“Your bedroom is to the rear, overlooking the grounds,” she told me as we entered the hallway. “It’s a little small, but the view is considered rather beautiful. Tea in my parlor, Jane, at once, and see that Cook doesn’t overboil the mutton.” Mary switched between addressing me and addressing her servants without pausing, every inch the older sister. “Would you like to change? But of course you have no maid, and mine is busy running errands. No matter. Perhaps she’ll have time to attend to you later.”
Changing wasn’t necessary, I assured her with a smile. After all, I now lived in a wardrobe of black, black, and more black.
We climbed the grand main staircase, double the width of ours, with stone steps and an ornate metal balustrade.
Being here, seeing Mary, was strange. It was like visiting my parents’ friends’ houses when I was a child and unsure what I could touch and where I might go. Mary had always been with the grown-ups then, while I’d been banished to the foreign nurseries on the occasions I’d accompanied my family on such visits at all. The dark, maze-like houses were only slightly less terrible than our hosts’ children—unfriendly and annoyed to find I was invading their territories. Once some boy, no doubt a peer of the realm or respectable clergyman by now, had bitten me.
I followed my sister, as lost as I had been then, until she turned into a room on our left. “There, isn’t it perfect?” She surveyed her parlor with satisfaction.
We sat as yet another maid smoothed a lace tablecloth over the round table between us.
“Go on. Tell me everything,” said Mary.
“I—” I cast around for the easy gossip that came to me when I wrote her letters, but it was difficult to reconcile the silver-haired and plump woman who sat before me with the slender girl, with hair as raven as mine even if she had never been so handsome, whom I’d written to throughout the years. “Well, the Thompsons hired a painter,” I said.
Mary’s brow creased.
“To paint the family’s portraits,” I clarified.
“A painter?”
“Yes. ‘Say’—that’s his surname. Francis Say, or was it Frederick?” I said, as if more details would make this more interesting. What was it I had said to confuse her?
“Lyddy!” Mary laughed, reaching out her hand toward me across the table. “I mean tell me everything about you.”
This I had not expected. Mary had never been privy to my personal dramas even before we were both married. And now? I doubted whether I’d even told her Ned’s tutor’s name.
“Why, you first, Mary,” I said. “After all, I am the one occupying your home, and besides, I am rather fatigued from my journey.”
This was a good way out of my difficulty. Soon she was rattling on about improvements to the gardens and some insolent groundskeeper who had a penchant for uprooting the wrong shrubs, gesturing so wildly that she nearly knocked over the rose-printed teapot the maid had set down between us.
I hardly listened, judging the room instead. It could have been my dressing room at Thorp Green Hall. Mary too had neat piles of letters, half-finished embroidery projects, and a near-identical stack of novels. But the color scheme here was a blue bordering on teal, not pink, and the country visible through the window was unlike ours. Thorp Green rose organically, if unexpectedly, from the fertile Yorkshire landscape, surrounded as it was by trees, but Allestree Hall subjugated its surroundings. A luscious, well-manicured, impossible lawn rolled from the house toward distant and uniform trees. It was all a blur of green and brown to me, but Mary had said something about silver birch and fine English elm.
“And what’s more,” Mary added, pausing to breathe or for dramatic relief, “nothing is certain yet, but I hope soon to become a grandmother.”
This revelation revived me. “Oh,” I said, delighted to have found something, anything, in common. “Why, my Lydia’s first baby should also arrive before the summer.”
“With the actor?” Mary asked, dropping her voice and righting the teapot mid-pour. “Is that cause for celebration?”
I stiffened. “Yes, with her husband,” I said. “Surely I couldn’t hope for anything else?”
We were silent for a beat, except for the sound of the brew tinkling into her cup. Mary’s smile looked as painted as the teapot. “And what of my other nieces?” she asked at last, stirring until the silver spoon sang against the china. “Bessy and my dear little namesake? Have they any prospects?”
“Mary is too young. And Bessy? We had hopes, for a time, of her and the Milners’ eldest son, but the deaths of both their fathers delayed anything definitive being done about that.”
Perhaps I ought to have bid the tedious Mrs. Milner a farewell visit and sought an excuse to leave her son and Bessy alone. But I had not been active here. Part of me did not want to lose another daughter, for all that Bessy and Mary were poor company. And part of me found it hard to comprehend that my Bessy was twenty and, for all her faults, undeniably a woman now.
“Mary is hardly too young,” my sister said, draining her tea in two gulps. “But let us talk of that later. I must go to the kitchens and see what headway Cook is making with dinner.” She stood. “I only hope you will have something to do with yourself, Lyddy. I can’t imagine how I should spend my time without a house to run.”
* * *
FOR THE NEXT TWO weeks we—all three of us, once the girls arrived—were my sister’s “project” and subject to her near-constant commentary.
My hair was unnaturally dark for my age. Was I sure I didn’t dye it? Young Mary was too shy. Bessy’s table manners left a lot to be desired. Such a pity that I hadn’t taken time to bestow my musical talents on the girls. Gentlemen did find dueting such a pleasant pastime.
I braced myself, laughed when my sister’s advice could be taken as a poor attempt at humor, and inclined my head in agreement when it could not.
At times I’d glance toward my children, hopeful that one of them would feel as I did and share a look of understanding with me, as my Lydia would have, a fleeting rebellion against our shared shackles. But Bessy and Mary’s senses were too blunt to feel their aunt’s jibes, and besides, the pair of them flourished when being clipped, corrected, and pruned. They’d been too long without an instructor.
“That was a beautiful rendition,” my sister told her “little namesake” once the latter had recited the final lines of some verses by Mr. Wordsworth one night after dinner. “Wherever did you learn it?”
“Miss Brontë taught us,” said my daughter Mary. “She is very fond of poetry.”
“The governess?” asked our hostess, with an eye on the door.
There was no sign of William or Thomas, the Evanses’ son, who had joined us for dinner and, unprompted, educated us about the operation of paper mills throughout the entire meal. The men must, thankfully, still be sitting over their port.
“Yes,” I said, answering for the girls. If only there was some way to change the subject, but we’d exhausted all topics of conversation some days before.
“I miss Miss Brontë,” said Bessy, who was constructing a pyramid from a set of playing cards. She’d been terribly fidgety since her aunt had scared her out of gnawing on her fingernails.