Page 5 of The Wallflower Manifesto
“What? Are you debuting, Dorothy Fletcher?Aftergetting married?” Millie balked, wrinkling up her nose. “What madness is this?”
“No madness,” Dot replied with a laugh. “A dear friend of the family has a daughter who is debuting, and he has asked me to assist and chaperone her to a few events, to mentor her somewhat if I am able, and I do not know that I am. But I shall endeavor to try.”
Millie tilted her head with interest. “You? In the ballrooms and tea houses? Dot, you’ve no map for such things.”
Dot laughed because it was true. “I am not so completely hopeless, Millie. There was the year where Freddy courted me, you recall, and since marrying Silas, I’ve attended a decent number of soirees and the like. Besides, I can’t watch youover there buying cigars and prowling Almack’s without a little vocation of my own, can I?”
“You could, in fact,” Millie said with a quirk of her lips, winning a delighted laugh from her oldest friend. “Well, I shouldn’t mind the company if our paths cross, regardless. Who is this girl you’re guiding about? Perhaps I can keep an eye on her as well.”
“Miss Hannah Lazarus. She is our banker’s eldest daughter.” Dot paused, giving a little tilt of her head and a blink of her large, green eyes. “She reminds me a lot of you, actually.”
“Then God help her,” Millie muttered, and meant it. If there was any justice in the world, every pinching, dour-faced modiste she’d had to see for her own Season was long retired and beyond reaching this debutante, who apparently shared Millie’s many misfortunes.
She pictured poor Miss Lazarus as herself at nineteen, a generously built girl with a mother who insisted on buying dresses that were always just a bit smaller than they should be and stays reinforced with whalebone and steel to make them fit. She winced.
She hadn’t yet investigated the shipment of gowns the dowager countess ordered for her back in Crooked Nook, but she knew she was going to be expected to wear one of them to the opera tonight. One did not snub such a gift. But, as long as they stayed sealed in their box, Millie could imagine they were not going to pinch and cinch her to the point of turning blue.
Millie had never had a proper Season. A modest dowry was reserved for her, of course, and she had been bought those fine, beautiful, torturous dresses and brought to a few polite events and introduced to young men who stared at and spoke directly toher bosoms. She had also been introduced to their mothers, who stared at and did not speak to her waistline with disapproving frowns or otherwise muttered things about “fertile hips” behind their fans.
They said other things too. Cruel things about Mrs. Yardley. Things Millie knew they both could hear.
The matrons must have known too. They wouldn’t bother to lower their voices, whispering in singsong behind their fans. “Poor thing, sad, skinny Lacey Yardley, so spindly her bones could start a fire, and somehow her daughter is plumper than a Christmas goose!”
And they’d giggle while Mama turned pale and everyone else pretended to go temporarily deaf.
Millie had, shockingly, not received any proposals.
It was around that time that Claire had really begun to blossom into a great beauty while still studying with her governess. She was neither plump nor spindly, but perfectly fashionably shaped, slender but gently endowed with feminine curves in the appropriate places. She had an angelic face and gentle manners, and in her, Millie knew her mother saw the triumph in Society she had always dreamed of.
So all attention had moved to the younger sister, and at last Millie could breathe again, both literally and figuratively.
The shift into assumed spinsterhood had been so quick and so simple that Millie could point to it in her diary, on the day of that final social engagement, when they’d come home to see Claire balancing books on her head in the stairwell and realized that she was the family’s great hidden jewel.
Her eldest brother, Zeke, had asked her back then if it bothered her. He was always the observant one, always the carer, but she had told him truthfully that she was relieved. Much like Dot had said, sometimes, all a girl wanted was to be left alone.
And besides, better to be unmarried than to be married poorly.
Someone ought to tell that to little Miss Lazarus before she started playing the marriage mart in earnest.
“Come, Vivian should be roused from her nap by now and ready for feeding,” Dot said, scattering Millie’s thoughts of young girls and their woes. “I don’t hear her screaming about it just yet, but that doesn’t mean she won’t. The nurse is very impressed with the volume of her cries. Says she has her father’s presence.”
“What does Silas say?” Millie asked.
“That he’s very proud,” Dot replied with a wistfulness that could only come from someone hopelessly besotted.
“It’s lovely, you know, that you named the baby for your mother. It made my mother cry when she heard about it. I know because the letter I got was all tear-stained.”
“She has sent many gifts, and visits when she can,” Dot told her, a smile in her voice. “She says she’s doing it in my mother’s honor, since she can’t be here to dote on the baby herself. It’s very sweet.”
She stopped just short of the door and turned, blinking with realization. “Oh! I almost forgot. Mind the cat when we go in. She won’t leave the nursery during the day and likes to menace newcomers when they approach the cradle. She’s harmless, really, she just has a mischievous spirit.”
“I like cats,” Millie said quickly.
“Excellent,” Dot answered, her shoulders relaxing a little. She turned the knob and gestured for Millie to follow her into the room. “Hopefully Queen Mab likes you right back.”
CHAPTER 2
The knock on the door that arrived that morning was all Abraham Murphy had been wanting for the last month. Finally, at long last, a fancy, titled person was arrived at his door, marking the start of the High Season, and hopefully, ready to shell out his hiring fee.
