More fool she . . .
But then, what dreams had she really had? What had she really done in her life other than be the perfect lady and hostess?
Returning to her desk, Annalee set the small yellow disc down and banged it with the gavel. She turned a smile on Lila. “This was long overdue, it was. Many thanks to His Grace.”
“To His Grace.” The other ladies all lifted their fists and pumped them twice in the air in a collective show of appreciation.
Lila inclined her head. “I shall be sure and let my husband know his efforts were appreciated.” A little blush rose in her pale cheeks. “I have been thinking,” she hesitantly ventured as the room attended to her, “about our meetings, and I have some concerns.”
Murmurs rolled around the room.
“Concerns?” Annalee echoed. “What concerns, exactly?”
“About the views expressed regarding men as partners and husbands,” Lila said quietly. “I fear that we are speaking in a blanket way about all marriages and all gentlemen when not everything is so very black and white.”
“Marriage and men are equally terrible.” Sylvia’s response sprang from an automaticity of truth and earned a laugh from Annalee.
Lila shot a look at her childhood friend, and then shifted her focus once more to Sylvia. “Surely you don’t feel that way about all men?” She continued before Sylvia could speak. “What of Hugh? And our brother, Henry?”
“The exceptions,” she said bluntly, and the other members nodded in concurrence. “They are the exceptions.” It was far easier for Lila, who’d not suffered a broken heart, to believe there was good in that union. But she was the exception, not the rule.
“I do not disagree with that assessment,” their sister-in-law, Clara, put in with a husky laugh, rousing like laughter from the other women around the room. A former courtesan who’d saved Sylvia’s brother and ended up falling in love with and marrying him, the music hall owner had every reason to be cynical where men were concerned.
“And knowing a handful of good men is hardly reason for me or any of us to advocate for the prison that is marriage,” Sylvia added when the laughter subsided.
“Not all marriages are the way you are describing them.” Lila spoke with a quiet insistence.
“How many others here have parents who entered into a love match and had it remain so during their union?”
The Kearsley sisters raised their hands.
However, aside from the siblings, not a single arm shot up. Certainly not Lila’s or Sylvia’s, whose parents had had a businesslike arrangement. Yes, there’d been affection, but there’d not been more than that.
Lila, however, clung to that lone family who lent the only support to her argument. “See?” She pointed to the Kearsleys. “Between them and me—”
“You married a gentleman who spent the bulk of his existence outside the ton,” Annalee gently reminded the other woman. “Men who’ve spent their entire lives in this world? They care only about title, rank, and privilege.”
There came more murmurs of assent.
“She isn’t wrong,” Sylvia said for Lila’s benefit. “Peers marry ladies with only one intention . . . to continue their line and maintain their wealth.” And all the while they sought their pleasures elsewhere. They found love with women who weren’t their wives. Once, just thinking that would have cut off her ability to breathe without pain. Now, the realization of who her husband had been and the lie her marriage had been caused only a dull ache in her breast. Pushing back thoughts of her late husband’s betrayal, she refocused on the debate at hand. “As such, given the motives of greed that drive men, I could never, and would never, encourage a woman to entertain the prospect of marriage. Now, is there anything else?”
“I suppose there is not.” There was a sad glimmer in her younger sister’s pretty brown eyes. And there was something more there: pity. At the changes life and love had wrought upon Sylvia? At the cynicism that should exist within a room, when Lila had proven that in the rarest of times, real love could not only exist but also thrive, as it had for her and Hugh?
And if there was even the rarest of times when a woman might want to trust herself to that state, and even . . . find what Lila had, who were they to stifle it?
“Continuing on.” Annalee banged the new gavel, calling the group back to the real focus of the day’s agenda. She looked over to Valerie, who’d become the official secretary of their society. “New business.”
The young woman scanned her notes. “The second order of business pertains to the topic of marriage.” She stole a sideways peek at Lila, and then Sylvia, and cleared her throat. “That is, more specifically”—she turned the page with a flourish—“avoiding the marital state when others within society and one’s family have the opposite expectation.”
As she spoke, everyone in the room sat riveted.
With an almost icy quality to her closely cropped blonde curls, there was an otherworldly quality to the young woman, an aura to her presence. Sylvia had readily seen from the moment she’d met her late husband’s true love just why he’d been so captivated. And then she’d come to know her for herself, and realized how grand of a personality she was. In short, she was a figure to elicit interest and intrigue, where Sylvia had simply been . . . Sylvia.
“We had discussed deterring family members who might attempt to guide us toward that state, and instead, turn the tables so that the obligation and responsibility falls to the male members of the household. The Kearsleys, who explicitly stated they were indifferent either way as to whether their brother married as long as his attentions weren’t on their unwedded states, were to employ some of the strategies we’d discussed as a group to put guardians and brothers and fathers or mothers off.” Valerie concluded her reading.
Sylvia and the room on the whole looked to the trio of young ladies, aged seventeen to twenty-four, all crammed onto a settee really meant for two: the Kearsley sisters. The sisters of her late husband’s best friend, the Viscount St. John, the young women had proven an unexpected but surprisingly welcome addition to the Mismatch Society.
Anwen, the eldest of the sisters, stood and smoothed her palms down the front of her skirts. “We began by summoning our brother for a family meeting.”
As one, the other members leaned forward in their chairs, hanging on to the young lady’s words. Just as she opened her mouth to continue, her younger sister Brenna Kearsley hopped up.
“And we each agreed to take on the sacrificial role,” she finished, stealing her sister’s thunder as all eyes swiveled to her.
Her elder sister glowered, but oblivious to anything other than the attention now trained on her, Brenna continued, sharing the clever, intricate way in which they had gone about bringing the viscount around to being the one to sacrifice his freedom, all the while preserving theirs. “We each of us took a turn, insisting that we would be the one to make the noble sacrifice.”
“Everyone from Mother on down to my four-year-old sister,” Anwen hurried to interject.
The pair went back and forth, each filling in the masterful details of a plot that had been hatched in this very room and orchestrated . . . to flawless perfection. When they’d concluded, both ladies curtsied and then sat beside Cora, who, as she so often did, had buried her head in a science periodical.