Lucy watched as Hyacinth strode to a dressing table and opened a drawer.
“Right where I thought they were,” Hyacinth said with a triumphant smile. “I do love it when I am right. It makes life so much more convenient, wouldn’t you agree?”
Lucy nodded, but her mind was on her own question. And then she asked it—“Why are you helping me?”
Hyacinth looked at her as if she were daft. “You can’t go back in with a torn dress. Not after we told everyone we’d gone off to mend it.”
“No, not that.”
“Oh.” Hyacinth held up a needle and regarded it thoughtfully. “This will do. What color thread, do you think?”
“White, and you did not answer my question.”
Hyacinth ripped a piece of thread off a spool and slid it through the eye of the needle. “I like you,” she said. “And I love my brother.”
“You know that I am engaged to be married,” Lucy said quietly.
“I know.” Hyacinth knelt at Lucy’s feet, and with quick, sloppy stitches began to sew.
“In a week. Less than a week.”
“I know. I was invited.”
“Oh.” Lucy supposed she ought to have known that. “Erm, do you plan to attend?”
Hyacinth looked up. “Do you?”
Lucy’s lips parted. Until that moment, the idea of not marrying Haselby was a wispy, far-fetched thing, more of a oh-how-I-wish-I-did-not-have-to-marry-him sort of feeling. But now, with Hyacinth watching her so carefully, it began to feel a bit more firm. Still impossible, of course, or at least . . .
Well, maybe . . .
Maybe not quite impossible. Maybe only mostly impossible.
“The papers are signed,” Lucy said.
Hyacinth turned back to her sewing. “Are they?”
“My uncle chose him
,” Lucy said, wondering just who she was trying to convince. “It has been arranged for ages.”
“Mmmm.”
Mmmm? What the devil did that mean?
“And he hasn’t . . . Your brother hasn’t . . .” Lucy fought for words, mortified that she was unburdening herself to a near stranger, to Gregory’s own sister, for heaven’s sake. But Hyacinth wasn’t saying anything; she was just sitting there with her eyes focused on the needle looping in and out of Lucy’s hem. And if Hyacinth didn’t say anything, then Lucy had to. Because—Because—
Well, because she did.
“He has made me no promises,” Lucy said, her voice nearly shaking with it. “He stated no intentions.”
At that, Hyacinth did look up. She glanced around the room, as if to say, Look at us, mending your gown in the bedchamber of the Duchess of Hastings. And she murmured, “Hasn’t he?”
Lucy closed her eyes in agony. She was not like Hyacinth St. Clair. One needed only a quarter of an hour in her company to know that she would dare anything, take any chance to secure her own happiness. She would defy convention, stand up to the harshest of critics, and emerge entirely intact, in body and spirit.
Lucy was not so hardy. She wasn’t ruled by passions. Her muse had always been good sense. Pragmatism.
Hadn’t she been the one to tell Hermione that she needed to marry a man of whom her parents would approve?