That sounded like the usual drama, so Angelina rolled her eyes. Then, conscious that time was passing and her happiness was directly related to remaining invisible to her stern mother, she hurried along the passage. She took the back stairs two at a time until she reached the family wing. Though it was less a wing and more the far side of the once great house that everyone pretended had not fallen into ruin.
Charming, her mother liked to say stoutly whether or not anyone had asked. Historic.
Angelina was well aware that in the village, they used other words. More appropriate words. Rundown, for example. She had once pretended not to hear the grocer’s wife refer to the once-proud Charteris family estate, nestled in what bits of the French countryside her father hadn’t sold off to pay his debts, as “that crumbling old heap.”
Though it had never been made clear to her whether the woman referred to the house or Angelina’s father.
Either way, while her sisters flounced about screaming and carrying on about everything from the lukewarm temperature of their thin soup at lunch to the lack of funds for the adventures they wished to take with their far flashier friends—because they wished to perform it on social media, not because they had an adventurous bone in either one of their bodies—Angelina had spent another pleasant afternoon practicing piano in the conservatory. A room not a single member of her family had been inside in the last decade, as far as she knew. Mostly because there was nothing there any longer. Just the old piano and Angelina, who far preferred the company of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to her sisters.
She had nurtured grand dreams of leaving the family entirely and going off to Paris when she hit eighteen. Or anywhere at all, as long as it was elsewhere. But there had been no money for what her father had sniffed and called her “vanity project.”
There had been money for Petronella’s Year of Yoga, as Angelina recalled. And for Dorothea’s “art,” which had been two years in Milan with nothing to show for it but some paint smudged on canvases, a fortune spent on wine and cafes, and a period of dressing in deeply dramatic scarves.
But that was a long time ago. That was when Papa had still pretended he had money.
“Of course there’s no money for you to play piano,” Dorothea had scoffed. “When Petronella and I have scrimped and saved these past years in the vain hope that Papa might throw us a decent debutante ball. Ironically, of course, but still.”
Angelina had learned early on that it was better not to argue with her older sisters. That was a quick descent into quicksand and there was no getting out of it on one piece. So she had not pointed out the many problems with her eldest sister’s statement. First, that Dorothea was thirty and Petronella twenty-six—a bit long in the tooth for debutante balls, ironic or otherwise. And second, that there was no point in pronouncing oneself a debutante of any description when one was a member of a rather shabby family clinging desperately to the very outskirts of European high society, such as it was.
Her sisters did not like to think of themselves as shabby. Or clingy, come to that.
Even if it was obvious that the house and family were not in a decline. The decline had already happened and they were living in the bitter ashes that remained.
She slipped into her bedchamber, staring as she always did at the water damage on her bare walls. Her ceiling. All the evidence of winters past, burst pipes, and no money to fix it. Her mother claimed that the family’s reliance on the old ways was a virtue, not a necessity. She waxed rhapsodic about fires in all the fireplaces to heat the house, no matter how cold it got in this part of France. She called it atmospheric. It is our preference, she would tell anyone who even looked as if they might ask. A family custom.
But the truth was in the cold that never lifted in this place of stone and despair, not even in the summertime. The house was too old, too drafty. It was June now and still chilly, and the picked-bare rooms and stripped walls didn’t help. Slowly, ever so slowly, priceless rugs disappeared from the floors and paintings from their hooks. Family heirlooms no longer took pride of place in the echoing rooms.
When asked, Mother would laugh gaily, and claim that it was high time for a little spring cleaning—even when it was not spring.
The more time Papa spent locked up his office, or off on another one of those business trips he returned from looking grim and drawn, the more the house became a crumbling patchwork of what had once been a certain glory.
Not that Angelina cared. She had her piano. She had music. And unlike her sisters, she had no interest at all in scaling the heights of society—whether that was bright young things who called themselves influencers, who Petronella desperately emulated, or the dizzy heights of the European once-nobles who turned Dorothea’s head.
All she wanted to do was play her piano.
It had been her escape as a child and it still was now. Though more and more she dreamed that it might also be her ticket out of this house. And away from these people she knew only through an accident of birth.
She hurried into the bath attached to her chamber, listening for the comforting symphony of the leaking pipes. She wanted a bath, but the hot water was iffy and she’d spent too much time in the servants’ passage, so she settled instead for a brisk, cold wash in the sink.
Because evening was coming on fast, and that meant it was time for the nightly charade.
Mother insisted. The Charteris family might be disappearing where they stood, but Mother intended they should go
