by Minda Webber
Ignoring her second-eldest daughter’s comment, the baroness snapped, “You’ll marry whom I say, when I say, and I’ll have no shilly-shallying over something so important. If Mr. Sterne concocts a fondness for you, all for the better. Beggars can’t be choosers.”
Greta snapped her gaze up and silently pursed her lips, angry that her mother had referred to Faye as a beggar. Just because Faye walked with a limp was no reason to make her feel less than attractive. Biting her lip to keep from speaking, Greta settled for a frown. Faye hated anyone to argue about her. Besides, even if one spoke up, doing so would only prolong the baroness’s harangue. For it was well known at the manor and throughout Cornwall—probably through most of England, too—that any such opposition was like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
Not as astute as her eldest sister, Rae responded. “Faye has no need to court Mr. Sterne’s attentions.” Although a spoiled beauty, she was fierce while protecting her family. “When Faye decides she wants to marry, she will. But I really think a baron is the least she should aspire to, and certainly not a Sterne gentleman.” She followed that thought with a shudder.
At last Baron Grimm entered the drawing room. He was relieved to see that his two rambunctious sons were missing. Unfortunately for his digestion, his wife was there, along with their pretty but slightly spoiled daughters. The fault of his wife, no doubt. At least his eldest, Greta, was present; she could be counted on to give a good report of her day.
Smiling at the room in general, he seated himself in his favorite chair and glanced over at his pinched-face wife, with her mop of gray-blonde curls and thin lips. He braced himself to do battle once again. Not yet did he know what they would fence about today, but with his usual good sense, he knew there would be something.
The baroness ignored her husband, pouring more fragrant tea into her pretty, rose-gilded cup. Her nerves were much overwrought. She knew in her heart of hearts that she and her daughters were penniless because of the baron’s tightness with his coin—not because of the unfortunate circumstances he always claimed. Just because the estate was barely making ends meet, and the crops had failed the last two years due to some blasted blight…that was no excuse for him to deny his daughters their rightful due! They were spinsters one and all, desperately needing a season in London. How could a mother possibly make do on these yearly expectations, and with four lovely daughters to launch? She would be forced to rely on the kindness of an estranged sister, which had her gritting her teeth. And her husband would undoubtedly forbid the new gowns needed for the trip, which, verily, her daughters must make.
“My feet hurt,” she announced.
“Perhaps we can afford a pair of new shoes for you, my dear. I take it the ones you bought last week are not to your satisfaction?” Baron Grimm asked politely.
She scowled at her obtuse spouse, the expression in her eyes denouncing him as a fool. “Shoes? Who’s speaking of shoes? My world is ending and you are talking of feet! I don’t know how my nerves survive your constant foolishness. Why I ever married such a silly man who speaks of shoes when my sister has written from Prussia is beyond my comprehension.”
Baron Grimm nodded. He now knew the battleground. His wife and her sister had been involved in a long-standing war of jealousy throughout their lives. What one had, the other coveted and vice versa.
“What did our dear Vivian have to say?” he asked, secretly wishing he could just go back inside his library and smoke his pipe. Whatever news from abroad—this broad, especially—they were undoubtedly bad tidings.
“Yes, what did she have to say?” Greta asked curiously, her heart pounding. Though she had not revealed the complete truth of their financial situation to her aunt, she had impressed upon Vivian the need for the daughters Grimm to marry and marry well. She had also begged her aunt for secrecy. Since her mother hadn’t scolded her up one side and down the other when she entered, Greta prayed that she was safe.
The baroness pooh-poohed them both. “My sister has invited our daughters to join her through the winter months and into the spring. She made mention at least half-a-dozen times of their unmarried state. I literally had tears of shame in my eyes when I read the letter. A serpent’s tooth is not sharper than a jealous sister.”
Greta and Rae exchanged a knowing glance, and managed to bite their lips to keep from smiling. “How wonderful,” Greta said, breathing a sigh of relief. Her aunt had come through!
Their mother, oblivious to all but her own consternation, continued. “Humph. I should have had six sons instead of two. Everyone of any wit knows that sons are much easier to marry off than daughters.” The baroness sighed dramatically, continuing on with scarcely a breath between sentences. “I can’t bear Vivian’s boasting and sly criticisms—years and years of her bragging. When her son married, she wrote seven times. Seven, I tell you. Eight pages each, at least! Can you imagine the gall, to write me of weddings when there are no weddings on the horizon at Grimm Manor?” She eyed each of her daughters with disgust.
Rae squealed in delight. She had half-tuned out, daydreaming, but suddenly the impact of her mother’s words registered. “Trip? What trip? To Prussia, to find husbands?” Finally, her dream was coming true. She would be washed ashore in a lovely foreign country and not buried alive in this backwater of England. She and her sisters would go to Prussia, and she would be the toast of the town. Men would worship at her feet, and a prince would find her slipper and offer his hand, his heart, his title and his castle. She would live in a palace with hundreds of servants, and wear dazzling jewels. She and her new husband would travel, and everywhere they went she would be admired. From near and afar.
“Prussia—doesn’t it snow all the time there?” Faye asked, her nose wrinkling. “I don’t like snow.”
The youngest Grimm sister spoke up. “Miss Darby will be pea-green with envy that I am traveling to the Continent like young gentlemen do,” Taylor bragged. “I shall tell her our aunt is married to a count or something. Maybe a duke!”
Baron Grimm shook his head. “I think you should stick to the truth, my dear.” He would have said more but was interrupted by his wife, who looked appalled.
“You will do no such thing. I will not have the village think that my sister married above me.” The baroness sat, glowering. “Bite your wicked tongue. Remember that pretty girls are seen and not heard…though beautiful ones may be both.”
“Just think: I shall live in a palace. I shall have a crown made of diamonds and sapphires to match my eyes. Maybe rubies for my lips,” Rae rhapsodized.
Greta smiled, secretly pleased for reasons other than husband-seeking. Her aunt lived in a village on the outskirts of the Black Forest—the land of legends.
Baroness Grimm called for quiet and then dramatically announced, “My sister boasts that she can get at least two of our daughters married if they have a nice long visit. Although it pains me to have to enlist her help, I have decided that they must go. We shall all need new gowns. In fact, we’ll need whole new wardrobes for the trip.” She momentarily halted her impassioned speech. Thinking about her words, she added, “I hate that I must accept this invitation, but I can’t lift my head up in town anymore on account of our poor, unmarried daughters. People laugh behind my back!”
The baron merely nodded. His mind was busy going over his accounts.
The baroness’s exclamation of ire caused him, a moment later, to turn his attention back to the conversation. “I never,” she said, “approved of the match, but my sister did marry a baron of Prussia. Of course, I have never heard the end of it. Although an English baron is most assuredly higher in the instep than a Prussian baron, still Vivian insists she has better connections. We must prove her wrong. The girls must go and be outfitted as bespeaks their station in life.”
The baron sighed audibly. He disliked having to argue with his wife. It was much easier to just nod and let her have her way, much like with a rebellious goat one was trying to herd. “I have heard nothing of thi
s. Why is your sister inviting them now, when she never has before? In fact, my daughters last saw Vivian when they were quite small!”
Greta looked away, trying to appear nonchalant. Their family was in dire straits with no coin coming in. Her father would not accept charity, even if her aunt were willing to bestow it. Therefore, she had not told him of her letter to her aunt some four months past. Their only salvation lay in getting some of the daughters Grimm married to gentlemen with means. Rae was their hope, their saving grace. They would go to Prussia and marry—or at least some of them would—and save the family estate.
Feeling a bit guilty, Greta stared down at her teacup. She would also be able to continue her search for the truth behind the Gothic tales. There were supernatural creatures out there—they just weren’t in Cornwall, England—and at the advanced age of twenty-four, she was tired of chasing shadows. She wanted to chase substance; and what better place than the Black Forest?
“I imagine,” Baroness Grimm snapped imperiously, “that she has written because she enjoys lording my situation over my head, and is probably herself shamed by the fact that I have four grown, unwed daughters. Although, heaven knows, without a proper dowry, marriages are impossible to arrange. Even harder when one is stuck in nowhere and not in London. If all remains as it is now, our daughters will either remain spinsters or, in spite of their loveliness, they will have to marry men in trade!” She gave a horrified gasp. “I won’t have it. I shall expire of shame.” She clutched at her ample chest and moaned piteously. “Is it not enough that I married beneath my station?”
Greta shared a smile with Faye. Both knew that their father was the one who’d married down, wedding a vicar’s daughter.
Ignoring his wife’s attempt to rewrite history, the baron fidgeted nervously. He hoped the scene’s melodrama would not progress further. In the past ten years, the baroness had put on some weight, and it was no mean feat to carry her to her bed when she was in a dead faint. Still, the truth, although not palatable, was preferable. He did not have the coin to spare, and he would not end up in debtor’s prison. “We cannot afford a whole new wardrobe for the four of them.”
“But of course we can! We must have ball gowns and walking dresses and hats and gloves and diamonds. And I must have some diamond earrings,” Rae spoke up, her blue eyes bright with excitement.
“Rae, you know Papa can’t afford new togs for all of us,” Greta scolded. “You know the crops have failed for the past few years.”
Baron Grimm fidgeted some more, feeling tremendously guilty about his lack of funds. His wife glared at him.
“Oh, do be still, husband. My daughters cannot go to my sister in Wolfach for their grand débuts with the rags they are wearing. I will not have them shame me. And my sister would just love to see how far in life I’ve fallen.”
The baron carefully inspected his wife. “Fallen? I fail to see any bruises or mud upon you, my dear,” he said, a twinkle in his eye.
“Oh, how can you tease at a time such as this? It’s a matter of life and death. My sister will introduce them to the elite of Prussian Society. They will meet princes and barons, and might finally marry well—what with their fresh-faced prettiness and my training, of course. Just think how much you will have, dear husband, with two or more daughters married!”
Glancing at her father, Greta noted his resignation. She put down her plate and decided to change the subject. She hated to see her father in a gloomy mood. “Why, Mother, only yesterday you told me I wasn’t attractive enough to catch a frog, let alone a prince.”
The baroness glared at her eldest, the pretty girl who was, alas, a trial to her. Greta was the hoydenish planner of her brood of children, always curious, always getting into things better left alone. “You were covered in soot, and your face was smudged. If you aren’t running around dirty and unkempt, you’re off telling those silly tales. Where you developed a lurid fascination for such demoralizing subjects as ghastly villains, ghosts and werewolves is beyond me. I just know it comes from your father’s side of the family. Certainly, my family members are too delicate in constitution to dwell on monsters or depravity. How your father can let you read that tripe is beyond me. But then, he does read all that awful Latin nonsense.”
Greta shared a smile with their father. He had taught her to read that “awful Latin nonsense” as well. She could quote Cicero with the best of them.
“Mama, you know Jakob and I were looking for trolls under the bridge and the old fireplace in the kitchen,” she responded.
Rae, who was seated next to their mother, returned from her private thoughts of fairy castles and princes, “Don’t forget the frog William brought home yesterday. And he had the audacity to suggest I kiss it!”
Greta hid a smile. Having lived with Rae all her life, she knew where this tale was headed. She would bet her last ribbon that Rae would now attempt to sway their father in favor of the gowns, with her pleading smiles and heartbroken little sighs. She would count to three and then intervene if Rae continued to harangue their father. One, two…
“Oh, Father, we really must make the trip. If we don’t, we shall all wither and die here of old age,” Rae beseeched, smiling sweetly at the baron. It was a cajoling smile, and one that was often effective. “How can we meet Prussian Society in gowns at least two years out of date? Why, I should probably be so melancholy that the men would be miserable themselves. We can’t do that to these poor Prussian gentlemen.” She sighed and bent her head dejectedly, then peeped out beneath her thick, dark eyelashes to note how her speech was affecting their father.
“I am sorry, my child, but I have not the coin for such expenditure,” the baron explained again. He frowned slightly, for he disliked the fact that his lovely little Rae sounded more like her mother every day. Perhaps his daughters should go to Prussia. “Be assured that if I had the funds, I would be more than willing to rig you out.”
Rae pouted prettily, contriving yet to bend her father to her will. “I must have the new gowns, Father. Truly. My beauty should be showcased in nothing but the finest. For all our sakes.”
“I can spare enough for one new gown each, and perhaps a ball gown, that is all.”
Rae’s face flushed red, but Greta frowned and spoke up. “Rae, really you should be embarrassed by such wheedling. Just because you won’t be parading around every day and night dressed as the finest of the fine, that’s no reason to blame Father. There are things he has no control over. Like the weather, and diseased crops.”
The baroness snapped, glowering at both her eldest daughter and husband. “Don’t speak to your sister like that, Greta! Someday she will be of higher social standing than you. Her beauty deserves to be showcased, unless of course she stays here to become a drudge or an old maid. Or perhaps Rae should just go ahead and marry the butcher, Mr. Spratt, since he’s asked her four times, even if he smells of raw meat and cheap tobacco. Or maybe she should marry the squire’s fat, pimply son. He’s been asking Rae since he turned sixteen. Your father and I could have fat little lumps with bumps on their faces as grandchildren.”
No one responded to this melodramatic announcement, although the sisters did trade a smile at the passionately charged atmosphere.
Undaunted, Rae retorted frostily, “Princes should write odes to my beauty. Not a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker.” She was well aware that she rated herself highly, but then she had spent days in front of her mirror. Vain she might be, but Rae knew her own worth—and that was definitely a small kingdom, or at least a large duchy.
“Alas, if my dear Rae feels inclined to choose a spouse from her many local admirers, I imagine I will bear up to the challenge of squint-faced, grubby little grandchildren,” the baroness said. “Even if Rae marries the stablehand, Mr. Stilzkin. I know he’s asked her at least twice, though he is twice her age and rather short of stature. I hear he wants to be a weaver. I can just imagine how clever their children will be. Perchance they will spin gold out of hay. And just think of it
: dressing their brood would not be costly, not with their short statures. And if Rae deigns to marry the butcher, Mr. Spratt, we shall be well set in pork. Ever since his last wife died, he’s been looking to remarry.” Rae gasped, and the baroness waved her arms in the air, wailing. “Fetch me my vinaigrette! I am overcome with palpitations.”
As the maid fetched the hart’s horn to revive her mistress, Rae and Taylor both pouted. Faye picked up a book and began reading, pretending to ignore the rumpus. Greta and her father exchanged sympathetic looks.
Once revived, their mother, quick-witted when cornered, spoke tersely. “If we sent only two of the girls, they could each have more gowns. I think Greta and Rae should make the journey to Prussia.” Satisfied, she sat back and smiled. “Yes, my loveliest two daughters will travel to Wolfach, and each will catch a fine, rich and noble husband. Then, with their new connections, they shall help find husbands for their less fortunate sisters.” Yes, the baroness would worry about her other two daughters later. With Faye being a cripple, the season would probably be wasted upon her, anyway, and Taylor was barely eighteen. There was still plenty of time for her debut.
At first, Rae was overjoyed that she would have more new gowns, but glancing over at Faye she was suddenly struck with guilt. Her elder sister was disappointed, although she was trying to hide it. “I’ll find you a husband once I’m married, Faye. Verily, I promise he’ll be handsome and of the nobility. And you can come and stay in my fine castle with me. We’ll have a lovely time.”
Greta silently seconded the notion. She admitted that Faye deserved much more than she had been given in life. Instinctively, she knew that Faye was rather like Sleeping Beauty: someday her prince would come and awaken her with a kiss, and she would become smiling and cheerful like she had been long ago.
