* * *
IT’S THE LESSON YOUNG GIRLS EVERYWHERE were taught their entire lives—don’t be seduced by the men you meet, protect your virtue—until, of course, their entire lives depended on seduction by the right man. It was an impossible situation, a trick of society as a whole: force women to live at the mercy of whichever man wants them but shame them for anything they might do to get a man to want them. Passivity was the ultimate virtue. Heaven forbid you turn into someone like Hyacinth Coldwater. Be patient, be silent, be beautiful and untouched as an orchid, and then and only then will your reward come: a bell jar to keep you safe.
Lady Sinnett had kept her hand clenched in a claw on the armrest of her seat for the entire performance. Before the applause had even ended, she yanked Hazel out of her seat and down the staircase, out of the theater and into their carriage.
She waited until they were a sensible distance from the theater and onto the quiet lane that led back to Hawthornden, and then she turned to Hazel. “Do you,” she said through clenched teeth, “have any idea what is going to happen to you?”
“What do you mean?” Hazel said.
Lady Sinnett swallowed and pressed her tight lips together. “The world is not kind to women, Hazel. Even women like you. Your grandfather was a viscount, yes, but I was a daughter and so that means very little. Your father owns Hawthornden, and when he—when your father dies, Hawthornden will go to Percy. Do you know what happens to unmarried women?”
Hazel knit her eyebrows together. “I suppose … I mean—”
Lady Sinnett cut her off with a sad, rueful chuckle. “Nowhere to live. At the mercy of your relatives. At the mercy of your little brother and whomever he deigns to marry. Begging your sister-in-law for scraps of human decency, praying that she’s kind.”
Hazel didn’t know what to say. She just stared down at her lap.
Her mother continued, fingering the edge of her veil. “I realize—I realize that since George left us, I maybe have not been as attentive to you as I might have been. I may not have stressed the importance of your marriage to Bernard Almont, because I assumed you knew it.”
“I do know it.”
“Yes, I thought you did. Smart girl, always reading. Not everyone will be so forgiving of your little—quirks—as your cousin is. The books on natural philosophy you steal away from your father’s study. There will be none of that when we go to London. I guarantee Cecilia Hartwick-Ellis doesn’t dirty her dresses with mud—or ink from books.”
“Only because she doesn’t know how to read,” Hazel mumbled to the glass of the carriage window.
Lady Sinnett sniffed. “Let your fate be on your own head, then. I have given you all the motherly advice I can.”
They spent the rest of the carriage ride in silence. Hazel stared at the dreary darkness through the window and watched the dead branches whip past them as the horses pulled them away from the city and toward home.
9
TWO STAGEHANDS WERE MISSING FOR THE opening performance that night. Jack grumbled as he filled in for them before the show, putting costumes where they belonged, checking the gaslights along the edge of the stage. He liked to be in place by now, high in the rafters, ready to raise the curtain on Mr. Antony’s cue.
Isabella stretched in the wings, her face already powdered, her flowing muslin costume on. She looked beautiful like this, Jack thought, with her yellow hair pulled high on her head and her cheeks rouged. But Jack always thought she looked beautiful. He spent every show in the rafters, up above the stage, watching her—watching the way she seemed to glide through the air like a fish underwater. Effortless. She turned to see him staring at her and smiled at him. Jack smiled back.
“Oi! Lover boy!” Mr. Anthony called out. He was securing a rope and balancing a cigar on his lower lip. “Make sure you get that tree set for Act Two. Carafree ain’t here, so his job is yours now.” He gave a heavy sigh. “You can handle it, right, Jack?” Mr. Anthony had lost an arm fighting the French in the West Indies, and in its place had a limb of leather stuffed with what might have been horsehair coming out at the seams between the false fingers, although Jack had always known better than to ask.
Jack swept his hair out of his eyes. “Course I can. But where is Carafree? And where’s John Nickels? Not like them to not show up.”
“You didn’t hear, you mean?”
“No, course not. Hear what?”
Mr. Anthony glanced around and moved in closer to Jack, turning his back on a group of giggling chorus girls. “Dead.”