“Do you mean an eligible young man?”
“Yes.”
“I consider whether I find him appealing,” Joan said promptly. “I like a firm chin and dark eyebrows. I can’t abide sandy eyebrows. But looks are not everything. Does he have the faintest interest in what I have to say, or does he lecture me about his interests? Does he look like a gambler, a degenerate, or a fortune-hunter?”
“How would you know about the last?” Viola asked. She had a feeling she knew what a degenerate looked like, albeit a titled version, but she had no idea about fortune-hunters.
“Shifty eyes,” Joan said, narrowing her own. “Versus lascivious ones.” She goggled at Viola. “Like this. What do you think when you meet someone?”
“I—”
Joan waited, eyebrow raised.
“I wonder if they think I don’t belong among the Wildes,” Viola said in a rush.
Joan looked nonplussed. “Why do you think that?”
“I’m not really a Wilde.”
“No more am I,” Joan pointed out. Her mother had fled the country with a yellow-haired Prussian count, leaving her newborn (yellow-haired) baby behind. It was generally accepted by everyone in the family except for the duke that Joan didn’t have a drop of ducal blood in her.
“But you . . . you’re you.”
“I won’t make the obvious response,” Joan said, looking suddenly very like Aunt Knowe. “You are as much a Wilde as I am. As is Parth, who is adopted. As well as your mother’s other children, Erik, Artemisia, and Spartacus. All of us are Wildes, and that’s the end of it.”
“It’s not that simple,” Viola argued.
“Why?”
“You’re all beautiful, for one thing.”
“As are you,” Joan flashed back.
Viola sighed. She had insipid brown hair, a pointed chin, eyes of an ordinary shape and an unremarkable color, and a small nose. In fact, she was small everywhere except her bosom.
Her stepsiblings were the result of years of breeding, and like the best racehorses, they showed it. Every single one was the very portrait of an aristocrat, with almond-shaped eyes, winged eyebrows, and an alabaster complexion.
Putting Joan’s golden hair to the side, the older children had inherited the duke’s dark hair, and the younger children had Ophelia’s red hair. But all of them, including Joan, had finely wrought features that spoke to generations of noble birth.
It wasn’t merely a matter of appearances. Over years of observation, Viola had realized that Wildes instinctively took on the mannerisms that defined the aristocracy. Even Erik at age ten excelled in raising one mocking eyebrow.
Viola had spent a whole summer squinting in the mirror before she accepted that her eyebrows were incapable of moving separately.
“When I meet someone, I imagine what they are thinking about me,” she admitted. “Sometimes I can almost hear voices laughing about me not belonging among the duke’s children, so loudly that I feel seasick.”
Joan scowled. “You mustn’t listen to that foolishness. The next time you meet someone, you should hold up your chin and silently repeat over and over, ‘I’m a Wilde. I’m a Wilde!’ We are your family, Viola, and we love you. You came to us as a baby, remember? You’re as much a Wilde Child as I am.”
“That’s silly,” Viola said, laughing.
“No, it is not. What if I succumbed to that sort of thinking? If I believed the worst that is said about me, I wouldn’t dare to debut at all. As it is, you and I shall debut together, heads high.”
“I’m a Wilde,” Viola mumbled. “I feel like an idiot.”
“Please try it?” Joan asked. Her eyes were hopeful, and Viola couldn’t say no. Besides, she was desperate. She had to conquer her shyness in order to be a true partner to Mr. Marlowe.
In the next few weeks, she practiced thinking, I’m a Wilde when talking to the housekeeper, when taking the pony cart into Mobberley to drop in on Mr. Marlowe and see how the vicarage renovations were coming, even when talking to her older stepbrother North.
Joan stayed at her side, and every time Viola faltered, overcome by a stab of shyness, Joan would hiss, “Wilde Child!” The phrase was so absurd that it made Viola smile—and somehow survive the moment.
It helped.
Absurd, unlikely, ridiculous as it was, the phrase helped.
In early January, two parliamentary lords and a visiting ambassador from France joined the dining table. Normally, Viola would have eaten in her bedchamber, but instead, she walked into the room clutching Joan’s hand, Wilde Child beating over and over in her head.
One of the lords was sixty if he was a day, and Viola found herself discussing the nesting habits of gray herons with him. Before she knew it, she was talking to the other lord as well, even though he was a young man, and unmarried. She didn’t feel even a tinge of nausea. Why should she? She had a mission.
The next morning she confided to Mr. Marlowe about her terror of the upcoming Season, hoping that he would volunteer to accompany the family to London. Instead he patted her hand, looked deeply into her eyes, and assured her that Providence would provide.
That wasn’t particularly helpful.
At a family-only dinner that night, the conversation turned to the household’s imminent move to London; Lady Knowe had decided that the household should depart in January, rather than February.
Viola felt a pulse of terror at the thought, but: “I’m a Wilde,” she said to herself.
“I don’t intend to marry until my third Season,” Joan said. She waggled her eyebrows at the duke. “Any suitors who come your way . . . Reject them immediately, if you please. They needn’t propose to me in person; it won’t change my mind.”
“I agree,” Viola put in quickly.
“You can always live with me, Viola, if you don’t want to marry anyone,” Erik said. He peered at Viola owlishly. “There’s something different about you lately. I hadn’t noticed before, but you are pretty. I could marry you, if you don’t mind waiting.”
“That is a very kind offer,” Viola said, smiling at him.
“Erik is right,” Aunt Knowe said. “These last few weeks you’ve been less timid.”
Viola’s smile turned into a grin.
“What helped?” Aunt Knowe asked. The whole table gazed at her, and Viola froze. She couldn’t admit in front of the duke that she hadn’t considered herself a true Wilde. He thought of himself as her father. He would be deeply hurt, and her mother would be terribly sad.
“It’s Mr. Marlowe,” Joan said, coming to the rescue. “He’s very, very calming. He’s made all the difference, hasn’t he, Viola?”
The sharp elbow in her side jolted Viola and she nodded. “Yes, he is. That is, he has. Made all the difference, that is.”
“Perhaps we should bring him to London with us,” Aunt Knowe said thoughtfully. “I think it would do him good to consult with older clergymen. He shared a plan to put on a cycle of plays depicting biblical events. I’m not sure that’s a good idea, but better to hear it from a more experienced cleric than from me.”
Viola twitched. Putting on plays drawn from the Bible had been her idea, but this clearly wasn’t the moment to confess, not when the second part of her plan was miraculously coming true.