2. Chapter Two

Chapter Two

The first one had been the four-leaf clover. The second a teacup, followed by a frog. After that, the robin. Or had it been the fox? She had almost a dozen lucky charms now, and after the first few, she struggled to keep the order of their arrival straight in her memory. It had been almost a fortnight since he’d sent anything new. What might the next one be? Rosanna turned the last charm he had sent—a butterfly—on its link to better appreciate the pink enamel. It was so pretty. So perfect.

‘Rosie! Are you listening?’

Rosanna jerked out of her daydream to look up at her father. He was leaning over the opposite side of the desk, looming over a large map of southern England.

‘Of course I am,’ she said. ‘I heard every word.’

‘So your suggestion is…?’ Her father raised a suspicious brow. Never one for indictments, Lawrence Hempel had a way of leading his children into the depths of their own lies or attempts to evade detection. When he suspected them, he never made accusations. He only fed them more rope to see if they would hang themselves on their own falsehoods.

Rosanna scanned the map. Before her thoughts had drifted, he’d said the words further expansion . They had two hotels in London, and one in York. This one, where they sat ensconced in the warm office, the original Aster, was the most luxurious and exclusive of them all. His hand half concealed Wales…

‘Brighton,’ she said with ready confidence. ‘It’s become increasingly popular as a holiday destination. The pier is a marvel. The fried fish is excellent.’

‘Not too popular with the middle and working classes? Toffs like to be ahead of the game, not alongside it.’

Rosanna drummed her fingers on the table. ‘It is popular with all strata of life, but old and new money like to be seen. If it were me, I wouldn’t want to go to all that hassle to holiday somewhere quiet, just to be with the same people I could meet at a house party. I’d want lots of people to see my new frocks and finery, especially if I were new to society and hoping to make an impression.’

Her father’s gaze narrowed. His lips moved as he muttered to himself while his finger traced first a line from London to the coast, then from Bath to Brighton. He knew every railway that fed in and out of the city, the small roads that were comfortable by carriage, and the inns along the way… every point of comfort, or possible discomfort, that might thwart a journey. He nodded, grinning as broad as a roof beam. While he’d let his children hang themselves, as a man raised roughly by the streets, he also appreciated a cunning mind that found a way of escaping when almost caught. Especially when the slip of the noose was handled with finesse.

‘I’ll make enquiries and begin canvassing suitable locations for renovating. Johannes!’

Rosanna’s brother, working on a desk in the corner, stayed hunched over the stack of cyan-coloured plans. He withdrew a pencil from behind his ear and, in a mimicry of their father, muttered as his fingers walked across the page.

‘Johannes.’ Rosanna leant across and lightly touched his shoulder, and he jolted as if scalded. ‘We’re going to look for a new hotel location. In Brighton.’

‘I was lost,’ he said, answering a question no one had asked. ‘Wait… Brighton? The sea?’

Rosanna smiled at her brother’s absent-mindedness, even as her father tutted and rolled his eyes. The two men were so similar at times. But while her father planned business empires, her brother was far more concerned with aged wood, clay, and days gone by. Two years her junior, Johannes loved buildings and architectural plans. He came into the hotel office to work on his designs and ideas, claiming Number 3 was too noisy to focus. His well-worn copy of John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture was never far from his grasp, and he poured over it, seeking inspiration for his own grand designs. He preferred to carve a balustrade or hand-tile a mantelpiece rather than instal something produced in a factory. He relished the flourish on a window moulding or a well-crafted brass handle, but after devoting himself to his studies, he had yet to find a position with a firm that was prepared to take on the gentle giant and his passion for the mediaeval, the gothic, and the handmade.

Johannes said he lacked opportunity. Father said he lacked bite.

‘I’d like you to take a train and scout Brighton to find a suitable property for conversion,’ their father said. ‘Put all that ridiculously expensive study to use. At least tell me how much it will cost to stop the right building from falling down once we start renovations. I want something old and grand and opulent. New won’t suffice. It should make the hobs think of their glory days, not remind them the world is moving on. Make sure you check the footings. I don’t have the patience for another Park Lane.’

‘I don’t want to check footings. I want to create my own buildings,’ Johannes grumbled as he bent back over his plans and papers.

‘One must design pavilions before one can build castles. Brighton. Or find yourself steady employment and a means to support yourself.’ Their father threatened Johannes with homelessness at least twice a week, although they both knew he’d never follow through.

Johannes frowned, his sharp yet achingly precise mind working through a reply, one that might not form clearly in his mind until the moment had long passed.

Just go , Rosanna mouthed.

The office door opened. Rosanna sat on the far side of the table away from the door, leaving the lower half of the room obscured by the desk. A giggle entered, followed shortly by another. Unmistakably her younger sister Nova, eight years old, followed by Amadeus, Ammie for short, her ten-year-old brother.

Father’s sternness cracked in an instant. A playful grin tugged his lips. ‘Is there a ghost at the Aster, opening doors and sneaking into my office?’

The giggles became louder as they shifted from the door to behind the couch, but before Father could sneak around the table to intercept them, Mama came into the room. Her face drawn, her eyelids heavy, her blonde hair roughly pinned, she held little baby Hazel tight against her chest. The baby squirmed, squawked, then let out an ear-splitting cry. Father changed trajectory and met Mama at the door.

‘We thought we’d get some fresh air. And Nanny Abigail needed some peace so that the younger children could sleep.’ For all her subtle elegance and her soft meekness, Wilhelmina Hempel never apologised for interrupting her husband, and he never looked annoyed. No matter the moment, her arrival always shifted his body with relief. Like he had been waiting for the sun to rise, and now she was here, his day could begin.

Father eased the baby from Mother’s shoulder and tucked her against his own. The little bundle squirmed before calming against him with a snuffle.

‘Probably just too much excitement.’ Father swayed a little, then kissed Mama’s forehead. ‘You should rest.’

Mama, her mouth still pressed into a worried line, brushed a finger against the baby’s cheek. ‘I’m trying to sleep when she does. Which is never.’

It had started like this with Garnett, all those years before. He was never quiet until silence was all there was. Rosanna had only been ten at the time. She had never known a sadness so suffocating and thought her entire body would break. Ever since, Mama never seemed able to settle into her babies until they could confidently toddle across a room. As if the danger had passed, rather than increased.

Rosanna startled as her sister bounded up before her. Nova held out a small white box tied with a thin pink ribbon. ‘You got a present, Rosie,’ she said. ‘I think it’s from your friend, Lord Richard.’

Rosanna took the box with forced composure, even though she wanted to rip the ribbon off and throw the lid aside. If she was going to be a lady, she needed to be calmer and control her impulses. Instead of fussing, she sat the box on the table.

‘If you marry Lord Richard, will I have to call you Lady Rosanna, or can I still call you Rosie?’ Ammie climbed over the back of the chaise longue from behind it and slid onto the seat.

‘If she marries a marquess, she’ll be a marchioness, not a lady,’ Johannes said.

‘He’s not a marquess, only his son. The third one. She would be Lady Richard, not Lady Rosanna,’ Mama said with tired patience.

‘I don’t care who he is, I’m not calling my sister lady ,’ Ammie announced, slipping onto the floor with a bump.

Nova pressed her spectacles up her nose as she pushed her head into the small pocket of space between Rosanna and the table. ‘What’s your guess? I think it’s a flower. Ammie says a dog.’

Rosanna pulled the tie and unthreaded the knot. ‘It will be nothing so pedestrian as a flower. It will be something exciting, like a hot-air balloon, or a—’

Rosanna peered into the box. Nestled inside, snug against a white cushion and fixed with white thread, sat a gold charm. He ordered them from Paris, he said, from a little jeweller on the Champs-élysées.

A daisy.

‘It’s perfect,’ she declared, and placed the box on the table.

‘But you said—’

Father, speaking low as he patted the baby’s back, looked at her brother. ‘Johannes, take Amadeus and Nova to see Grandpa Robert. He’s in the kitchen, stuck with a terribly hard task. He needs help.’

‘What’s he doing?’ Amadeus asked nervously.

‘It’s not for the weak or the faint of heart. I hear he’s been taste-testing new flavours of iced cream all morning.’

Johannes stumbled as the younger Hempels pushed past him to tear down the hallway, giggling and shouting out guesses of what flavours they might find before their high voices faded.

‘For heaven’s sake, this is a hotel. Remind them to be quiet? Please?’ Father looked to Johannes. ‘And ask Pierre to send up tea and coffee.’

‘Will do,’ Johannes said, then took off after Ammie and Nova at the same pace. He loved ices as much as the children, if not more.

Mama stifled a yawn against the back of her hand. Father guided her to the couch, and after a small show of resistance, she relented and settled against the cushions. By the time the tap at the door announced the trolley of tea and coffee, Mama’s eyes had closed, and her breath had settled into an easy rhythm.

Father gently eased back into his seat. He pressed a kiss against baby Hazel’s ear. ‘This marquess’s son seems quite taken with you,’ he said.

‘He does,’ Rosanna replied. She made busy at serving the coffee and tea, pouring his how he liked—strong, black, and bitter. She took her tea weak and with a slice of lemon, as a lady should.

‘Is that the life you want?’ he asked.

‘Why wouldn’t I want to marry a lord?’ She placed his coffee on the table before him, then settled into her seat.

‘I can think of a thousand reasons. But my reasons are not yours.’

How to explain to her father who’d had nothing, less than nothing, when he fell in love with Mama? Johannes was the only one of her siblings with the faintest of memories of those early days when life had been filled with less financial certainty but so much joy. When the Aster had rarely been full and never in demand. But as the years passed and the quiet hotel empire grew and life became more comfortable, her parents’ love had never waned. It had only grown stronger.

It seemed a cruel twist at times that she’d been raised to see what love, true love, should be, and yet have to negotiate a world where money twisted a man’s affections in the time it took for her to be introduced. Even her friendship with Elise—her friend whose reputation had been thoroughly ruined by her sister’s scandal—raised little more than an eyebrow in deference to Rosanna’s family name. Her first year in society had been a sharper education than any she’d endured at finishing school. She’d learnt how to keep interested gents at a distance while she waited for them to show a greedy hand. How to read a man who saw her dowry as his for the sponging off, and not as her own income for her own self. A man who might turn cruel once they said I do . And they always revealed themselves—with a word, a slip, a comment. She saw through them all.

But Lord Richard had been different. He sought out her conversation. He listened to her opinions. He enquired about her work with Father and asked about her siblings. She’d met him in the dining room of the hotel when she’d been discussing the menu with Grandpa Robert. The young lord had interrupted and suggested adding duck a l’orange in the winter, when citrus was at its best, and then apologised. It had all been so casual and enchanting. Small conversations had extended into long ones, and with her father’s begrudging permission, into chaperoned walks. A few days later, the gifts had started arriving. First, the bracelet had been delivered, glimmering against a soft white cushion with its thick gold links in beautifully crafted ovals. A week later, a four-leaf clover charm had been delivered, and when Lord Richard next accompanied her for a walk, he told her he’d picked it because it reminded him of how lucky he felt to have met her by chance.

Lord Richard, third son of a marquess, had a solid education, his own prospects, and he didn’t need her money.

Surely, of all the places to begin a marriage, that was as good as any?