So, considering it was a dress Celia made me wear whenever she thought eligible men would see me, it was a little disconcerting that she was making me wear it now when I was only seeing a ghost.
"I think Jacob will take you somewhere today," she said, fastening the hooks and eyes at the back of the dress. "He has a sense of urgency about him. Hopefully he wishes to communicate with his family after all, and if he has a brother or cousin..." She let the sentence drift, full of potential and possibility.
"It's more likely Jacob is concerned about the demon," I said.
She guided me to my dressing table and forced me to sit at the stool. "It can't hurt to be prepared," she said, undoing my braid. "You never know whose path you'll be thrown into."
I couldn't fault her logic although I didn't like to think about eligible gentlemen, or marriage or any of those things. Some girls of my acquaintance may be married by seventeen, but I wasn't sure wedlock was for me. What would happen to Celia? And why would I want to live with a man, by his rules, in his house, when I could live here with my sister and do as I pleased?
Besides, what sort of husband would want a fatherless bastard for a wife? And if my parentage didn't concern him, surely the fact I had conversations with the dead would.
A knock at my bedroom door made me turn around, yanking the hair out of Celia's hands. "Be still," she snapped, "or I'll have to start over."
"I can appreciate that a lady needs time to prepare herself to face the day," Jacob said through the door, "but do you think you could go faster?"
"He wants us to hurry up," I told Celia.
"Hurry!" she scoffed. "A lady cannot rush her morning toilette."
"I won't be long," I called out.
"Good because we need to get going," he said.
"We're definitely going somewhere," I said to my sister's reflection in the dressing table's oval mirror. "And where are we going to?" I shouted to Jacob.
He suddenly appeared in the room at my right shoulder, his back to me. I jumped and Celia tugged my hair. "Be still."
"Sorry," he said, "but I don't like shouting through doors. Can I turn around?"
"Yes," I said and hoped Celia thought I was speaking to her. I didn't want her to know he was in the room. She was already wary of him and for some reason I didn't want to turn that into outright distrust.