“You’re revolting,” Josie said.
“And you’re a squib,” Annabel said. “I’m being practical. One of us has to marry, and immediately. Imogen has been telling us for two years now that she means to marry Maitland, and Tess has never made the slightest push to marry anyone—so that leaves me. One of us has to marry and take the others to her house. That’s what we always said.”
“Tess could marry anyone she chose!” Josie said stoutly. “She’s the most beautiful of us all. Don’t you agree, Imogen?”
Imogen nodded, but she had her arms clasped around her knees, and she was clearly paying not a whit of attention to the conversation. “She may marry anyone, other than Draven, of course,” she said dreamily. “Just think, I might see him in a matter of hours…minutes really.”
Annabel ignored her comment, which was pretty much the way the girls had acted every time Imogen mentioned Maitland’s name for the past two years. “I agree with you as to Tess’s beauty,” she told Josie, “but men aren’t prone to marry penniless girls who show no interest. Yet I am interested in marriage. Very interested.”
“In the institution, not the man!” Josie retorted.
Annabel shrugged. “Imogen is romantic enough for the rest of us. It’s Papa’s fault. He made me keep the books for all these years, and now numbers float before my eyes every time I think about matrimony.”
“He didn’t precisely make you keep the books,” Tess put in, a trifle wearily. She was tired of defending their father from Annabel’s charges, but Josie took any criticism of their papa very badly. There was no way to sugarcoat the fact that their papa had discovered Annabel had a gift for figures at age thirteen and dumped the entire financial accounting of the estate on her slender shoulders.
“The important point is that I shan’t be keeping books any longer. I don’t want to think of numbers, or bills, or unpaid accounts ever again in my life. Thank goodness, men are silly enough to overlook my lack of dowry.”
“You could try for a little modesty,” Josie needled.
“You could try for a little maturity,” Annabel retorted. “I’m not being immodest. I’m simply being practical. One of us must marry, and I have the attributes that make men dazed enough to overlook lack of dowry. I’m not going to pretend to possess ladylike virtues that I don’t have in front of you three. It’s too late for that. If Papa truly wanted us to think like ladies, he wouldn’t have trained us to do exactly the opposite.”
“Papa did wish us to be ladies!” Josie protested. “He taught us to speak just like English ladies, didn’t he?”
“Poppycock,” Annabel said, but there wasn’t any real spite in her voice, just an amused acceptance. “Josie, if Papa had given a fig for his daughters’ futures as ladies, our lives would have been quite different. For one thing, he wouldn’t have pissed in the chamber pot right there in the dining room.”
“Annabel!” Tess said. “Keep your voice down.”
But Annabel just grinned at her. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I fully intend to counterfeit every ladylike quality that exists, until at least a week after I convince some bacon-brained peer to marry me and hand over his pocketbook.”
Tess sighed. It wasn’t easy to be an elder sister to Annabel, with her startling tawny hair and brazen belief in her own magnificence. The problem was that she and Imogen truly did look like the princesses in the fairy tale “Snow White and Rose Red.”
“Well, you needn’t set your cap at Holbrook,” she said. “I don’t think he’d make the best husband in the world.”
“If he’s rich enough, he’s good enough. Frankly, I can’t marry just anyone,” Annabel said. “I’ve very expensive tastes.” She hopped off the bed and examined herself in the glass. “I may never have had a chance to indulge those tastes, but I’m certain they’ll be expensive when I do indulge them. I have no objection to considering the Earl of Mayne if he shows as much depth in the pocket as our guardian.”
“You’re being shocking for the mere sake of it,” Tess said.
Annabel ignored her, as she had ignored every piece of advice that directed itself toward proper ladylike behavior. “The duke is a better bet. Higher title, and all that. I shall reel him in,” she announced, “then I shall go directly to London. From the day I am married, I shall wear nothing but silk next to my skin.”
“There’s a word for women like you,” Josie observed.
“And that word is happy,” Annabel said. It was hard to offend Annabel, even though her smallest sister devoted herself to the task. Annabel was too—Annabel. Too sure of herself, too glowing, too sensuous, too loving. Too desired. “I can hardly believe that we have finally found our way out of that backwater and almost to London. I don’t mind admitting that there were times that I despaired. Papa’s schemes, after all, never came to anything, for all he kept promising that he’d take us to London for the season.”
As far as Tess could ascertain by staring in the mirror, she and Annabel certainly looked like enough to be sisters, but their effect on men was utterly different. Something about Imogen and Annabel drove men into imbecilic paralysis in their presence, and whatever it was, she, Tess, didn’t seem to have it. They were all beautiful, thanks to their mama, who had been the most lovely debu-tante in London until she threw herself away on a horse-mad, bankrupt Scottish viscount. But Tess never reduced anyone into stammering silence the way Annabel and Imogen did.
Tess sometimes thought the problem was that she not only looked like their mother but that she remembered her. Annabel would never speak of their mother, and Imogen and Josie had been too small to have clear memories. But Tess remembered. And remembered. And somehow since Papa died, it was all wound up together in her chest…missing her mama so much that her chest hurt, then missing her father with the same pulse of pain.
“Now, if I marry the duke,” Annabel said briskly, “one of us ought to marry that earl our guardian has so kindly provided.”
“Better the earl than the duke,” Imogen said. “I don’t think Holbrook has combed his hair since last Tuesday. Not that I’m marrying either of them.”
“I’m too young to marry anyone,” Josie said with satisfaction. “And even if I weren’t, the Earl of Mayne would never want to marry someone like me. There’s something rather arrogant about him, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean by ‘someone like me’?” Tess asked. “Because you are beautiful, Josie. He would be lucky to marry you.”
“A plumpy partridge?” Josie said, and there was a hint of shame in her voice.
“Papa meant it as an endearment, not as a description,” Tess said, cursing her father silently, then instantly following the impulse with a silent prayer for forgiveness.
“Did you hear His Grace mention that he would ask Lady Clarice to be our chaperone?” Imogen said, abruptly changing the subject back to her favorite topic of conversation. “Lady Clarice is Draven’s mother. His mother! We are bound to see him often. And if she likes me…”