A Secret Ambition

XV

"I cry even harder, thinking of how it could have been, of how I thought it would be. For the first time, I want to give up, to die, because suddenly everything is too much and there is no solution in sight." B.A. Paris, Behind Closed Doors

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XV.

Just as Lily had predicted, the door to her bedroom opened and closed a few minutes after midnight, and there was suddenly a glow of flickering candlelight that filled the room.

"Cecily Beresford!" gushed Perrie. "You had better not be sleeping. Not when you have quite a tale to tell me!"

Lily had not been sleeping, and she sat up in her bed immediately. Perrie was quick to scurry over, and she climbed in beside Lily, setting the candle down on the table beside her.

"Don't you have an infant to tend?" Lily reminded her with a wry smile.

"She is in the very capable care of her father. Why should it be solely up to the mothers to child rear when their fathers have two perfectly good hands?" Perrie tsked, but she sensed Lily's teasing. "If you tell Joe that I called him 'perfectly capable', I will deny it and declare you insane."

Lily giggled as she sidled up beside her sister and sighed. Lord, it felt like an age since she had been able to talk like this with Perrie. Now she was married, their private time together was, of course, reduced. But Lily's absence had certainly made her heart grow fonder.

"Tell me everything," Perrie urged softly. "I want to know it all. All I can say for the beginning is that you look as well as I have ever seen you."

"I am well," Lily assured her. "I needed to do this, for certain. I don't know if I could have faced what awaits me in the Season had I not explored what was beyond the gates of Ashwood.

"And do not mistake me. I am perfectly aware that the four walls of an office do not represent the whole world, and being out in it, but for someone like me to have the chance of meeting characters that are quite certainly the salt of the earth ..." Lily paused pensively as her voice trailed off, before another thought floated into her mind. "Perrie, what do you know of Ireland?"

"Ireland?" repeated Perrie. "What an earth do you mean?"

"Ireland, the Irish, what do you know of it, of them?"

Lily could see by the expression on her sister's face that Lily had quite stumped her. Lily, herself, was still very ignorant on the subject. All she knew was what Mr McCarthy volunteered, and he did not volunteer much at all. Perrie was the first person who Lily could reasonably ask without suspicion, and Perrie's education exactly matched Lily's.

Their schooling encompassed the history of needlework, not of their Catholic neighbours.

"I don't know very much at all, to be fair," Perrie admitted. "I suppose I have never thought about it, never had reason to, and that seems so strange to be so unaware of a country so close to our own. What do you know about them? Why do you ask?"

"My employer ..."

"Is your employer the one who is the salt of the earth?" Perrie interjected curiously.

"He is Irish," Lily replied. "And yes. I think him to be very much the salt of the earth."

"This is the same man who placed that rather brash advertisement in the newspaper, is he not?"

Lily thought back to seeing Mr McCarthy's original advertisement, and she couldn't help but smile, before she shuddered at her first idiotic attempt to make tea.