Lesson One

"Lady Yseult Thornbury," your mother says, "is not a suitable acquaintance."

She says it over the breakfast table in Half Moon Street, over the cold toast and the account book she keeps beside her plate the way other women keep a prayer book. She has said it four times since you came home from Lady Wrexley's. You are beginning to suspect she means it.

"She was perfectly respectable," you say. "She lent me a book."

"She lent you a ribbon." Your mother holds it up between finger and thumb, the lavender silk you forgot to take out of Madame de Staël. "I know what a widow's ribbon means, Ava. It means she's bored."

"She said so herself."

"Then for once she was telling the truth." Your mother sets the ribbon down beside the account book, which is somehow worse than throwing it. "Sit. I want to show you something."

You know what she wants to show you. You've seen it before. But she opens the ledger anyway and turns it toward you, and her finger moves down the column of figures with the patience of a woman who has done this sum every night for two years and hoped, every night, that it would come out different.

"The lease on this house ends at Michaelmas. The landlord won't renew at the old rate. Your father's annuity died with him. What remains is this." Her finger taps a figure. "And this." Another, larger, in red. "Which is what he owed."

"I know, Mama."

"Then you know that the only thing of value we own is in that room." She nods toward the back parlour, where your father's library lives now, three thousand volumes shelved two deep and stacked on the floor and propped against the windows so the light comes in stained with leather. "Mr. Quiller at Paternoster Row will give us eleven hundred pounds for the lot. I've asked."

Your stomach drops. "You can't sell them."

"I can, and I will, at Michaelmas, unless you are engaged." She closes the book gently. "And then I shall go to my sister in Shropshire, and you will take a position as a companion. There's a Mrs. Fairclough in Cheltenham who wants a young lady to read to her. She's deaf, so you needn't do the voices."

"Mama."

"Three Seasons, my darling. Three." Her voice breaks a little, which is the worst thing of all, because she never lets it. "I don't know what else to do."

You don't either. You sit there with your hands around a cup of tea gone cold, and you think of your father reading aloud from Gibbon with his spectacles pushed up into his hair, of the smell of that back room, of every book in it you've read and every book you haven't yet, and you can't speak.

There's a knock at the street door.

Sukey brings up a card on the little tray, very straight-backed, very pink. Your mother reads it. Her lips thin.

"She's here," she says. "In a phaeton."

Kezia Gosling, who arrived ten minutes ago to borrow a novel and has instead attached herself to the drawing room window like a limpet, makes a noise like a kettle.

"She drives it herself," Kezia hisses. "Ava. She's holding the reins. There's a groom up behind and he's not even pretending to be in charge."

"Kezzy, come away from the window."

"I will not. They say she wore lavender to the Opera three months after her husband died. They say she reads Byron at breakfast. They say Sir Godfrey died of her wit, which I think is the most romantic thing I've ever heard." Kezia grabs your hands. Her curls are bouncing. "What does she want with you?"

You think about the library. The brandy. That's not the real reason. No. It isn't.

"Lessons," you say.

Hyde Park at five o'clock is a parade disguised as an outing. Everybody who is anybody drives or rides along the Ring, slowly, to see and be seen and count how many people bow to them. You have walked it with your mother perhaps fifty times. You have never been driven in it, eight feet off the ground in a high-perch phaeton painted the deep green of a beetle's wing, beside a woman who handles a pair of greys as if they're an extension of her wrists.

People are looking. A great many people are looking.

"Don't hunch," says Lady Yseult, without turning her head.

You sit up. "I wasn't."

"You were folding yourself up like a letter you're ashamed of sending. Stop it." She checks the greys around a slow barouche full of dowagers, nods to them with immense graciousness, and murmurs, "Lady Rushmere's sister. She once told my mother I'd come to a bad end. I like to drive past her as often as possible to show her how it's going."

You laugh before you can stop yourself. She glances sideways, pleased.

"There," she says. "That. Do that more."

"Laugh at Lady Rushmere's sister?"

"Laugh at all, where people can see it. It's very hard to be a wallflower while laughing. Wallflowers are expected to look grateful and slightly unwell." She shifts the reins to one hand. Her gloves are dove-grey kid, buttoned at the wrist with tiny pearls. "Lesson one. Are you listening?"

"I'm always listening."

"Yes, that's rather the problem. You listen and you watch and you take notes in your head and nobody can tell you're doing anything at all. Lesson one is the opposite." She slows the greys to a walk. "When you want something from someone, a dance, a word, a little of their attention, look at them as if you want it. Not as if you're asking permission to want it. As if it's already half yours."

"I don't know how to do that."

"Everybody knows how. You've only decided you're not allowed." She turns her head and looks at you.

It's a short look. One breath, maybe two. But it's the way she looked at you last night by the fire, steady and unhurried, as if she'd found something in the room she meant to keep, and the park goes quiet around you. You can't hear the carriage wheels anymore.

"Like that," she says softly. "Now you."

You try. You lift your eyes to hers and you think, I want, and you don't know how to finish the sentence. Her eyes are grey and green and gold at the very center. There's a tiny scar at the corner of her mouth, pale, like a comma.

Her lips part.

"No," she says, and her voice isn't quite steady. "Not like that. Like that."

You don't know what you did differently. You don't dare ask.

Hooves, close. A horse comes up alongside the phaeton at a brisk trot: a glossy bay mare and, on it, in a sky-blue habit with a little hat tipped at an angle that must have taken her maid half an hour, Miss Clarissa Thornbury. Beside her, on a black hunter, Lord Peverell, who sees you, goes faintly red, and studies his reins.

Clarissa looks from her sister to you and back again, and her lovely face goes perfectly blank with astonishment.

"Yseult," she says. "What on earth are you doing with Miss Lidcote?"

Yseult gathers the reins, entirely at her ease, and smiles at her sister the way a cat smiles at a canary that has wandered within reach.

"Ruining your Season, darling," she says. "Do keep up."