Ask My Sister

You find Clarissa Thornbury three days later, which is three days longer than you meant to wait and two days longer than your temper can stand.

Tunstall's Circulating Library on Bond Street is where young ladies of fashion go to be seen choosing novels. There are sofas. There are mirrors, so that young ladies of fashion may watch themselves choosing novels. There's a man at the desk with a ledger who looks at the title of every book you borrow and makes a small private face, which is one of the reasons you dream of a different sort of room altogether.

Clarissa is at the back, by the shelf of new arrivals, alone except for a maid half-asleep on a bench. She's in primrose yellow. She's holding a three-volume novel and frowning at it as if it has personally disappointed her.

You don't plan what you say. You're past planning.

"Was it amusing?" you ask.

She turns. Up close she's even prettier than across a ballroom: freckles under the powder, honey-brown eyes, the same long neck as her sister. Her eyebrows go up.

"Miss Lidcote." Her voice is cool. "Was what amusing?"

"Peverell. Merriott. Sir Digby, though I'll grant you Sir Digby was no great loss." Your hands are shaking. You put them behind your back. "I don't know what I ever did to you. I don't know why you'd bother. You could have any man in London. You don't need to take the three who were... who were kind to me."

Clarissa looks at you for a long moment.

Then she sighs, closes the novel, and puts it back on the shelf, spine in, which is a crime against librarians.

"Oh, honestly," she says. "Do you think I want them?"

You stare at her.

"Lord Peverell," says Clarissa, "has called on me four times this week. He talks about drainage. He has opinions on the drainage of every field in Wiltshire and he shares them all. Mr. Merriott recites Cowper at me. Do you know how much Cowper there is, Miss Lidcote? There's no end to it. It goes on like the sea." She presses her fingers to her temples. "And Sir Digby kicked his groom in front of me at Tattersall's, and I had to pretend I hadn't seen, because Mama was there and she'd decided he had eight thousand a year."

"Then why..."

"Why do they come to me?" Clarissa's mouth twists. "You'd have to ask my sister who sends them."

The library goes very quiet. Somewhere at the front the man at the desk turns a page.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean exactly what I said. Every time some man looks at you for longer than a quadrille, Yseult finds a way to put him in my path. She tells him I've asked about him. She seats him beside me at dinner. She mentions to his mother that I admire his horses." Clarissa folds her arms. "I thought at first it was for me. She's always thought she knows best whom I should marry. Then I noticed they were all yours."

You feel cold all over. "Why would she do that?"

"I've no idea. I've stopped trying to understand Yseult. Nobody ever has." She hesitates. Something in her face softens, unwillingly. "And I'll tell you something else, because you look like you're about to march over to Mount Street and make a scene, and you mustn't. You mustn't make a scene anywhere near my sister."

"Why not?"

Clarissa glances at her maid, who is snoring gently. She lowers her voice.

"Because of Sir Godfrey's will. Her husband. He left her the house in Mount Street and the one in Bath and three thousand a year, and out of that she pays my dowry and keeps Mama's house in Clarges Street from falling down around our ears." Her jaw tightens. "On condition that she gives no occasion for public scandal. Those are the exact words. If she's talked about, in the papers, in the clubs, in any way his trustee decides is scandal, she loses all of it. All of it goes to his nephew. Sir Eustace."

"That's monstrous."

"That was Godfrey. He was very fond of her, in his way. He just didn't trust her." Clarissa lifts her chin. "So whatever she's done to you, Miss Lidcote, and I'm sure it was abominable, she generally is, don't make her talked about. It's not only her you'd ruin."

Pym opens the door in Mount Street, takes one look at your face, and doesn't ask if her ladyship is at home.

She's in the library. She's at the writing desk by the window with her back to you, a quill in her hand and her hair coming down, and she doesn't turn when the door opens.

"Pym, if that's Lady Rushmere's sister again, tell her I've died and she can..."

"It's me," you say.

She goes still.

Then she sets down the quill, very carefully, and turns in her chair, and you watch her face arrange itself into lightness the way a woman pulls on a glove.

"Ava. What a lovely surprise. You're early for Thursday. Has something..."

"Did you send Lord Peverell to your sister?"

The glove slips. Just for a second. You see it.

"Sit down," she says.

"I don't want to sit down. I want you to answer me." Your voice is louder than you meant it to be. Mrs. Tuke isn't in the corner today; it's only the two of you and the books and the fire. "Clarissa says that every time a man looks at me, you put him in her way. Merriott. Peverell. Sir Digby. She says she doesn't even want them. She says you send them."

Yseult doesn't look away. Whatever else she is, she isn't a coward. She sits with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on yours, and when she speaks her voice is quite steady.

"Yes," she says.

The word lands like a dropped plate.

"Every one of them," Yseult says. "Merriott. Peverell. Sir Digby Mallard. And I would do it again."

You can't breathe properly. "You offered to teach me to win them back."

"I did."

"You were laughing at me. The phaeton, the waltz, the lessons... you sat in Mrs. Sowden's music room and watched me make a fool of myself over Peverell, and the next morning..." You stop. "You sent him to Clarges Street that very morning. Didn't you?"

She doesn't answer. She doesn't need to.

"Why?" It comes out of you raw, much too young. "What did I ever do to you? Is it a game? Is that what widows do when they're bored? Pick some poor plain girl at the edge of the ballroom and..."

"You're not plain." Sharp, instant, almost angry. "Don't ever say that in my hearing again."

"Then why?"

Yseult stands. She's very pale. She crosses to the window, and for a moment you think she isn't going to answer at all, that she's going to stand there with her back to you and let you walk out of her house and never come back.

Then she turns around.

"Before you hate me," she says quietly, "and you're entitled to, I'd like you to hear why. All of it. And then you can go, Ava. If you still want to."