Page 29 of Prince of Masks
How the hell am I supposed to marry a gentry, if I must, and survive New Year? I’ll be bankrupt after just one.
I might have to hock gifts I receive just to make ends meet.
That’s a strange thought.
One that, if I really let sink in, feels foreign to me.
A husband who works, like…at a normal job. Teaching, if it’s Eric. He will have to teach classes at a school. Or, with connections to my family, perhaps start up an academy of his own?
What will I do? Keep house? Sit around and… read? All day? Every day?
Oh, the dread is cold down my spine.
If I am subjected to that hellish existence, I can only hope Mother steals me away to salons and spas and to Milan—and showers me with everything I don’t have anymore.
I shove the threat from my mind, my body, and weave in and out of stores to buy some things for myself.
The risk of losing it, the black card, the wealth, it scares me—and I overspend. A lot.
By the time the skies are darkening, and the weight of the bags pulls down on my arms, and my lashes are low over my tired eyes, the mere prospect of catching the tube back to the veil then waiting in the five o’clock queue is enough to lift my hand in the air and hail a taxi.
It takes me all the way to Stonehenge, two whole hours away.
Guess I’ll just add it to the costs I have run up on the card today, a tab that even my father might raise his brows at.
I dread it.
I dread the change at Stonehenge, when I leave the taxi and climb into my family car instead, because I’m closer now, closer to home, to my parents, my father—and it’s not the tab that has me squirming in my seat.
It’s the library.
The unease is flicking in my gut, like snake tails, and though my heartrate is calm, there’s an unease in it, an ache that spreads cold through my chest. No amount of rubbing at my breastbone soothes it.
That discomfort stays with me to Stonehenge where I shift all my bags into the family car, and it lingers for the whole ride to Elcott Abbey.
But the dread turns cold when the car pulls up to the front of the estate, and Mr Younge opens the car door. He only does that when he has been waiting for me, when Father has been waiting for me.
The engine hasn’t even turned off, the quiet purr rumbles under me.
I bare my teeth in something of a grimace.
Mr Younge holds the door open and simply stares down at me. No chiding in his gaze, no pity, no emotions of any kind, and I’m sure—as I was when I was little and Oliver told me that we magicked the servants from stone in the gardens, left them as statues under the moonlight, then breathed life into them—that he is stone all the way through.
I fumble my way out of the car.
I don’t move for the boot, where the bags are placed neatly. Someone will gather them for me.
“Dinner is to be served in the dining hall at seven o’clock.” His gaze spears me. “Your father is in his study.”
“Waiting for me?”
Mr Younge nods once, a slow and methodical gesture, and his gaze never wavers from mine, not even to blink.
Oliver was only ever teasing me when he tricked me into believing the servants weren’t real people or true witches, that it waswewho made them, but there’s something about that silly childish belief that sticks.
Especially when it comes to Mr Younge.
He’s just…
