The House of Serendipity by Lucy Ivison

Author:Lucy Ivison [Ivison, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2021-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

17

DRESSED FOR FREEDOM

Myrtle

I stood very still behind the servants’ curtain to the drawing room, where I could just peep in on what was happening. Our plan was for us all to go shopping together, to get the things we needed for Agapantha’s costume, and to see if she really could pull off pretending to be a boy. But none of it would happen unless Sylvia could convince Marmalade to let her miss the luncheon party being thrown to celebrate Delphine’s season.

The drawing room was probably the most beautiful room in the house. Serendipity House seemed as if it belonged in the pages of a fairy tale. The duchess’s dress mirror was covered in roses that wound around it and made her look even more like a fairy queen. The paintings were all of far-flung lands, full of flowers and animals I had never seen before. Every vase I picked up to dust felt enchanted; every time I touched an ornament, I half expected a genie to appear. Dot, Mary, and Gladys just saw it as endless things they had to clean, endless things they could break and get into trouble over. But I loved it. They made me feel as if I belonged somewhere magical and new.

Only yesterday Sylvia had put two medieval chairs on either end of the ballroom windows and used the damask curtains to swing back and forth between them. She moved about the house chaotically, arms and legs flung out at random as she danced through all the spaces she inhabited as if they were alive and would know to move out of the way as she spilled into them. She didn’t fear them like Dot, Mary, and Gladys; she positively owned them, without ever really seeing how wonderful they were.

Now she swept into the drawing room and flung herself down onto the silk cushions Dot spent hours pressing every week. They were in a war that Sylvia had no idea existed. Dot would plump the cushions through gritted teeth, and Sylvia would always walk in on cue and destroy them again.

The duchess was wearing a long yellow knitted jumper and matching skirt and was practicing her golf swing. “Darling!” She looked up. “What a frantically witty outfit! You are too clever.”

Sylvia had decided the best way to successfully go out in London without a chaperone and without rousing suspicion was to pose as a French woman. She said as soon as people thought she was foreign, they would not even think to remark she bore a resemblance to the duke of Avalon. I was going to manage the fabric buying, and Agapantha was going to do all the talking in the shops that stocked the items she needed for the expedition. We had planned it meticulously, but now that I was standing listening to Sylvia execute the plan, my stomach started to churn. Pretending to be Lady Calypso Mortimer outside of Serendipity House felt like a much bigger risk. What if one of us saw

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