Grace and Julia garnered fifteen Accomplishment Points while Chloe earned five for effort.

She had to admit to herself that some time-management software might’ve come in handy for such ongoing projects as the piano practicing, the needlework, and remembering to shake her vial of ink three times a day.

Chloe stood between Grace and Julia, who tapped her toe on the Aubusson carpet. Grace feigned a yawn. Chloe felt flushed and fanned herself. Mrs. Crescent, who lounged in a green tufted Grecian couch, looked down at Fifi and petted him.

The butler looked straight into the cameras. “Before we proceed, I would like to remind Mr. Wrightman that Miss Tripp has ninety Accomplishment Points, Lady Grace seventy, and Miss Parker forty-five. Mr. Wrightman has to take into account that Miss Parker failed to finish her needlework task even after a request to extend the deadline was granted.”

Chloe felt the sting of that failure and she really cringed to know that the public announcement of it was being filmed. She didn’t want Abigail to see it, for one thing.

“All three of you have gowns for the ball already made and fitted,” said the butler. He rose up on his toes in his gold-buckled shoes. “But, only two of you will be invited to attend. If you are not chosen, you must immediately pack your trunks and you will be sent home tonight. The two that remain will be attending the ball tomorrow.”

More than ever, Chloe wanted to stay. Surely, Sebastian wouldn’t have sent her that note if he didn’t want her to stay.

“Mr. Wrightman, if you please.”

The butler stood aside, and Sebastian came forward. He looked elegant in his dark coat and breeches and a white cravat that showed off his tanned face.

Sebastian lifted an envelope from the salver. “Lady Grace.”

It was like a guillotine slicing down. Chloe’s chances were suddenly cut in half. It was going to be Julia or her. Even though the note he’d given her had raised her hopes, this had all occurred before her pathetic pianoforte performance, and anything could happen now. Fear of being sent home ripped through her. She realized the worst had happened: she was falling for Sebastian!

Grace curtsied as Sebastian bowed, and the ostrich feather in her turban brushed up against him. Why her?! Chloe fumed internally.

Sebastian gazed at Chloe and Julia, as if even at that moment, he hadn’t yet decided which one of them he would choose. Chloe imagined having to go home to Abigail. Abigail would be thrilled to see her, but also crushed to know that her mother had been sent home. She’d be even more crestfallen to know that her whole life would have to change. They’d have to downsize, move out of the city, and Winthrop, being in a better financial situation, might even be granted the holiday and summer custody he wanted.

“Miss—” Sebastian paused for the cameras. He glanced at the envelope with the red wax W and then at the two women. “Miss Parker.”

She could almost hear the French horns blaring triumph in her head. She felt tantalizingly close to victory, despite her pianoforte fiasco, because she was to meet Sebastian at the ice house. She said her good-byes to Julia, incredulous that Sebastian would let her go and Grace stay.

“Ladies . . .” The butler looked at Chloe and Grace. “Mr. Wrightman will see you at the ball tomorrow night.”

Sebastian bowed, Chloe and Grace curtsied, and Chloe watched Julia as she didn’t bounce, but shuffled into the foyer on Sebastian’s arm.

“Good riddance to her,” Grace said, and brushed her hands off as if she’d just gotten rid of an annoying fly.


The final task was the ball, and Saturday morning, Chloe put herself in the capable hands of Mrs. Crescent, Fiona, and even her chambermaid and a few random servants to help dress her, arrange her hair, fasten her jewelry, and make her up for the evening. She was as diligent as a bride dressing for her wedding, and it took a village.

Mrs. Crescent, alas, would not be going to the ball. She had to stay at Bridesbridge for fear of slipping in the mud and a superstition that a full moon might induce labor. Chloe would be under the dark wing of Grace’s chaperone for the night, but even this didn’t daunt her. Finally, the anticipated moment arrived.

Lit by the moon, the remaining ladies of Bridesbridge Place, Chloe, Grace, and Grace’s chaperone, stepped out of their carriage in front of Dartworth Hall. Dressed in their silk gowns, ostrich feathers, and elbow-length white gloves, they stepped into mud thick as chocolate frosting from the day’s rain.

The rain and mud, combined with the lack of Julia’s sporting presence, not to mention Mrs. Crescent’s, conspired to dampen Chloe’s spirits, but she smiled in anticipation of her first ball in England, surrounded by English people with their English accents. And she quickened at the prospect of dancing with Sebastian even as she wondered at what to expect at the ice house.

After Grace and her chaperone were helped out of the chaise, the footman handed Chloe out and helped her balance on the steel platform pattens strapped to her pale pink ballroom slippers.

Chloe looked back at Bridesbridge Place. She missed Mrs. Crescent, however pregnant and persnickety she might have been. How could she pass this final test—the ball—on her own?

Cameras were everywhere and it made her uneasy. Granted, going with Grace meant she got to ride in the chaise-and-four. Still. Still, she was going to the ball with one of Cinderella’s evil stepsisters, and she knew it.

Grace, in her wedding-white gown, looked down on Chloe from the first landing on the stairs. Chloe stretched her bejeweled neck toward the bright open doors of Dartworth Hall. She lifted her silk gown and pelisse and took a deep breath. Back home, everybody was eating cheeseburgers because it was the Fourth of July, but she got to go to a ball in one of the grandest country estates in England.

She teetered her way to the palatial staircase a good four inches off the ground in her pattens. They made a sucking sound every time she took a step in the mud. Everyone laughed as a footman’s shoe stuck in the mud and he had to hop around in his stocking foot. How would she trek to the ice house in all this? And who knew it rained so much in England?

The maids ushered the women into the ladies’ cloakroom, where one of them took off Chloe’s Greek-key-trimmed pelisse and her pattens. The maid even retied her ballroom slippers, fastening the spaghetti-thin pink straps around her ankles a little too tight, but Chloe didn’t complain.

She looked in the same mirror in which she had beheld herself after the hedge-maze debacle and hardly recognized what she saw. This time, instead of seeing a madwoman, she saw a peach-gowned princess with a tiny Empire waist trimmed in sparkly gold. Her arched eyebrows, blackened with ripe elderberries, beckoned. Candle-soot eyeliner brought her bright eyes to life. And this time she hadn’t eaten her rouge. Was it the strawberry stain, or did she actually have cheekbones now? The weeks of not eating haunch-of-venison soup, raised giblet pie, and Florentine rabbits had paid off. She could market this Regency diet when she got home. She wished Abigail could see her now!

She smiled at her stick-straight hair that Fiona had transformed into a splendor of curls. But the pin curls and yellow beaded silk ribbon that swirled around her hair reminded her of—question marks. Were her feelings for Sebastian real? Or was she just projecting her idealized vision of Mr. Darcy onto him? Did she know him well enough to even say yes to a made-for-television marriage proposal?

“Miss Parker!” Lady Martha clapped her hands at Chloe.

Grace’s chaperone always clapped at Chloe, as if she were a dog or circus animal.

Lady Martha put her hands on her silver-spangled hips. “Are you quite ready?”

“Really.” Grace rolled her eyes.

Chloe was incensed, and with a huff she spun and led the way through the foyer. Video cameras rolled and cameras clicked away as she marched through the gallery, past rows of oh-so-serious Wrightman family portraits, toward an archway at the end of the marbled foyer that was flanked by two footmen and two candelabra. But, when Henry stepped out from behind the arch in a black cutaway coat, gray knee breeches, white stockings, an elegant ruffled white shirt, and gray gloves, she came to a screeching halt. He bowed. Then, from the other side of the arch, Sebastian appeared, looking as dapper if not more so in his black coat and buff-colored breeches. He bowed, too.

The only thing better than one gentleman was two.

Once again imagining a book on her head, Chloe floated along with video cameras at her side, her gown flowing at her ankles. She glided toward both Henry and Sebastian, who stood waiting in the anteroom. She was ready to glide, on both of their arms, into the pale yellow ballroom bedecked with gilt floral molding and sparkling with candles reflected in gilt mirrors when Henry, with his eyes, and a flick of his gloved hand, signaled her to step aside. She slowed her pace. She had forgotten to let Grace precede her. How could she have forgotten that?

Suddenly the ball of her right foot stuck to the ground, her heel lifted out of her slipper, and she stumbled. Grace had deliberately stepped on the back of Chloe’s slipper!

She felt her face flush with color. Of course the cameras got that.

“Ballroom blunder number one,” Grace whispered out of the side of her mouth as she slithered past Chloe.

Chloe shot a look at Lady Martha, who just lowered her eyelids in disdain. “You must enter the ballroom in order of rank. You must always remember your place, Miss Parker,” she sneered.