carriage came they rode home through the cold streets in a silence Rosalind was grateful her aunt left unfilled, though she felt her aunt’s eyes upon her more than once in the dark. At Wimpole Street, in the warm dark of her aunt’s good house, the only house in her life that had ever wanted her simply for being in it, she took up her candle at the foot of the stair and stood a moment.

Then she went up to bed with the word she had said twice still sounding beneath everything else, beneath Selina’s spite and the cold street and the whole long, strange evening. James. Whatever comes of this, I have said it, and I shall not take it back.

Chapter Eleven

“Iwould as soon have this errand done as carry the guilt of it a day longer,” Augusta said, as the footman bore her card away up the stairs. “A pattern promised is a debt, my dear, and I have owed the Countess this one for three weeks together.”

Rosalind came into the cold hall behind her aunt with a parcel beneath each arm. This was the house her family kept for the Season, and she had never once lived in it, and the old wariness settled across her shoulders as she crossed the threshold.

“Shall I carry the silks through to the small parlor?” she asked, when her aunt had shaken out her skirts. “That is where the Countess keeps her work, I believe, and it will save the footman a second journey.”

“As you like, child. I shall go up and be announced in the proper fashion, and you may join me the moment your hands are empty.”

Rosalind went down the short passage with the silks. The work-parlor would be at the back, away from the street, where the light was steady. So it proved, and the door stood open a hand’s-breadth. She had her hand half raised to it when she heard who was within.

She knew the two voices at once, for she had spent eleven years learning them. It was not the voices themselves that stopped her where she stood, but the sound of one of them, low and quick and warm, for in all the years she had stood in rooms with Selina and been spoken over, she had never once heard such a sound come out of her.

“You will not say such a thing again, do you hear me? Not even to me.” It was Selina’s voice beyond all doubt, but it was warm, warm and frightened both, with the cold gone clean out of it. “You will not even think it. A girl who believes herself overlooked will be overlooked the next day, and the day after that, until her own thinking has done the work that no one else troubled to do. I will not have it of you.”

“But, Mama⁠—”

“No.” There came the scrape of a chair, and then the small soft sounds of someone crossing a little room. “Sit down. Give me your hands. There. Now look at me and hear me, for I shall say this once and not again, and I want it kept.”

Rosalind could not move, for her feet had gone as still as her breath, and her heart beat hard against the silks she held to her chest. Ought she to step away? Could she knock, and pretend she had heard nothing? She could not make her hand rise to do it, and there was nowhere to step back to that would not be heard.

Twice now in as many days, this family had pressed upon her a thing it had never meant her to hold. First there had been Selina’s voice carried down a freezing street, and now Selina’s voice through a parlor door, and she had wanted neither. Why must it always be she who saw what other people took such care to hide? She had spent her whole life being that person, and not once had she asked to be.

“Your father left us nothing.” Selina spoke low. “You know that. A good name, which is something and not nothing, and two girls to settle upon it, and no more than that.”

There was a pause, and when the voice came again, it had dropped lower still.

“I married Lord Marbury to make us safe, and there has not been one hour since, Cassandra, not one, in which I have felt safe. A second wife is never safe. A countess who came up a widow is watched by every woman in London for the place where she will slip. They will not wait long for it, and they will not be kind when it comes.”

A small sound came from Cassandra, half a word and not a whole one.

“I know what it is to count the coals,” Selina said. “I will not have you learn it. I would do a great deal worse than I have done to keep you from learning it.”

A silence followed, and then a small wet sound that might have been Cassandra, very near to tears.

“You are not overlooked.” The voice gentled further still, and the gentling was the worst of it, for it was real. There was no audience it was pitched at, and no performance in it anywhere. “You are my own girl, and you are worth ten of any of them. If the Season has not seen it yet, then the Season is a fool, and we shall make it see.”

Another sniff came, softer now.

“But you do not weep at it. You do not let them catch the thinking on your face. You hold your chin where I put it, and you make them come to you. That is how it is done, Cassandra. I have done it every day of my life, and you have never once seen me weep. You never will.”

Rosalind stood in the passage with the silks against her chest and hardly dared to breathe. She had come braced for the cold, and for this she had no practice at all. The fear was real, and so was the love, and neither had ever had a thing to do with whether Rosalind was worth keeping. I could bear her cruelty. I do not know how I am to bear this.

“There.” Selina’s voice turned brisk again, all its briskness gathered back into place. “Wash your face, for we have callers, and your hands are cold. You will come and pour, and you will be charming, and we shall none of us speak of baronets’ sons again as though they were a grievance. Where has your sister got to?”