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“Why did you say ‘wrong again’?” Josephine raised her eyebrow. He was towering over her, which she found most unnerving. Why could they not have stayed the same height? “When have I ever been wrong in my life?”
“I haven’t known you all your life,” Laurie protested, stuffing more cake into his mouth.Wait, why am I looking at his mouth?“Met you when you were two.”
“And you were barely three.”
“An infinitely more mature age. And, might I add, a better one.”
“You might not, you insufferable oaf,” Josephine said, taking the cake out of his gloved hands with disgust. Their fingers brushed in the process, and even through the gloves, his skin felt burning-hot for some unfathomable reason. A shiver traveled down her spine.Stop it, spine. Right now.“Being three years old when you met me is nothing to brag about. Besides, I turned three later that same year.”
“Ah, always slightly behind,” Laurie smiled. Just to irk her. He was wearing his cravat in the latest fashion style—it looked like a frothy, white waterfall. Utterly ridiculous. Utterly delicious. Drew the eye to the way his Adam’s apple jutted out and bobbed as he talked, and the hard line of his jaw, and those dimples—
What am I thinking?
“Do you want to get out of this parlor and have your nose broken?” Josephine said, “because I’ll do it.”
“I have made you angry, my dear, I apologize,” Laurie observed, not sounding at all sorry. “But you are no longer despondent, I see.”
He was proud of himself.
Josephine opened her mouth to tell him just how odious he sounded, when he raised a finger in the air to stop her. He might be an insufferable, conceited idiot, but he was an insufferable, conceited idiot who knew her too well.
“The night might yet improve, m’ dear,” he said in that obnoxious way of his that she loved. “You’ll see.”
And with that cryptic remark, Theodore Lawrence took his perfect cheekbones, his perfect wavy black hair and his perfect sugar-dusted red lips and disappeared among the throng of adoring debutantes who squealed as he approached. All the ladies present were dressed in pastel silks and feathers and Josephine, even though, for once, shewas dressed like them, she stood out in her awful frown. As usual.
The ladies surrounded Laurie immediately, hiding him from sight, and those who did not approach him, on account of being too old, kept whispering ‘what good shoulders’ he had. Josephine rolled her eyes at them, not that they were paying her any mind. They were right, of course. He did have the most spectacular shoulders. Jo herself could barely take her eyes off them, especially back at home, when he only wore his shirtsleeves to tend to his beloved horse, and—
Look what London has done to me. Turned me into one of those simpering females who think about men’s shoulders.
She was not like that. Always on the fringes of society, never quite fitting in. She preferred it that way. She pushed her back into the wall, going back to blending in with the wallpaper. The suffocating crowd of young ladies parted for him to pass, and she was afforded a rare view of Lord Lowry’s back muscles rippling gracefully beneath his immaculately-fitted waistcoat, as if he were clenching his fist with the force of a violent emotion.
What does he have to be angry about?Josephine wondered idly.
Even from the back, he looked like a Greek statue, deuce take him. And, despite his reassurances to the opposite, he, too, had left her.
Good riddance.
Dear Beth,
In the middle of spring, I find myself missing Christmas. Our Christmas.
Here in London the Season is in full swing—the furthest thing from the kind of cozy family affair that December used to be in our house. Perhaps that’s why I keep thinking of Christmas. I miss it. I miss you. I miss us. I shall miss having sisters.
I am tired of being angry all the time.
I want to wake up on Christmas morning to the sound of your pianoforte playing those baroque melodies. For one last time, I want to stomp down the stairs in my bare feet and my nightgown, mumbling grumpily because you woke me up just as I had gotten to sleep after staying up all night writing. For one more time, I want to go back in time and tell myself to enjoy the candles, the oranges, the off-key singing, the badly-sewn costumes for a ridiculous play I had written and forced you all to act in. For one last time, I want to see the expression on Laurie’s face whenever we made him play the damsel in distress because no one of us girls wanted to play her, not even you, who were the most agreeable, timid little thing. But he always did it, because he wanted to make us happy, and our own brother was always away on Christmas, invited to some marquis’ manor or other, and it hurt so much to miss him we could barely breathe.
I want to go back in time and understand that there was no time enough to hear your beautiful playing and I had to drink it in as much as I could, even if I hated waking up so early in the morning.
Ten years ago, Papa brought the pianoforte into your room, because you were so sick you couldn’t get out of her bed, but you still wanted to play it. Three months ago, the servants covered it with silk sheets because we were leaving, and the house would be empty for months, and it would collect dust.
But we never put a silk sheet over that last Christmas when we were all together for the last time. Because we didn’t know it would be the last Christmas. Our last Christmas with you, our last Christmas with Mama, and now our last Christmas with Meg. What else is going to be taken from me before the next winter rolls by?
One thing is becoming increasing clear: everything changes and everyone leaves. And I will never make my peace with that.
Eternally,
Your sister
