Page 121 of Immortal Rose

I sent her a grateful look. “I suppose it’ll do. It’s tradition, isn’t it?”

“Marry in yellow and resent the fellow, marry in pink and shatter your link, marry in white and endure a fight, marry in green and neither will be keen,” Felicity said. “But marry in blue and your love will be true.”

I stared at her. “You just made that up, didn’t you?”

“Blue it is,” she said quickly. “I’ll bring it in and press it. It won’t be but a moment.”

There was a knock at the door. I nodded to Felicity, who opened it to reveal Mrs. Silver, holding a small posy of white and blue flowers and a velvet bag. If it were possible for a person to radiate joy, she would have lit the whole of Feygrove Square.

All that faded the moment she saw my face.

“So,” she began, sharing a look with Felicity, who hurried past her. “We are not celebrating.”

I gave her a watery smile.

“Oh, ma chère,” she said, her whole countenance softening as she came toward me.

Setting aside the flowers and bag, she wrapped her arms around my shoulders, stroking my hair. “Of course. What girl wishes to be married without her dear mama to see it, with no flowers to line aisles of your loved ones, and without a choice in song—Albion is a nation of the emotionally repressed who cannot see the romance of living! To be married in a sitting room! I cannot bear it!”

The embrace, the kindness behind it, nearly made me weep again. “I had never thought to be married at all.”

She pulled back, still stroking my hair. “Neither did I. Love took me by surprise, but that is the way of fate, non? I only had to lay eyes on Marina to know, and once we were finished trying to—ah.” Mrs. Silver paused. “Well. We were at war then, of course, and there was no telling what might become of us. It was a time of passion and terror and dreams.”

“There is no love here,” I told her, hating the disappointment that flickered in her dark gaze. “None of this is real.”

“Could it not be?” she asked gently. “He is rather handsome, non? And you will be a countess.”

I balked, feeling the blood drain from my face. God, I hadn’t even thought of the title.

“He is . . . not hard to look at, no,” I grumbled.

Mrs. Silver let out a small laugh, her knuckle stroking my cheek the way Mama’s used to, when she was trying to gently rouse me from sleep. My heart seized painfully in my chest.

She went to retrieve a brush from the vanity and gestured toward my hair. I nodded, turning my back to her so she could begin to take out the pins. With each stroke of the brush, I felt some of that same tightness release.

“What was your wedding like?” I asked her.

“Oh, but it was romantic.” Mrs. Silver sighed dreamily. “The war was done, and we were on a ship bound for Albion’s coast. The night was so very clear, I could see the stars reflected in her eyes. She looked like a goddess. Marina is adorably embarrassed by emotion, you see, and she was horrified when I woke the captain and asked him to marry us on the deck beneath those same stars. But, then, she has always been the night to me.”

“Did you want to come to Albion?” I asked, twisting around to look at her.

“There was not much choice, non?” she said with a hint of sadness. “This is a kingdom of the cold-blooded who care only for horses and tea, but my own would have seen us stoned and buried.”

Yes, there was that.

The Church of Albion had experienced a cataclysmic rupture from the central body and tenets of the Undying Faith when King Bayard had ascended to the throne. Determined to marry his male lover against the existing religious prohibitions and prejudice against such unions, he’d set about creating an altogether more morally flexible branch of the faith, with him at the head.

Naturally, old Bayard hadn’t spared a thought to elevating the position of women from faithful, meek, and virtuous servants to their menfolk while reforming church canon to suit his needs.

Mrs. Silver and Mrs. Keyes could wed and live openly in society, but their legal status as women remained inferior to that of men. While they wouldn’t have to dissolve their identities into their husbands’, they and single women like me and widows were forced to hire a male solicitor or rely on a male relation—in this case, likely the Lords Foxcourt—to guarantee their bank accounts, oversee legal matters, and so on. It was humiliating to any capable woman.

At the sound of voices below, and a newly arrived guest smelling strongly of old holy books and incense, I tensed.

“I’ve brought you these, though you do not have to wear them if they are not to your taste,” Mrs. Silver said, spilling a pair of pearl drop earrings from a velvet bag into her palm. “Marina told me that nonsense superstition about not wearing pearls at a wedding, for they represent tears, but I wore them at my own wedding and they have brought me much luck. They will lend their magic to you as well, I think.”

The sparkle of a diamond had its own charm, to be sure. It was the essence of splendor. But beauty was something entirely different—something far more subtle that spoke the secret language of the heart.

I saw it in the pearls gleaming iridescent in the afternoon light, in the simplicity of their gold hoops, but the pearls were all the more exquisite for having been offered in kindness.