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NEVER understood before just how precarious life was. How in one moment, one could exist on Byron and science experiments and in the next, they could vanish—replaced by singing lessons and etiquette books as if my life itself depended upon them. Gone were my days of laughing and learning with Miss Miller, my hours-long visits with Lizzie in the splendors of her bedroom. My debut had ceased to be a vague kind of doom floating about my future; it had grown wings and teeth and swooped down to carry me away with its obligations.
    “Don’t light about here and there like a bird!”
    I started at Aunt’s voice. I had been wandering about the room, loath to sit and make any more pronounced the confines of my corset, but lacking in anything of substance to do instead.
    “Your strength, if you have one, is in your aspect. That pale, white skin and the sheen of your dark hair. With the least bit of wakefulness at night, with a bit of languor and lethargy, you look quite tragic. You should walk slowly, like one in mourning, with measured paces. You must attain a certain note of grace.”
    I had to acquire grace now too? Along with a perfectly pitched voice and an accomplished playing of an especially difficult Hungarian dance by Brahms? “You ask too much.”
    “Then you expect too little. I can open the doors of high society to you. My marriage to Mr. Stuart entitled me to that, at least. But I cannot make you walk through them with any kind of success. That is up to you.” She frowned at me, criticism lending weight to her scowl. “Go now. And think on that. Have the butler deliver the newspapers. I need to know where everyone has been and who they’re seeing and what they’re doing.”
    I did think on my success. I thought about it all night while I tossed and turned and sighed and groaned. By this time next year, I might be married. And if not married, then engaged to be so. There was no doubt about that. Only one uncertainty regarding my future remained: the identity of the groom. If I was going to marry, and it was certain that I was, why should I not marry the De Vries heir? I had almost convinced myself that I should be the winner of that prize. Though I still didn’t understand the circumstances of Aunt and Father’s determination that I unite with him, wasn’t my family’s honor more important than Mrs. Barnes’s connections? But Lizzie’s words kept echoing through my thoughts.
    “Never, but never, will we ever allow a suitor to come between us.”
    Never, but never? How could we possibly keep that promise unless we both decided to cede Mr. De Vries to the other? And why would Mrs. Barnes or Aunt allow either of us to do that?

    Sunday provided some relief from my training, though I should rue the day that I considered a walk down the aisle of Grace Church preferable to an hour spent with Aunt! As soon as I was settled in the pew, I snuck a peek across the aisle.
    It was occupied!
    By more than just Mr. and Mrs. De Vries. There was another younger woman sitting beside them, wearing a hat edged in white fur. And a dark green costume trimmed with the same fur. She looked like a Russian princess who had stepped from the pages of Harper’s Bazar .
    On the other side sat two young men. Both dark-haired. The first was dressed in an elegant dove gray frock coat, his hair precisely combed away from his brow. The other had the telltale folds of an Inverness cape showing at his shoulders. His hair was rather unruly, his brows thick. And it was he who caught me looking in their direction.
    I quickly pressed myself against the back of the pew. But leaning back just a bit, beyond the furthest reaches of Aunt’s hat, I could see them still. Enough to know that the young man had done the same.
    Leaning forward, I took the hymnal to hand and flipped to the morning’s first hymn, determined to give him no more thought. Though I did wonder which one he was: the elder or the younger. To which of them was I to be presented?