CHAPTER ONE. Away to London Town
(Thalia)
To market, to market, one girl as a bride,
Home again, home again, lord by her side
To market to market, I’ll be no man’s wife
I’ll write poems instead and make my own life.
—Thalia Aubrey
Oxfordshire, late February 1817
Charis Elphinstone was missing.
To one unacquainted with Charis, this might be alarming, even shocking. But Thalia Aubrey, tasked with finding the cousin she had known since infancy, was neither alarmed nor shocked. She was, truth be told, rather put out. She settled her bonnet on her golden curls and set off toward the gardens in a huff, her half boots crunching across the gravel rather more loudly than was ladylike.
On an ordinary day, Charis’s disappearance would not be so remarkable. Charis quite often went missing, only to turn up hours later with dirt on her hem and a smudge on her nose, having heard the siren call of some rare bird. But it was beyond anything for Charis to disappear on this morning, which was to take Thalia, her sister Kalliope, and Charis to London, for the London Season that paralleled the sitting of Parliament, running from late winter until June. A Season that, for Thalia, had already been delayed a year due to Mama’s illness last spring.
“Charis, where are you?” Thalia muttered, more to herself than anything, leaving the road and crossing the dead lawn. Spring was still just a hopeful thought in Oxfordshire: Most of the bushes were dormant, and what few leaves clung brown and determined to their branches bore the hint of last night’s frost. The frost was a good sign: Uncle John said it would mean clear, hard roads and a quicker arrival at their destination.
But what good were frost and clear roads if Charis would not appear?
Thalia cleared the corner of the house and spotted the hedges that surrounded the garden. She didn’t think Charis would have picked this morning, of all mornings, to thread her way through the maze, but one never knew. Perhaps she’d spotted some new insect among the twisting paths. But surely it was too early in the year for bugs?
The windows of Elphinstone manor winked at Thalia in the morning light. Her aunt and uncle’s manor house had often proved a sanctuary for her, when her father’s crowded parsonage had become too much, though its vastness didn’t feel very sanctuary-like at the moment, since Charis might be hiding anywhere.
“Thalia!”
She turned to find Adam Hetherbridge bearing down on her. Though Thalia was uncommonly tall for a young lady, Adam was a few inches taller still than she, with sandy hair and blue eyes that were bright behind gold-rimmed spectacles.
Thalia returned his smile. “You’ve come to send us off?” Adam had begun as their neighbor, and then her brother Frederick’s friend, but something had shifted last spring, when Adam graduated from Oxford while Freddy continued to slog away at his studies. Adam intended to go into the church, but while he waited to become eligible for a suitable living, he continued his studies with Thalia’s father. His near-daily visits to the vicarage inevitably turned into near-daily visits with Thalia, where they argued amicably about history and books and philosophy and anything else that caught their interest.
“Yes. Good thing for me that Charis went missing, or I’d have missed you entirely!”
Thalia made a face and twitched a blond curl over her shoulder. “I’m glad her disappearance is lucky for someone.” She entered the maze, Adam at her side. “But you needn’t have bothered—you’ll join us yourself in a few days.”
Adam had not meant to come for the Season at all, but his father insisted he acquire some social polish before burying himself in a country parish. Even then Adam might have resisted, but Thalia overheard her own father telling Adam it would ease his mind to have a “stable influence” in town with his daughters (never mind that their aunt and uncle would accompany them). Perforce, Adam agreed to stay with a cousin in London once he had finished up some work for Thalia’s father. “True enough. But I told Frederick I’d see you off in his stead.”
“Did Freddy ask you to?” That seemed most unlike her brother, who could not reliably be depended upon to remember anything that did not closely concern himself. Thalia highly doubted he’d sent word from Oxford.
Adam hesitated for a minute, thwacking a loose branch out of their path. “Not exactly. But I’m sure he meant to.”
“What you mean is, you would have done so, had you any siblings. Because you are a prince among men.”
“That’s rating me rather too highly,” Adam said modestly. “Say rather … a marquis.”
As a marquis was still several degrees higher in the social order than a vicar’s daughter and an aspiring vicar, Thalia laughed, and led Adam into the center of the maze. She had walked it so frequently now that she might have traversed it with her eyes closed and come to no harm. She called out to Charis again when they reached the center, but without much hope of an answer.
“And what shall you do first, when you reach London, Miss Aubrey?” Adam asked.
“Oh, so I’m Miss Aubrey now? I was Thalia a moment ago.”
“I’m giving you practice in responding to your proper name,” Adam said. “I can call you Toodles, if you’d rather.”
Thalia made a face at the childhood nickname and turned a corner round a hedge. “Don’t you dare.”
“You’re avoiding my question.”
“I’m not avoiding it.” Thalia reflected for a moment. “First, I imagine we shall eat, then sleep. Then I shall find Hatchards bookstore, if Aunt Harmonia does not make me go shopping.”
“I’m glad to see you have your priorities in order,” Adam said. “I’m always skeptical of enterprises requiring new clothes.”
Thalia laughed. “Don’t tell Kalli that. She has her heart set on a new wardrobe.”
They emerged from the maze. No Charis.
“Has anyone checked the greenhouses?” Adam asked, indicating the glass structure some distance to their right.
“Uncle John was dispatched to look there,” Thalia said, starting across the broad stretch of grass reaching to a small, wooded area. “Though knowing Charis, she’s halfway through the wood by now, and once we find her, she’ll be covered in mud, and we’ll all have to wait while she changes clothes. Mama sent the children to look through the house with Aunt Harmonia, or we’d no doubt be looking for them too at this point.”
“What do you think Charis is after this time?” Adam asked.
“Heaven only knows. Perhaps she heard a birdsong she wished to identify. Or a gardener found some fox scat that she wished to inspect.” Though if that were the case, wouldn’t the gardener have reported seeing her?
“And she’s to make her debut with you? What on earth will Charis do in London?”
Thalia shrugged. “She’ll dance with young men, promptly forget their names, and wish the entire time that she was at some lecture at the Royal Academy of Sciences.” Aunt Harmonia had wanted Charis to debut last spring, when she and Thalia were both seventeen, but Charis had refused to do so without her cousins, and now they were all to come out to society together. Being “out” meant one was officially of marriageable age and allowed to attend balls and society events.
Thalia wondered if Charis was regretting her rash promise to debut with her cousins. Perhaps she was hiding. But Charis’s parents could afford to send her to any number of Seasons, so it was not likely to matter if Charis did not take this Season. Or any Season, for that matter.
It was different for Thalia and Kalli, whose straitened circumstances meant they needed to establish themselves. Mama hoped they would both find husbands, but—
“And you?” Adam asked.
“Well, I shan’t be wishing I was at a scientific lecture,” Thalia said, and Adam laughed. She liked his laugh, the way his eyes lit and his freckled cheeks crinkled. “I enjoy dancing, thank goodness for small favors. But I don’t mean to go to London to find myself a husband. I’m going to find the intellectual heart of the city, the salons with the brightest ideas, and soak it all in. It will be better even than a library. And then I’ll get a publisher for my poems, and I won’t need a man to support me.”
“Take care that you don’t become a bluestocking,” Adam teased. “Your family and friends have reputations to uphold.”
“If being a bluestocking is the worst that is said of me, Mama will be relieved. And it’s not like that reputation could harm you,” Thalia said. Adam had his own reputation for being “bookish,” though it was unfair that a penchant for scholarship was accounted an advantage in a man and a disadvantage in a woman.
As they neared the wood that edged Uncle John’s property, Thalia caught a glimpse of something blue.
“There she is,” she said, tugging Adam forward.
A moment later, Charis herself marched out of the wood, her hair hanging loose down her back, wearing an old blue dress that she reserved for field excursions. As Charis was rather ample and the dress several years old, the fabric strained at the bodice and hung short enough that Thalia could see the top of Charis’s old boots and a good few inches of wool stocking.
Charis had spotted them. “Hallo!” She gave a friendly wave. “What brings you both out this way? Isn’t it a glorious morning? There was a mandarin duck on the pond, floating snug as you please.”
Thalia took a deep breath. Charis had not been hiding—she had simply forgotten what day it was.
Charis drew closer and took in Thalia’s navy traveling dress. Guilt stole pinkly across her wide, freckled cheeks. “Oh no. London. Mama even sent a maid up to remind me, and I only meant to steal away for a few moments because I’d heard a call that I thought might be a hoopoe, but of course it wasn’t, and then the duck drove it entirely out of my head.” Her pink cheeks paled. “Is Mama very angry?”
Thalia considered this. “I’d say resigned, rather.” As Aunt Harmonia—Lady Elphinstone—had no other children to lavish her maternal ambitions on, Charis was the sole (if often disappointing) vehicle for her societal dreams. Her ambitions were not dimmed by Charis’s reluctance to share them, though they were frequently thwarted.
“Oh, worse and worse! I’d rather face her angry than despairing.” Charis picked up her skirts and began to run across the field, her sturdy legs pounding and her wavy auburn hair bouncing along her shoulders. Thalia and Adam followed more sedately.
Thalia’s parents were waiting for them in the courtyard, along with Thalia’s sister Kalli, who practically bounced with enthusiasm, her dark curls quivering about her face. The two youngest Aubrey children were darting about the carriages, but Antheia, who at fourteen was too young for a Season, was sulking beside their mother.
“Thank goodness Charis has been found,” Thalia’s mama said. “Have you everything you need for London?”
“Yes, Mama,” Thalia said, checking to see that her and Kalli’s trunks were securely lashed behind one of the carriages.
“I’ve brought you something,” her father said, handing her a neat leatherbound book. The pages inside were blank. “I hope you’ll fill it with poetry and keep me updated on your progress.”
“Be sure to attend church regularly and listen to your aunt. She knows all the eligible gentlemen,” her mama said. She pressed a quick, distracted kiss to Thalia’s cheek before dashing away to rescue her youngest son from one of the horses, calling back over her shoulder, “And write us every week!”
Thalia’s father tugged her to him in a firm hug. “I’m depending on you to be a help to your aunt and uncle. You’re my sensible child, and I trust you’ll watch over Kalliope in my absence and keep her from trouble.”
“Of course, Papa.” Thalia swallowed a tart response: I thought Adam was to be the “stable influence.” She would not say, even to her father, that she hoped London would allow her to be a little reckless and irresponsible for once.
“Come on, Thalia!” Kalli said, giving one last hug to their sister Antheia, who was now sniffing damply. “Aunt Harmonia has given us our own carriage. She says it’s because we won’t want to listen to our uncle snoring, but I think it’s because she means to sleep alongside Uncle John.”
Adam helped Kalli into the carriage, then held his hand out to Thalia. As she took his hand, Adam surprised her by brushing his lips against her cheek. “Safe journey, Toodles, and don’t forget me.”
Her skin tingling where his lips had been, Thalia tried to ignore the heat rising in her face—and Kalli hooting in most unladylike fashion inside the carriage. She pretended she did not see the significant look her mother gave her father. Adam was like a brother to her—the oldest friend she had, outside of Kalli and Charis. She struggled for a quip, something to make the moment light. “I doubt I am in danger of forgetting you in less than a se’nnight.”
Adam laughed, and Thalia settled herself beside Kalli.
Within minutes, Charis presented herself meekly in the courtyard. Her cheeks bore the bright red of the freshly scrubbed. Adam helped her into the carriage as well. “Go take London by storm.”
“If by storm you mean hurricane,” Charis said gloomily, “then I rather think I shall.”
Thalia had a sudden image of an auburn-haired whirlwind wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting city. A line of poetry began to take shape in her head: The whirling wind that wrecked the world was merely woman, scorned. Hmm. No. Charis was hardly scornful.
Adam laughed again. “Have a little faith in yourself, Charis.” He shut the carriage door and stepped back, waving at them.
The youngest Aubrey children shouted, banging on the carriage until Thalia’s mother pulled them back.
The carriage lurched forward. Kalli’s fingers closed around Thalia’s, cold despite the blanket she’d pulled over them both. “London,” Kalli breathed.
Charis, sitting on the seat facing the Aubrey sisters, peered through the window and waved. Thalia kept her face forward, toward the road that would carry them away from the only world she’d ever known.
“London,” Thalia agreed, echoing her sister.
Copyright © 2023 by Rosalyn Eves
