Normally no one went into the library. That was the one room out of all of the rooms at Rose Garden Cottage that was their father’s. Today, though, Lily could hear her mother’s voice floating past the thick oak panels.
‘...I won’t stand for it, do you hear me, Coleman?’ her mother was saying, her usual dulcet South Carolina tones hard and brassy. ‘You’ve always left our girls’ education to me and I have worked myself to the bone to make sure they are a credit to us. My own health has been broken, but that doesn’t matter to me. Only the darlin’ girls matter. And now we have the opportunity I’ve been praying for...’
Lily’s father’s voice answered, a rough rumble too low for Lily to understand. Whatever he said made his wife wail.
‘You don’t care about us at all! I tell you, I shall die if you don’t...’
Lily thought it would be much better to get this over with, before her mother’s maid came running with the smelling salts. She quickly knocked and pulled the door open.
‘You sent for me, Mother?’ Lily said brightly, even though officially no one had ‘sent for her’. She studied the library in front of her: the carved dark panels of the walls, the red brocade curtains, the tapestries copied from a set at Hampton Court and her parents grouped around the tall, ivory-inlaid desk; her father in his velvet chair, his gouty leg propped on a footstool, his mutton-chop whiskers, once darkest jet, now half-grey, his spectacles slipping down his nose; her mother standing in front of him, tall and slim still after twenty-five years of marriage and three daughters, her pale hair piled atop her head, striped chiffon and silk floating around her. A handkerchief was pressed to her eyes.
This was what Lily had seen over and over in her parents’ marriage, ever since she was a tiny girl trying to keep the peace so her sisters wouldn’t hear the quarrels and start crying. It was precisely what she never wanted for her own life and definitely not for her sisters’.
Her mother turned to her and held out a slim, white hand, sparkling with diamonds and pearls. ‘Thank the stars you are here, Lily my darlin’!’ Stella Wilkins cried. Lily hurried to clasp her hand, hoping to hold her mother steady. ‘You must help me talk some sense into your papa. We have a golden chance here and he wants to toss it all away.’
‘Not toss it away, Stella,’ Lily’s father muttered, shifting his aching foot on its stool. ‘Just wait a year or two. What’s the hurry?’
‘Hurry!’ Stella shrieked. ‘Lily is already nearly twenty. All her friends are married. We must seize the chance now.’
Lily swallowed hard, afraid this was about Adam Goelet again. ‘Perhaps you should tell me what is happening, Mother?’
Stella clutched her hand even tighter and led her to the brocade sofa near the window. She didn’t look at her husband again, but smiled brightly at Lily. ‘My dearest girl, it is quite, quite wonderful! You remember that my mother went to school in England when she was a girl? She told me about it so often.’
Stella gestured to the portrait in the shadows on the panelled wall, of a stately, golden-haired woman in massive, pink silk skirts and puffed sleeves, marble columns behind her, magnolia blossoms in her hand. Lily’s grandmother. ‘Of course,’ Lily said. It had been all her grandmother had ever talked about when Stella would take Lily and the twins to South Carolina when they were children—the glories of England she had seen in her golden girlhood, before her genteel Southern world fell apart.
Lily had never minded those stories, though, for the long history of England, the romance of it, was most fascinating. The castles and monuments, the battlefields and museums. She’d pored over books about it all, peppering her grandmother with questions.
A tiny spark of excitement kindled to life deep inside, but she dared not let it take hold, not yet. Too many things disappointed in the end.
‘Well, I had a letter from the daughter of one of her English schoolfriends,’ Stella said. ‘Lady Heath, her name is, the widow of a viscount. She spoke most kindly of the old friendship and offered to meet us if we ever came to London. Lady Heath has many connections, even to the royal court, and meeting her could be so beneficial to you girls. Don’t you think?’
The excitement grew. Was this escape, then? An end to Newport and Fifth Avenue, to her mother’s constant struggle to belong, to outdo everyone else? Was she going to see England at last? But she glanced at her father, still trying to find a comfortable position on his stool. ‘I would certainly like to see London,’ Lily said cautiously. ‘The centuries-old buildings and museums...’
Stella tossed a tearful look at her husband and her hand tightened even more on Lily’s. ‘Of course you would. You are such a good, scholarly girl. Papa, though, is being ridiculously obstinate.’
‘It’s a long way, Stella. You wouldn’t let them go when they were younger—why suddenly now? That’s all I am saying,’ Coleman Wilkins said wearily.
‘They were not ready before now! And England is not too far for Jennie Jerome, is it? Or Consuelo Yznaga,’ Stella cried.
Lily saw in a flash what this was all really about and she felt like a fool for not realising immediately. It wasn’t about her grandmother, or culture or education. It was about marriage. Stella seemed to have something bigger in mind now than the Goelet money.
Jennie Jerome was the daughter-in-law of a duke now. Consuelo Yznaga would one day be a duchess herself. Her mother wanted a coronet for the Wilkins family, too.
Of course she did.
Lily felt a sudden wave of fear, washing away that tiny spark of excitement. She had known she couldn’t hide in her books for ever, but—to jump into English society, a pool whose depths she could not fathom? Everyone would be watching, everyone would know why she was there in London and she was sure to disappoint her mother again. ‘Mother, I don’t know. Perhaps Papa is right, perhaps I am too young...’
‘You are almost twenty! And the twins are almost seventeen. They need polish so badly,’ her mother wailed. Stella collapsed on to the sofa, her face buried in her handkerchief. ‘There is no more time. If you were settled, the other girls would be safe, too. No one could touch us!’
‘It’s all right, Mother, I promise,’ Lily said soothingly. She reached out and rubbed her mother’s silk-covered shoulder, meeting her father’s gaze above Stella’s head. In his eyes she saw her own feelings: resignation. They would go to London. But Lily had no idea what would happen then. She only knew she couldn’t be afraid. Rose and Violet were counting on her to help them make their own choices for the future and she would never let them down.
Copyright © 2020 by Ammanda McCabe
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ISBN-13: 9781488071638
Unexpectedly Wed to the Officer
Copyright © 2020 by Jenni Fletcher
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Unexpectedly Wed to the Officer--A Historical Romance Award Winning Author Page 24