Page 2 of The Wallflower Manifesto
Millie bit the inside of her cheek and stared straight ahead until she was summoned by her assigned servant to follow, and only then did she allow herself to throw a look over her shoulder at her sister, a glare harsh enough that she saw her sister raise a hand to cover her lips just before she rounded the corner and the whole scene vanished from view.
Almost immediately, Millie felt a sag in her limbs and a yearning for the softness of a bed. Any bed. The maid ahead of her, the shorter one, was silent and apparently utterly uninterested in her as a visitor in the home, which suited them both just fine.
Millie imagined it would fit very nicely into the mundanity of her journal entries from the last four days. “Maid did not speak to or look at me”would fit rather nicely alongside “Stayed at an inn again, which looked much like the last,”or “Oliver was fussy on the road,”or “Carriage still cramped; Mother and Claire bickered.”
Truly, she thought once her mother had rested a bit, she’d see the wisdom in taking some respite from the road before attempting to awe the dowager countess with all of her skilland charm. They were all rather bedraggled from the road and several days enclosed in tight quarters with baby Oliver and, frankly, with each other.
This was Claire’s official relocation to her new home and only her second time meeting her mother-in-law. The dowager had come to London once, some months prior, to meet her grandson, but Claire had been hesitant to undergo such a long journey with him until he was at least old enough to take his first steps.
Having had to personally chase the lad around more than one inn in the last days, Millie privately wondered at that thinking. Evidently, children did not learn their steps in a slow, steady fashion, but rather figured the thing out and went immediately to sprinting, and woe to whomever was left in their wake.
(In this case, it was Millie. Woe to Millie, specifically.)
As to Oliver’s father, the Earl Bentley, he was not permitted in this house. Claire had seen to that when she’d assumed custodianship of the deed in exchange for paying off her husband’s substantial debts, mere hours before Oliver’s birth. In exchange for clearing his legal burdens, Claire had secured something very near her freedom from the binds of her marriage, without losing any of the benefits of it. She retained her title, usurped his lands, and freed herself from the necessity of his company.
Insofar as to whether or not the earl’s mother took issue with this coup, Millie did not know, and she had not asked. The dowager had received them graciously, and perhaps valued her own home here too much to speak out against it.
And the earl himself? Millie didn’t know that either. The last she’d heard of Freddy Hightower was on the day the deal was done. He’d been taken away in a carriage and could very well have kept riding right off the edge of the known world. And if he had, the devil could take him.
Millie had no love lost for Freddy Hightower. The scoundrel.
He deserved his fate and more.
She tried not to think about him much, despite how closely her nephew was clearly going to resemble the man. Perhaps, having met the dowager, who had the same crystal-blue eyes and sandy-blond hair, Millie could come to associate those features with Oliver’s grandmother instead of with Freddy. It would be a relief, she thought, to look at the dear boy and be reminded of a stately grandmother instead of a ruinous father.
It wasn’t Oliver’s fault, after all. Just like Claire and Millie couldn’t control their own mother’s antics, Oliver had no purchase over his father’s.
One day, Millie thought with a shake of her head as she was shown into her bedroom,he and I may just bond over that.
Once relieved of her overdress, half stays, and hairpins, Millie collapsed into the goosedown sleigh bed in the center of the room, face-first and sighing, with her eyes already closed, and for a good, long moment, there was nothing in her life but stillness and the sound of a slowly flowing river outside her window.
The manor was situated just outside of Bourton-on-the-Water, a quaint little village full of cobbled paths and thatched roofs on the other side of the meadow. The county seat here had been built into the source of its original wealth: an old quarry builtinto a bountiful vein of limestone that jutted from the landscape like an announcement of grandeur, interrupting the idyll of rolling hills and flowing water simply because it could.
When Millie had asked Claire if the house had a name, Claire had smirked and said that while the house was called something rather grand and official, the locals called it Crooked Nook, and that was the only thing she could ever remember without digging up the papers and scanning them.
Crooked Nook.
Millie liked it.
It made her think of something wild and hidden, something that couldn’t be cultivated and combed into submission like her mother’s rose garden.
As her mind grew heavy and swam toward the stretchy, light-smeared landscape between the waking world and sleep, she thought of the corner near the gate of her lifelong home in London, where the weeds could climb through the iron fence and reach toward those precious, pampered rose bushes.
The dandelions were just there, fuzzy and white and delicate as enchanted snow. When the wind blew their seeds up and sent them dancing around the rich, indigo blue of the morning glory trumpet blossoms springing proudly from their vines, Millie could feel a true wonder spark in her heart just as it had when she was a child.
What sort of girl loves weeds?her mother had asked.
Lacey Yardley had let Millie plant a cutting once, many years ago. The idea was to teach the least biddable of her children howplants can duplicate themselves in fertile soil, how beauty and grace might expand, if honored.
Millie had done it, of course. She’d dug into the dirt, plucked away the worms, and rooted a thick, thorny cutting of roses into the very planet by its stringy feet.
It hadn’t taken.
Instead, the plot had exploded in creeping ivy and daisies, each wild thing strangling the life out of that cutting. She’d been young then, only ten or so, and she’d stood over the carnage with an odd feeling in her chest that was, for certain,notdisapproval.
The rap of knuckles on the door snapped her from her reverie, forcing her to lift her head full of wild, unpinned chestnut curls from the bed and blink bleary-eyed at the wall with a frown. Her fingers were stretched outward, as though to touch the flowers she had been conjuring in the half-mire of her mind.
She sighed as another rap sounded on the wood and rolled herself from the bed to trudge reluctantly across the room. She hadn’t even a dressing gown to grab and wrap about herself for modesty, so she opened the door only a crack, sticking her nose through the sliver of air in askance.
