A Star Shall Fall

Gertrude held up a cautionary hand. “Might be within the sound of the bells. But no one’s quite dared test that yet.”

Irrith thought of the City as it had become—not London as a whole, but the City of London, the central part, and specifically the part within the increasingly broken wall. Galen, when he told her where he lived, said Leicester Fields was no longer as fashionable as it had been, that the better sort of people were moving farther west. No one wanted to be within the narrow, twisty, dirty lanes of the City, which had scarce been changed even by the Great Fire. There was a broad new street cutting up from the river to the Guildhall, called Queen Street south of Cheapside and King Street north, but that was the biggest difference. Most of the City was still as it had been these hundreds of years, and that was not good enough for fashion.

She murmured, “So he was the only gentleman who fit?”

“There have never been all that many gentlemen in the Onyx Hall,” Gertrude reminded her. “Well, there aren’t that many gentlemen at all, are there? Not compared to ordinary folk. Peers are even rarer. So most of the ones who get brought below are common. Lord Hamilton was the grandson of a viscount; for all that he wasn’t what anyone would call wealthy, and that was good enough for them as cared. But then he died, and Lune had to choose someone new.”

“Galen was a bit of luck,” Rosamund added. “His mother went into labour without much warning, and they couldn’t move her; so he was born in the house where she’d gone to have dinner.”

Irrith just kept blinking, trying to absorb it all. No, they hadn’t foreseen that—who would expect that London would grow so much, and all the wealthy people would move out to its western edge? “She’s going to have to stop choosing gentlemen. The place of birth has to do with the Hall’s enchantments, doesn’t it, and we can hardly ask her to work with someone she doesn’t like—but the rank, that’s just because no one wants their Queen to be paired with a commoner.”

The brownies looked unhappy. Gertrude said, “If she can. There was an apothecary a few years ago who might have done, but her lords and ladies didn’t much like the idea.”

Rosamund snorted. “And then he ran mad and flung himself off Westminster Bridge, so maybe it’s just as well. Not a stable mind, I fear.”

“Galen isn’t bad,” Gertrude hastened to say. “A trifle green, to be sure, but that’s nothing time won’t cure. Especially if those around him help out—give him advice when he needs it, that sort of thing. He’s too embarrassed to ask for it, poor dear.”

No wonder Gertrude had said he must never know. Hearing this laid out so baldly would only cripple him with doubt. And Galen had enough trouble with that already.

“You will help him, won’t you, my dear?” Gertrude gave Irrith an entreating look that would have melted the heart of a stone.

Irrith nodded. “Yes. I will.”

If I can.

SOTHINGS PARK, HIGHGATE

7 July 1758

Nothing brought home to Galen the importance of this evening like his first sight of Sothings Park.

His mother, seated by his side in the carriage, breathed out her nose in something that was almost a snort of disdain, but the look in her eyes was a mixture of envy, hope, and regret. It wasn’t that Sothings Park was especially impressive; Aldgrange, the St. Clair estate in Essex, was much larger and grander, if sadly run down for want of money to maintain it. But the fact that the Northwoods could afford to rent not only a townhouse in Grosvenor Square far superior to anything in Leicester Fields, but also this little manor, just far enough outside London to be pleasantly situated, made it clear without words what Miss Delphia Northwood could offer in exchange for the St. Clair name.

The prospect cheered Charles St. Clair sufficiently that he had hired out two carriages for the evening, and neither of them common hackneys. Galen’s sisters followed in the second one, for the Northwoods had invited them all to dinner today at Sothings Park.

It was not the first meal shared between the two families. Since that encounter at Mrs. Vesey’s in May, Galen had dined in Grosvenor Square four times, twice with his mother and father along, and the Northwoods had come to Leicester Fields twice. He had met Miss Northwood’s younger sister Temperance, and missed her brother Robert only because he was somewhere in Italy at the moment. In short, Galen was perfectly well acquainted with the Northwood family.

He would have been less nervous had he gone to dine with the lions in the Tower of London.

The carriages pulled to a halt in front of the austere entrance, built in the revived Palladian style. Galen handed his mother down, wondering if she felt his own arm trembling. He’d mastered it by the time they were shown in to the parlour where the Northwoods awaited them, but it still lurked inside, where no one could see.