When Sarah came down for supper, she was feeling a bit better about having to spend the evening with Hugh Prentice. The row they’d had that afternoon had been awful, and she could not imagine they would ever choose to be friends, but at least they’d got everything out in the open. If she was to be forced to remain at his side for the duration of the wedding, he would not think she was doing so out of any desire for his company.

And he would behave properly as well. They had struck a bargain, and whatever his faults, he did not seem the type to go back on his word. He would be polite, and he would put on a good show for Honoria and Marcus, and once this ridiculous month of weddings was over, they would never need speak with each other again.

After five minutes in the drawing room, however, it became delightfully clear that Lord Hugh was not yet present. And Sarah had looked. No one was going to accuse her of shirking her duty.

Sarah had never much liked standing alone at gatherings, so she joined her mother and aunts over by the fireplace. As expected, they were nattering on about the wedding. Sarah listened with half an ear; after five days at Fensmore, she could not imagine there was any detail she had not yet heard about the upcoming ceremony.

“It is a pity the hydrangeas aren’t in season,” her aunt Virginia was saying. “The ones we grow at Whipple Hill are just the shade of lavender-blue we need for the chapel.”

“It’s blue-lavender,” Aunt Maria corrected, “and you must see that hydrangeas would have been a terrible mistake.”

“A mistake?”

“The colors are far too variable,” Aunt Maria continued, “even on a cultivated shrub. You would never have been able to guarantee the shade ahead of time, and what if they did not match Honoria’s dress perfectly?”

“Surely no one would expect perfection,” Aunt Virginia replied. “Not with flowers.”

Aunt Maria sniffed. “I always expect perfection.”

“Especially from flowers,” Sarah said with a little chuckle. Aunt Maria had named her daughters Rose, Lavender, Marigold, Iris, and Daisy. Her son, whom Sarah privately thought might be the luckiest child in England, was called John.

But Aunt Maria, though generally kindhearted, had never had much of a sense of humor. She blinked a few times in Sarah’s direction before giving a little smile and saying, “Oh yes, of course.”

Sarah still wasn’t sure if Aunt Maria had got the joke. She decided not to press the matter. “Oh, look! There’s Iris!” she said, relieved to see her cousin enter the room. Sarah had never been as close to Iris as she was to Honoria, but they were all three almost the same age, and Sarah had always enjoyed Iris’s dry wit. She imagined the two of them would be spending more time together now that Honoria was getting married, especially since they shared a profound loathing for the family musicale.

“Go,” her mother said, nodding in Iris’s direction. “You don’t want to stay here with the matrons.”

She really didn’t, so with a grateful smile to her mother, Sarah made her way over to Iris, who was standing near the doorway, quite obviously looking for someone.

“Have you seen Lady Edith?” Iris asked without preamble.

“Who?”

“Lady Edith Gilchrist,” Iris clarified, referring to a young lady neither of them knew very well.

“Wasn’t she recently engaged to the Duke of Kinross?”

Iris waved this off as if the recent loss of an eligible duke was of no consequence. “Is Daisy down?” she asked.

Sarah blinked at the sudden change of subject. “Not that I have seen.”

“Thank God.”

Sarah’s eyes widened at Iris’s rather fast use of the Lord’s name, but she would never criticize. Not about Daisy.

Daisy was best in very small doses. There was simply no getting around that.

“If I make it through these weddings without murdering her, it will be a small miracle,” Iris said darkly. “Or a large... something.”

“I told Aunt Virginia not to put the two of you in a bedchamber together,” Sarah said.

Iris dismissed this with a flick of her head as she continued to glance about the drawing room. “There was nothing to be done about that. Sisters will be put together. They need to conserve rooms. I’m used to it.”

“Then what is wrong?”

Iris swung around to face her, her pale eyes large and furious in her similarly pale face. Sarah had once heard a gentleman call Iris colorless—she had light blue eyes, pale strawberry blond hair, and skin that was practically translucent. Her brows were pale, her lashes were pale, everything about her was pale—until one got to know her.

Iris was as fierce as they came. “She wants to play,” she seethed.

For a moment Sarah did not comprehend. And then—terrifyingly—she did. “No!” she gasped.

“She brought her violin up from London,” Iris confirmed.

“But—”

“And Honoria has already moved her violin to Fensmore. And of course every great house has a pianoforte.” Iris clenched her jaw; she was quite obviously repeating Daisy’s words.

“But your cello!” Sarah protested.

“You’d think, wouldn’t you?” Iris fumed. “But no, she’s thought of everything. Lady Edith Gilchrist is here, and she brought her cello. Daisy wants me to borrow it.”

Instinctively, Sarah whipped her head around, looking for Lady Edith.

“She’s not here yet,” Iris said, all business, “but I need to find her the moment she gets in.”

“Why would Lady Edith bring a cello?”

“Well, she plays,” Iris said, as if Sarah had not considered that.

Sarah resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Well, almost. “But why would she bring it here?”

“Apparently, she’s quite good.”

“What has that got to do with anything?”

Iris shrugged. “I expect she likes to practice every day. Many great musicians do.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Sarah said.

Iris gave her a commiserating look, then said, “I need to find her before Daisy does. Under no circumstances may she permit Daisy to borrow her cello on my behalf.”

“If she’s that good, she probably wouldn’t want to lend it out. At least not to one of us.” Sarah grimaced. Lady Edith was relatively new to London, but surely she knew of the Smythe-Smith musicale.

“I’m apologizing in advance for abandoning you,” Iris said, keeping her eyes on the open doorway. “I shall probably bolt midsentence the moment I see her.”

“I may have to bolt first,” Sarah told her. “I have been assigned duties of my own for the evening.”

Her tone must have belied her distaste, because Iris turned to her with renewed interest.

“I’m to be nanny to Hugh Prentice,” Sarah said, sounding rather burdened as the words clipped out of her mouth. But it was a good kind of burdened. If she was going to have a dreadful evening, at least she could boast about it in advance.

“Nanny to— Oh, my.”

“Don’t laugh,” Sarah warned.

“I wasn’t going to,” Iris clearly lied.

“Honoria insisted. She thinks he won’t feel welcome if one of us doesn’t see to his happiness and inclusion.”

“And she asked you to nanny him?” Iris gave her a dubious stare, always an unsettling expression. There was something about Iris’s eyes, that watery pale blue and the lashes so fine they were almost invisible. She could be rather unnerving.

“Well, no,” Sarah admitted, “not in so many words.” Not in any words, to be truthful, and in fact, Honoria had specifically denied those words, but it did make for a better story to call herself a nanny.

At functions such as these, one had to have something good about which to complain. It was rather like those boys at Cambridge she’d met last spring. They only seemed happy when they’d been able to moan about how much work they had to do.

“What does she want you to do?” Iris asked.

“Oh, this and that. I’m to sit with him tomorrow at the wedding breakfast. Rupert’s taken ill,” she added as an aside.

“Well, that’s good, at least,” Iris murmured.

Sarah acknowledged this with a brief nod as she continued. “And she specifically asked me to entertain Lord Hugh before supper.”

Iris glanced over her shoulder. “Is he here yet?”

“No,” Sarah said with a happy sigh.

“Don’t get too complacent,” Iris warned. “He’ll be down. If Honoria asked you to watch out for him, she will have asked him—quite specifically—to come to supper.”

Sarah stared at Iris in horror. Honoria had said she wasn’t trying to make a match of the two of them... “Surely you don’t think—”

“No, no,” Iris said with a snort, “she wouldn’t dare try to play matchmaker. Not with you.”

Sarah’s lips came together to ask her what she meant by that, but before she could make a sound, Iris added, “You know Honoria. She likes everything to be neat and tidy. If she wants you to look after Lord Hugh, she’ll make sure he’s here to need looking after.”

Sarah considered this for a moment, then gave a nod of concurrence. Honoria was like that. “Well,” she declared, because she always did like a declarative well. “It’s going to make for a miserable two days, but I promised Honoria, and I always keep my obligations.”

If Iris had been sipping a drink, she would have sprayed it across the room. “You?”

“What do you mean, me?” Sarah demanded. Iris looked as if she was about to chortle with amusement.

“Oh, please,” Iris said, in that scornful way one could adopt only with family and still hope to be on speaking terms the next day, “you are the last person who can claim to keep all of her obligations.”

Sarah drew back, deeply affronted. “I beg your pardon.”

But if Iris saw Sarah’s distress, she did not notice. Or did not care. “Does your memory not stretch back to last April?” Iris prompted. “April the fourteenth, to be precise?”

The musicale. Sarah had backed out the afternoon of the performance. “I was ill,” she protested. “There was no way I could have played.”

Iris did not say a word. She didn’t have to. Sarah was lying, and they both knew it.

“Very well, I wasn’t ill,” Sarah admitted. “At least not very ill.”

“It’s nice of you to finally admit it,” Iris said in an annoyingly superior voice.

Sarah shifted her weight uncomfortably. It had been the two of them that spring, plus Honoria and Daisy. Honoria had been happy to play as long as she was with family, and Daisy was convinced that she was well on her way to becoming a virtuoso. Iris and Sarah, on the other hand, had held many conversations debating the various methods of death by musical instrument. Gallows humor. It had been the only way they’d been able to get through the dread.

“I did it for you,” she finally said to Iris.

“Oh, really.”

“I thought the entire performance would be canceled.”

Iris was clearly unconvinced.

“I did!” Sarah insisted. “Who would have ever thought Mama would drag poor Miss Wynter into the performance? Although it did turn out well for her, didn’t it?”

Miss Wynter—Miss Anne Wynter, who was going to marry Cousin Daniel in two weeks and become the Countess of Winstead—had made the mistake of once telling Sarah’s mother that she could play the pianoforte. Lady Pleinsworth, apparently, had not forgotten this.

“Daniel would have fallen in love with Miss Wynter regardless,” Iris retorted, “so don’t try to soothe your conscience with that.”

“I wasn’t. I was merely pointing out that I never could have foreseen—” She let out an impatient breath. None of this sounded the way it did in her head. “Iris, you must know that I was trying to save you.”

“You were trying to save yourself.”

“I was trying to save both of us. It just— It did not work the way I planned.”

Iris regarded her coolly. Sarah waited for her to respond, but she didn’t. She just stood there, drawing out the moment like soft treacle candy, stretched into a ropy swing. Finally, Sarah could take it no more, and she gave in with, “Just say it.”

Iris raised a brow.

“Whatever it is you’re so keen to tell me. Obviously there is something.”

Iris’s lips parted, then closed, as if she were taking time to choose the correct words. Finally, she said, “You know that I love you.”

It was not what Sarah had expected. Unfortunately, neither was what came next.

“I will always love you,” Iris continued. “In fact, I will probably even always like you, and you know I cannot say that about most of our family. But you can be terribly selfish. And the worst part of it is, you don’t even see it.”

It was the strangest thing, Sarah thought. She wanted to say something. She needed to say something, because that’s what she did when faced with something she didn’t like. Iris couldn’t call her selfish and expect Sarah to just stand there and listen.

And yet that was what she seemed to be doing.

She swallowed, and she felt her tongue dart out to moisten her lips, but she could not form words. All she could do was think No. It wasn’t true. She loved her family. She would do anything for them. That Iris could stand there and call her selfish...

It cut deep.

Sarah stared at her cousin’s face, sensing the precise moment when Iris moved on, when the fact that she’d just called Sarah selfish was no longer the most consequential thing in the world.

As if anything could be more consequential.

“There she is,” Iris said briskly. “Lady Edith. I need to get to her before Daisy does.” She took a step, then turned and said, “We can talk about this later. If you want.”

“I’d rather not, thank you,” Sarah replied tightly, finally hauling her personality out of whatever hole it had just jumped into. But Iris didn’t hear her. She’d already turned her back and was making her way toward Lady Edith. Sarah was left alone in the corner, as awkward as a jilted bride.

And that—of course—was when Hugh Prentice arrived.