And Margrete Charteris, who in her youth had been one of the fabled Laurent sisters, did not take kindly to the sight of her youngest in jeans and a sweater with holes in it. Not to mention, Angelina thought as she stared in the mirror, her silvery blond hair wild and unruly around her and that expression on her face that the piano always brought out. The one Mother referred to as offensively intense.
Rome could be burning in the drawing room and still Angelina would be expected to smile politely, wear something appropriate, and tame her hair into a ladylike chignon.
She looked at herself critically in the mirror as she headed for the door again, because it was too easy to draw her mother’s fire. And far better if she took a little extra time now to avoid it.
The dress she’d chosen from her dwindling wardrobe was a trusty one. A modest shift in a jacquard fabric that made her look like something out of a forties film. And because she knew it would irritate her sisters, she pulled out the pearls her late grandmother had given her on her sixteenth birthday and fastened them around her neck. They were moody, freshwater pearls, in jagged shapes and dark, changeable colors and sat heavily around her neck, like the press of hands.
Angelina had to keep them hidden where none of her sisters, her mother, or Matrice, the sly and sullen housemaid, could find them. Or they would have long since been switched out, sold off, and replaced with paste.
She smoothed down the front of her dress and stepped back out into the hallway as the clock began to strike the hour. Seven o’clock.
This time, she walked sedately down the main hall and took the moldering grand stair to the main floor. She only glanced at the paintings that still hung there in the front hall—the ones that could not be sold, for they had so little value outside the Charteris family. There were all her scowling ancestors lined up in ornate frames that had perhaps once been real gold. And were now more likely spray painted gold, not even gilt.
Angelina had to bite back laughter at the sudden image of her mother sneaking about in the middle of the night, spray painting hastily-thrown-together old frames and slapping them up over all these paintings of her austere in-laws. Margrete was a woman who liked to make sweeping pronouncements about her own consequence and made up for her loss of her status with a commensurate amount of offended dignity. She would no more spray paint something than she would scale the side of the old house and dance naked around the chimneys.
Another image that struck Angelina as hilarious.
She was stifling her laughter behind her hand as she walked into the drawing room, just before the old clock stopped chiming.
“Are you snickering?” Mother demanded coolly the moment Angelina’s body cleared the doorway. She looked up from the needlepoint she never finished, drawing the thread this way and that without ever completing a project. Because it was what gently bred women did, she’d told them when they were small. It wasn’t about completion, it was about succumbing to one’s duty—which, now she thought about it, had been the sum total of her version of “the talk” when Angelina left girlhood. “What a ghastly, unladylike sight. Stop it at once.”
Angelina did her best to wipe her face clean of the offending laughter. She bowed her head because it was easier and dutifully went to take her place on the lesser of the settees. Her sisters were flung on the larger one opposite. Dorothea wore her trademark teal, though the dress she wore made her look, to Angelina’s way of thinking, like an overstuffed hen. Petronella, by contrast, always wore smoky charcoal shades, the better to emphasize her sloe-eyed, pouty-lipped beauty. None of which was apparent tonight, as her face looked red and mottled.
That was Angelina’s first inkling that something might actually be truly wrong.
“Have you told her?” Petronella demanded. It took Angelina a moment to realize she was speaking to their mother, in a wild and accusing tone that Angelina, personally, would not have used on Margrete. “Have you told her of her grisly fate?”
Dorothea glared at Angelina, then turned that glare back on Petronella. “Don’t be silly, Pet. He’s hardly going to choose Angelina. Why would he? She’s a teenager.”
Petronella made an aggrieved noise. “You know what men are like. The younger the better. Men like him can afford to indulge themselves as they please.”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Angelina said coolly. She did not add, as usual. “But for the sake of argument, I should point out that I am not, in fact, a teenager. I turned twenty a few months ago.”
“Why would he choose Angelina?” Dorothea asked again, shrilly. Her dirty-blond hair was cut into a sleek bob that shook when she spoke. “It will be me, of course. As eldest daughter, it is my duty to prostrate myself before this threat. For all of us.”
“Do come off it,” Petronella snapped right back. “You’re gagging for it to be you. He’s slaughtered six wives and will no doubt chop your head off on your wedding night, but by all means. At least you’ll die a rich man’s widow.” She shifted, brushing out her long, silky, golden blond hair. “Besides. It’s obvious he’ll choose me.”
“Why is that obvious?” Dorothea asked icily.
Angelina knew where this was going immediately. She settled into her seat, crossing her ankles demurely, because Mother was always watching. Even when she appeared to be concentrating on her needlepoint.
Petronella cast her eyes down toward her lap, but couldn’t quite keep the smug
