“I trust you’re right, Miss Cassia.” His sigh was more of a groan as he dabbed his forehead at the edge of his wig with a linen handkerchief. “Your sister may have been born a preacher’s daughter, but she gives orders like she’s lived all her life in a palace.”
“Pratt, there you are!” called Amariah from the staircase, and he groaned again. “You’re needed in the pantry to help move a table, and— Ah, Cassia, at last you’re home!”
“Good day, Amariah,” she said, wishing she could be heading off with Pratt. “You make it sound as if I’ve been away to China and back.”
“Well, you have been gone for hours and hours, and so much has happened since you’ve been gone.” She leaned over the railing, searching the entryway. “Where is the painting you went to fetch? Is it coming later in a cart?”
“It’s not coming at all.” Cassia untied her bonnet as she glanced into the refurbished dining room. “I didn’t buy it. I see the painters have finally taken down their scaffolding, so I suppose the ceilings are done at last.”
“But you told us the fortune telling painting was perfect!” Amariah hurried down the steps to join her, her white linen apron billowing around her. “You left the space on the wall bare specifically for it—a great, gaping, empty hole, with our first night all but upon us!”
“Then I’ll find something else to put in its place.” Cassia pushed open the tall double doors, eager to avoid answering any more of Amariah’s questions about the auction. This was her own fault, really, for gushing on so much about the painting after she’d seen it in the preview, about how cheaply it would be had. It would have been, too, if not for that dreadful man stealing it away from her. “And I know we open tonight. However could I forget?”
“If you decided against that painting, then you should have been here, working with us.” Amariah followed her through the doors. “How things look at Penny House, Cassia—that’s your responsibility, just as Bethany’s is in the kitchen and mine is—”
“To greet our guests, to oversee the gaming staff and to keep the books.” Cassia sighed, exhausted. All three of them were, from working so hard and with so little sleep to be ready for the first night. That was probably the reason that man had irritated her so over the auction; if she hadn’t been so tired, she wouldn’t have paid him any heed at all. “I’m sorry I took so long, Amariah, but it couldn’t be— Oh, don’t the chairs look fine!”
With the protective cloths finally removed and the painters gone, she wandered through the room, running her hands lightly over the tops of the tables and chairs. The old tables had been sturdy enough to keep, but the few original chairs that remained from Whitaker’s had been so rickety they’d needed replacing before some corpulent gentleman plunged through to the carpet.
Cassia herself had scoured secondhand stores along the river to find the replacements, then scrubbed and polished away the old grime from the chairs in the yard out back. None of the chairs matched, but Cassia’s eye for proportion had made her choices cousins, if not brothers, and the overall effect was lighthearted and imaginative and inviting.
But that was how she’d decorated all of Penny House, from the private card rooms to the bedchambers the sisters kept for themselves on the top floor. Everything was a curious jumble, from the fresh, bright paint and well-used furniture, to the latest political cartoons pinned beside an ancient carving from the East Indies. Yet somehow Cassia had put it all together to make the rooms seem more exotic and fashionable than what the most expensive London architects were creating for their wealthiest clients.
The Fortune Teller was going to have been one of her few indulgences, a costly painting for her and one to be given a special place of honor. Cassia glanced up to the empty spot over the fireplace where the picture would have gone, and muttered furiously to herself.
“So why didn’t you buy the painting, Cassia, if you wanted it so badly?” Amariah was watching her, arms folded over the front of her apron. “You had money from the old paintings you’d sold last week, and this morning you seemed to feel sure it could be had cheaply.”
Cassia gave a dismissive sweep of her hand. “It should have come cheaply, yes. But there was a dreadful, selfish, rude man at Christie’s who stole it away from me, as boldly as any thieving pirate might!”
Amariah listened, her expression not changing. “You mean he was willing to bid higher than you?”
“I mean he drove the bidding so high that I could not compete with him.” Cassia stalked back and forth before the fireplace, unable to keep still. “Before the auction, he saw that I wanted the picture, and then from purest spite he let me bid as if I had a chance.”
She held her hand up, palm open, over the mantelpiece. “He let me bid, Amariah, let me bid in my innocence before he finally squelched me flat as a gnat!”
She smacked her palm down on painted wood for emphasis, showing exactly what the man had done to her hopes.
But Amariah didn’t blink. “How high did he run the bidding?”
Cassia let her hand slip from the mantel, not wanting her sister to realize how her fingers stung after that thoughtless, emphatic little gesture. “The reserve was five pounds, which was fair. His final bid was one hundred, which was not.”
“So evidently he was either a very rich pirate, or a very indulgent one,” Amariah said. “I trust you offered him an invitation to our opening?”
Cassia gasped. “I most certainly did not!”
“Why?” Amariah pulled out one of the chairs and sat. “He is gentleman enough to be at Christie’s bidding on paintings, he is rich and he is impulsive. He sounds ideal for Penny House.”
“But I thought we were only inviting gentlemen recommended by the membership committee!” Cassia protested. “True gentlemen, with breeding and manners, and not boorish and ill-tempered and—”
“Was he handsome, too?”
“Handsome?” Cassia paused, surprised that Amariah would ask such a question. The man was handsome; she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t noticed as soon as she’d bumped into him. His features were sharp and regular, his pale eyes intelligent, and he was so tall she’d had to look up to his face. His dark hair had seemed too thick and heavy to stay in place, and as they’d spoken, he’d had to toss it back impatiently from his forehead. His skin was browned by the sun, as if he were a sailor or farmer, and his hands and the breadth of his shoulders seemed to belong more to a man who worked for his living rather than a gentleman. He’d certainly stood out among the crowd at Christie’s.
Not, of course, that any of that would matter to Cassia now.
“He was handsome enough, in his way,” she admitted with a dismissive little shrug. “In a common way.”
“Indeed.” Amariah sat back in her chair, watching Cassia closely. “Was he young, too?”
“Older than we are,” Cassia said. “Thirty?”
“Young for a gentleman.” Amariah sighed, smoothing her apron over her knee. “Thus the man was young and handsome and rich and impulsive. For all we know, he may already have one of our invitations. Yet because you imagined he’d slighted you somehow, you were every bit as ill-mannered as he was to you.”
“I did not say that!”
“You didn’t have to, Cassia.” Amariah pressed her palm to her forehead and sighed. “You’re saying