The Secret Wallflower Society - Jillian Eaton Page 0,17
around. If Lady Shillington saw her here she would ask where she was coming from, and Calliope had never been a very good liar. If she revealed she’d been at a dress shop then her aunt would demand to know why, and she would have to tell her about the Galveston ball which would be the equivalent of throwing a bolt of lightning into the sky. Not only would Lady Shillington be furious her niece was sneaking around behind her back, she would immediately – and correctly – assume Calliope was husband-hunting.
Calliope didn’t know if her aunt would toss her in the cellar and throw away the key…but she wouldn’t put it past her, either. Which was why, with nowhere to run, she did the only thing she could think of.
She hid.
If there had been bushes around, she might have jumped into those. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a bush to be seen.
But there was a tree.
A large oak, to be precise, with a wide trunk and a thick, low-hanging branch. Slipping off her shoes and stockings, along with her gloves and bonnet, Calliope stashed the bundle behind the tree and then started climbing.
She reached the first limb with ease and scrambled up onto the one above it. Leaves closed in on her as she straddled the branch and scooted all the way back until her spine was pressed against the oak’s rough trunk. It wasn’t until a twig tangled in her hair that she recognized this probably hadn’t been the most advisable reaction. Surely it would have been better to turn around and dash back out towards the street, but in her moment of panic she hadn’t been thinking rationally.
Still, hiding up in a tree was far preferable to facing what was down below, and she was grateful for her quick thinking – not to mention her tree climbing skills – when Lady Shillington turned the corner.
Dressed in black from head to toe, she was flanked by her daughter on one side and a woman Calliope did not recognize on the other. As they walked past bits of their conversation floated up through the leaves like embers from a fire.
“…sixteen more days…”
“Where is…”
“…home. Probably stealing the silver…”
“Really…trust poor relations.”
Calliope’s entire face flushed a deep, dull red when she realized she was the subject of their conversation. They were accusing her of stealing, when the thought had never – not once! – crossed her mind.
She knew she’d been a burden to her aunt and uncle. After all, they’d planned on one daughter and had raised two. But she’d always been polite, and courteous, and done her best to help. From taking Beatrice’s verbal abuse without complaint to playing the part of lady’s maid, she had been paying back the debt she owed every single day since she first arrived. But now she understood, perhaps better than she ever had before, that it would never be enough. That nothing she did would ever be enough. They would always resent her. They would always dislike her. No matter how nice she was, or how many times she ran back to the house to fetch Beatrice’s parasol, or how small she tried to make herself appear, that would never change.
Calliope pressed her lips together. There was a part of her that felt as if she didn’t deserve what her uncle had given her. A part of her that thought the inheritance really should go to Beatrice. But that part was wrong.
She did deserve it. She deserved every single shilling.
And she wasn’t going to give up without a fight.
Waiting until her aunt and cousin were both out of sight and out of hearing distance, she slowly began to swing her leg over the branch. Toes wiggling, she stretched out her calf as she searched the limb underneath. Upon finding it, she started to transfer her weight…but her grip wasn’t as secure as she’d thought, and with a soft cry she suddenly found herself plummeting straight towards the ground.
Thankfully, her fall was cushioned by a man.
A very large, very hard, very angry man.
“Who the bloody hell are you?” he snarled as he more or less shoved Calliope off of him and staggered to his feet. There was a streak of dirt on his jacket and more on his breeches, indicating he’d taken the brunt of the fall. And if his dark glower was any indication, he wasn’t very happy about being forced to play knight-in-shining-armor. “And what the hell were you doing in a tree?”