The Countess Conspiracy

Everything was always desperate with Lily. It always had been. Although she’d been the elder, Violet had often felt as if she were the one following behind her sister, trying to smooth things over. That’s the way things were; people liked Lily, and while they were busy liking her, Violet got things done.

It never bothered Violet. She liked having things to do, and if her sister hadn’t been there, they wouldn’t have liked Violet any better. They’d only have ignored her more.

She tried to put a helpful expression on her face.

Clearly, it didn’t work, because Lily let out an exasperated sigh. “Please just listen to me. This time, it’s serious.”

“I’m listening,” Violet said.

“Be that way, then.” Lily tossed her head. “It’s Mama. She’s trying to do to Amanda what she did to us.”

Violet blinked uncertainly.

“You know what that was like.” Lily reached over and touched Violet’s sleeve. “It took me years after my marriage to come to trust Thomas, truly trust him as a wife ought. I was so hemmed in with Mama’s rules and shadow rules, what one could say, what one couldn’t. If it hadn’t been for Thomas’s lasting love and patience…” She looked away at the carpet, as if seeing some dismal almost-future. “No,” she said softly. “I can’t have Mama after Amanda that way. She did enough harm to the two of us already, and it’s only by the grace of God that you and I have recovered.”

Speak for yourself, Violet wanted to say. She didn’t feel harmed by her mother’s rules. She’d needed them desperately. But then, Violet had needed lessons on how to hide herself from the world. Everyone had already liked Lily precisely as she was; she’d had no need to pretend.

Violet looked at her sister. Lily’s eyes were wide. Her nut-brown hair was arranged perfectly. She had a softer version of Violet’s own face: a little less nose, a little more lip. More sparkle in her eyes, fewer wrinkles in her brow. It made her pretty, something Violet had never been able to achieve. It made her soft, and Violet had never been that either. Violet was all angles, a blunt, bludgeoning thing.

“You know,” Violet told her sister carefully, “it wasn’t as if Mama acted the way she did without reason.”

Lily reached out and took Violet’s hand. “That gossip is long dead. Those lies can’t hurt my children now.”

Violet looked away. It hadn’t been gossip. It had been scandal, one that could have destroyed them all.

“Lies?” she asked softly. “What lies?”

Lily waved a hand impatiently. “Yes, yes. I know. Never acknowledge the things that can hurt you.”

Violet hadn’t been referring to their mother’s rules.

But Lily made a sound of exasperation. “We’re family. And I know you feel as I do. What Mama did to us—what she made of us—was insupportable. She made us untrusting, hard things for no reason at all.”

God, Lily actually believed that. Had she never seen how desperate matters were? When the ugly details of the coroner’s report had surfaced—those coded words of likely accident—the whispers had started. Violet had heard them over her father’s casket. She’d stood there, fourteen years old, feeling awkward and ungainly, holding her nose in the air because she didn’t know how else to keep from crying. She’d clutched her mother’s black-gloved hand, feeling her mother grip too tightly in return.

The next day, her mother had sat down with Lily and Violet at breakfast.

“I am writing a book,” she had announced. “A book on proper deportment, and you two are going to exemplify its teachings.”

Lily and Violet had stared in numb, grieved confusion. “There will be a great many rules,” Mama had told them. “Public rules, which will appear in the printed guide itself, and private rules, which you must adhere to more closely.”

At the time, Violet hadn’t understood. She’d begun her mother’s lessons in bewilderment.

A lady never acknowledges an insult. That was the public rule, the one that was eventually printed in The Ladies’ Guide to Proper Deportment. But the Shadow Guide—as she and Lily had called the private rules their mother had given them—was more explicit.

A lady never acknowledges an insult, but she never forgets one either. She pays it back, no matter how long it takes.

A lady never lies, the Guide cheerily proclaimed. Her good word is her most precious possession.

A lady never gets caught lying, the Shadow Guide grimly countered, but there are six things every lady always lies about.

A lady shares her good fortune, taught the Guide. But the Shadow Guide explained: A lady protects what is hers, and she doesn’t let anyone else have a piece.

Over the year of their mourning, their mother had drummed every rule into the two sisters. Nobody had ever known the lies they told, because they never got caught.

And when they’d come out in society, it was their mother’s newly-published book of rules, the Ladies’ Guide to Deportment, that had dominated the conversation. Not the question of whether their father was a suicide. A clever woman, their mother. She’d made everyone watch her daughters for the wrong clues, and taught her girls to hide the things nobody was allowed to see.

They’d been perfect, utterly perfect liars, lying with their smiles and their best behaviors.

Lily might think that was awful, but Violet could see that training for what it had been: necessary. Lily had never forgiven their mother; Violet held the woman in awe.

As a child, she’d never thought of her mother’s private grief. She’d never thought how much it would hurt her mother to smile through the worst innuendo. She recognized it now: Their mother had raised her head and soldiered on, refusing to let her sorrow and her husband’s likely accident harm her daughters’ futures.

“It’s completely unnecessary,” Lily was saying. “Every time Amanda visits, Mama starts drilling her on the rules. On all of the rules. She’s teaching my daughter the things that every lady must lie about.” Violet’s sister threw her hands in the air. “It’s never acceptable to lie! She tells me that one never knows when a scandal might break, and that it’s best to be prepared. Have you ever heard anything so unreasonable? What sort of scandal does she expect?”

Violet tried to look suitably blank, to shake her head in what she hoped came across as friendly confusion. But her mind had already leaped ahead of her sister. She had written dozens of papers discussing inheritance—and therefore sexual intercourse—in frank, clear terms. She thought about the paper she’d published explaining the reproductive habits of the peppered moth, the relative incidence of various moth colorings since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and what that all had to do with Darwin’s evolutionary notions. She thought about the people who visited Sebastian’s lectures—waving placards and shouting epithets—and imagined them following her around instead.