Sublime

A successful

Emma Gladstone had learned a few hard lessons by the age of two-and-twenty. Charming princes weren’t always what they seemed. Shining armor went out of fashion with the Crusades. And if fairy godmothers existed, hers was running several years late.

She occupies her days with clothing – in the mending and embellishment of it for purposes theatrical and ecclesiastical, in ironing and starching it; even sometimes in constructing new garments out of old ones, and wearing them through Aldleigh in the knowledge that she is seen and admired and enviously mocked.

Grace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.

Her late mother-in-law had been cut from the same cloth as her sister Malva. Halla had tried to love her and then had tried to like her, and then had tried to be dutiful and compliant, and finally had settled for not being too obviously relieved when the woman had dropped dead.