Cassandra pressed her nose right up to the window pane as the carriage containing Miss Henley of Henley Hall went lurching past the front gate.
‘You can come away from the window now,’ said Aunt Eunice, from the cutting table where she was working. ‘She’s gone.’
Along with all the beautiful clothes Cassandra and her aunts had spent the last few months, often late into the night, creating.
Would Miss Henley wear the white muslin with the periwinkle ribbons and spangled overdress, with which Cassandra had fallen half in love, to a ball? Or, once she reached London, would she discard it in favour of something created by a fashionable town modiste? The way she’d so easily discarded Cassandra the minute she could, apparently. Miss Henley hadn’t even leaned out of the window to wave as she’d gone past just now, the way Cassandra would have done had she been in the coach, and Miss Henley the one whose fingers had developed calluses as she’d sat up till all hours, making sure everything was finished on time.
A heavy, invisible cloak seemed to settle over Cassandra’s shoulders as she thought of how much effort she’d put into making each and every garment that comprised Miss Henley’s wardrobe for her Season. She’d wanted them all to be perfect, because of the way Miss Henley had stood up to her mother, who’d wanted her to take her custom to a more reputable dressmaker with a shop in Exeter.
‘I want nobody but my dear, dear friend, Miss Furnival,’ she’d said, ‘to make the clothes I’m going to wear in town. Because every time I put on something she has made for me, I will feel as if she is with me in spirit and then I shall feel less alone.’
The statement had touched something so deep inside Cassandra, she hadn’t quite known how to deal with the feeling.
‘You won’t be alone,’ Lady Henley, her mother, had said tartly enough to dispel it. ‘I shall be with you. And so will your papa.’
‘Yes, but I shan’t have any friends my own age,’ Miss Henley had objected, with a pout. ‘And everyone will be so…sophisticated and they are bound to make me feel like a mere country miss, and…’
Her big blue eyes had swum with tears. And Lady Henley had promptly capitulated.
‘I suppose at least it will save us a deal of expense,’ she’d said, looking round the front parlour of the cottage where Cassandra’s aunts carried on their business. ‘Which will please your papa. And we shan’t have the fatigue of travelling up to Exeter whenever you need a fitting, either. Very well, my puss. You may have your way.’
‘Spoiled madam,’ Aunt Cordelia had muttered. After the Henleys had left, of course.
‘Still, it is a big order,’ the ever-practical Aunt Eunice had pointed out. ‘And at least Sir Barnabas will pay promptly.’
‘That is the one advantage of having a vicar with evangelical tendencies,’ Aunt Cordelia had replied. ‘He would rain down fire and brimstone on anyone who brought hardship on any of his flock by neglecting to pay what they owe.’
‘Especially two spinster ladies of genteel birth, who have fallen on such hard times that they are forced to earn their living by the needle,’ Aunt Eunice had said, her tongue most decidedly in her cheek.
Cassandra felt her lower lip wobble as Miss Henley’s coach swept round the bend in the lane, taking it briefly out of sight. Would its youngest occupant ever really think of her when she was driving round the park in a curricle tooled by some handsome young buck? Or when some dashing blade was rowing her down the river to a grassy bank where dozens of dazzling young people would be gathering to take a picnic?
Probably not, she reflected, heaving a sigh.
‘I’m just going to watch,’ she said with a sniff, in belated answer to Aunt Eunice’s comment about getting back to work, ‘until they’ve gone over the bridge.’ It might take her a while to shake off this fit of the dismals and she had no wish to show a glum face to her aunts, since it would smack of ingratitude.
‘You won’t be able to see them going over the bridge,’ Aunt Eunice said, before Aunt Cordelia shushed her.
‘The girl might be able to glimpse the trunks strapped to the roof when they get to the brow of it,’ she said.
Yes, the trunks. And there they were! She could see them now as the coach crested the narrow bridge over the River Teene. Each and every one of them stuffed to bursting with outfits she’d helped create, outfits which were going to London, a place she had never been, nor would ever be likely to go, not now, even though it was an experience most girls of her age and station considered their right.
Because she’d committed a Fatal Error.
‘Leave her be, Eunice,’ said Aunt Cordelia. ‘It can’t be easy watching a stuck-up little madam like that swanning off to town when our Cassy…’
Had been stupid enough to trust in a handsome face and a scarlet jacket, and a kindly demeanour…
Oh, dear, there went her lower lip again.
She dug into the pocket of her apron for a handkerchief, and surreptitiously dabbed at her left eye, which was, in spite of her resolve, starting to leak. She had no intention of letting the aunts see that she was on the verge of tears. It might make them think she was unhappy with her lot. Which would be terribly…disloyal. Because if they hadn’t taken her in and given her honest work, she could easily have ended up lying dead in a ditch somewhere. Or, worse, staying alive and earning her living by…
She pulled herself up short with a sniff. She hadn’t had to endure such horrors. Because the aunts had taken her in. Even though her own mother and stepfather had refused to do as much, claiming she would bring shame on them and blight her younger brother’s reputation, as well.
It was true that Aunt Cordelia, who was not really an aunt but only some sort of cousin of her mother’s, had only opened her door grudgingly. But that hadn’t been anything to do with Cassandra’s actions.
‘We don’t mix socially any longer,’ she’d said gruffly. ‘Not since we’ve set up house together. And if you come to stay the rest of the family will turn their backs on you, because they will consider you’ve been…er…contaminated by our sort of…’
‘Eccentricity,’ Aunt Eunice had concluded when Aunt Cordelia had floundered.
‘Yes,