“Bosky!” Lucy crowed, as she stumbled up the last step. “Bosky! Bosky! Bosky!”
“Hush. You’ll wake Emily and Mr. Newell and Mama.”
“Nothing will wake Mama. She’s been asleep for years.”
In vino veritas.
Cassandra said nothing and concentrated on maneuvering Lucy around the landing. Fortunately, Lucy had forgotten about the next round of brandy. She had also forgotten how to walk. She tripped and slid, Cassandra barely catching her before they both went tumbling down the stairs.
“Come on, Miss Bosky.” She hauled Lucy to the safety of the hallway. “Let’s put you to bed before you get yourself killed.”
“Was Charlie bosky when he got himself killed? Was Papa bosky when he got himself killed?”
Abruptly, Cassandra let go of her sister, but Lucy stayed on her feet, swaying. The light from the candle showed Lucy’s face was hard, the way she got sometimes these days: hard and bright like crystal. For too long they stared at each other, the flame flickering between them. It was Lucy who looked away first and burst into a shriek of loud laughter.
A door opened: Emily’s bedroom. Cassandra could just make out the pale oval of Emily’s face through the crack. Mama’s door stayed shut. Mr. Newell would be awake, no doubt, in his room around the corner, but he would have enough sense not to emerge.
Lucy picked up her skirts and danced down the hall to her own door.
“I’m going to run away to Ireland!” she yelled.
Cassandra followed after her. “Haven’t the Irish suffered enough?”
“Maybe a pirate will kidnap me. If I’m lucky.”
“If we’re all lucky.”
Finally, Lucy stumbled into her room. The momentum carried her to the bed, and she clung to a bedpost, swaying. Cassandra put down the candlestick with meticulous care.
“Let’s get you out of that gown.” How jaunty she sounded. Perhaps she would laugh too, if she raided Papa’s brandy stash.
“Poor Mother Cassandra! Whatever will you do with me? With naughty, bosky, tipsy Lucy.”
“There is only one thing I can do,” Cassandra said, still with her forced cheerfulness. “I shall sell you at the market.”
“Sell me?” Lucy spun around, eyes wide. “How much do you think I could fetch?”
“You’re so pretty in that gown, I wouldn’t accept a penny under twenty pounds.”
“Twenty pounds.” Lucy repeated it dreamily, but then her demeanor changed again. She leaned toward Cassandra, her teeth bared like a wild animal. “Ha! I wish you would sell me. At least then I could get away. You want to keep me here to grow old and ugly and boring like you, you with your husband who’s so ashamed of you he never even visits. Just because your life is already over, you want us to be miserable too. I hate you!”
Lucy’s spite was so vicious that Cassandra lost her breath in a hiss, which meant she had no breath to yell too, to scream that she was trying, didn’t Lucy see that she was trying, that their family had been unraveling like bad sewing for years, and she was trying to keep it from unraveling further, but she didn’t know how, she had no idea, she didn’t ask for this, but this was what they had. And how dare Lucy mock her marriage to Mr. DeWitt! So what if her husband was a stranger? Papa had chosen him, Papa said he was a good man, and Papa said she had to be married to inherit Sunne Park, so they weren’t cast out if Papa died. She’d done it for all of them, and she wouldn’t regret it, none of it, and if she never saw her husband and couldn’t remember his face, it was best this way, it was best it was best it was best.
But as always, her lips stayed locked. Screaming and theatrics were Lucy’s forte. Cassandra was the calm and sensible one.
Besides, this was her problem, not Lucy’s, and there was already something so terribly broken in Lucy. Something that Cassandra didn’t understand and didn’t know how to fix.
The silence crackled around them, until Lucy released another wild laugh, whirled away, and tripped. Mercifully, she fell facedown on the bed. Even more mercifully, she stayed there.
“Is Lucy all right?” came a soft voice from the doorway. Cassandra briefly squeezed her eyes shut before turning to smile at Emily, who was using both hands to torment the end of her long red plait. Dear, sweet Emily. Fourteen going on ten. “Is she drunk?”
“She’ll have a bit of a headache tomorrow,” Cassandra said. Oh, so jaunty, so cheerful. Yes,