Callie was frantic. She hadn’t seen Talis in two days now. Two days of doing the most inconsequential, most boring, most useless nonsense she’d ever not known existed. There were lute lessons, and dress fittings and scheduled walks in the garden, during which there was a lot of talk about what went on at Queen Elizabeth’s court. There was endless talk about who was getting married and who wasn’t. The oldest of the unmarried sisters still left at home constantly made declarations that she wouldn’t have so and so man if he were offered to her on a platter.
The youngest sister (who Callie rather liked) said Edith would take a man if he had one eye, one arm, and no legs.
“And you?” Callie asked.
“Mmmm,” Dorothy said, thinking. “I’d really like for him to have at least one leg.”
Callie laughed, which made Edith stop walking and reprimand them for being frivolous.
Once, Callie heard the clanking of swords and immediately started in the direction of the sounds, but Edith, with an astonishing burst of speed, caught her. “Ladies
do not consort with men without chaperons.”
“We could all go?” Callie asked tentatively, making Dorothy giggle.
By the third day, Callie felt as though she would explode. Of course the steel corset the daughters had laced her into didn’t help her feel settled. At the first feeling of those hooks being closed around her ribs, she nearly fainted. Catching herself against a windowsill, she managed to whisper, “Why?”
Dorothy didn’t have difficulty figuring out what she meant. Why bother with a corset when Callie had nothing on top to tame, was what she meant. “All of us are like that,” Dorothy said. “At sixteen I had nothing, then within three months, everything popped out.” With a delighted smile, she glanced down at her own plump bosom. “Don’t worry. You’ll be just like us.”
Callie started to point out that there was no reason to compare her to these women because she wasn’t their sister. She was the daughter of some man named Gilbert Rasher, a man no one wanted to speak of. But when she looked at the five unmarried daughters of John Hadley, she knew that they were like her. They were thin and blonde just as she was. Even the two boys she had glimpsed briefly the first day were like her. Talis, who was supposed to be their brother, when compared to them, looked like some great black bull let loose in a sheep pen.
“Why? Why? Why?” Dorothy was saying as she leaned out the window, staring down at the courtyard. Dorothy was eighteen and never married. Neither were her four older sisters because their father refused to part with money for a dowry. And none of the five were pretty enough to make a man take them without a dowry.
Beside Dorothy was Joanna, twenty-six, the plainest of the sisters, and threatening to run away with one of the gardeners if her father didn’t find her a husband. In one bold moment, she had said this to her father. John had merely looked at her and said, “Just so it’s not the head gardener’s boy. I need him.” Joanna had gone running from the room in tears.
“He is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen. Is incest truly a mortal sin?”
“Joanna!” Dorothy said, trying to act as though she were aghast, but actually working hard not to smile.
Callie went to the window to look out. Below them she saw Talis, a gleaming sword in his hands as he rammed it toward a man twice his age and half again his size. Talis was struggling with all his might to down the man while John sat on a horse and looked on, a faint frown on his face.
“I don’t think Father is so pleased with him,” Edith said, coming to look out the window. “I heard that for all his size, he isn’t very strong. Philip unseated him yesterday.” She was speaking of her weak-lunged younger brother.
At just the sight of Talis, Callie’s legs nearly folded under her. Some part of her seemed to fly out the window to be with him. Two days seemed like twenty years. She did not just miss him, she felt as though someone had cut her body in half and taken away the half containing her heart.
As though he knew she was watching him—which he did—Talis turned and looked up at Callie. For all that Callie had recently been told all sorts of idiotic things about the proper conduct of ladies, she dismissed everything she’d heard as she leaned so far out the window, she nearly fell. “I am here,” she shouted, waving her arm at him. “I am here.”
Callie’s unladylike shouting almost brought the people of Hadley Hall to a halt. No one had hardly heard the girl speak since she’d arrived; it was easy to forget she was there.
Below, John was especially annoyed that his precious son should be so distracted by the pale girl, and he thought of reprimanding her that night. But John was not prepared for the change that took over Talis when he heard Callie’s voice.
When Talis turned to look up at Callie, Hugh Kellon, the seasoned knight he had been struggling with (the man was having no trouble beating Talis’s awkward, weak, untutored thrusts), started toward his back. He meant to show the young whelp that girls should not distract a man from the important business of life.
But Talis knew that Callie was watching him, and when the man came at his back, Talis whirled in one brilliant flash and attacked the man, driving him backward. Within seconds, the man was on his back in the sand, Talis’s sword at his throat.
Ever the showman, Talis put his foot on the man’s chest and raised one arm toward the sky as he looked up at Callie, who immediately began applauding him.
It would be difficult to know who was more surprised: John or Hugh Kellon, the man who now had Talis’s foot on his chest. For a moment, rage went through Hugh, rage at his humiliation, rage at the arrogance of this young pup for his foot and his bravado. But then Hugh saw the humor of it all. It had been a long time since he had performed great feats to impress a girl.
Removing his foot, Talis turned to give a bow to Callie and to the two other young women who were politely applauding him.
Edith pulled the three of them away from the window. “Have you no shame! Really! You’re acting like harlots. And with your own brother, too!”
“He’s not my brother,” Callie said, as always letting everyone know that she and Talis were not blood relatives.
Edith looked at Callie standing between her sisters Dorothy and Joanna and she could see the very strong family resemblance. But she turned away, not wanting to acknowledge what she saw. Her parents had told her that the young man was her brother and this hoyden Callie was not related to her. That was good enough for her.
“Come, all of you. There is a music lesson in the solar.”