Le rêveur

"A pair of blue stockings!" Her cousins tittered uncomfortably.

Cassiopeia West lifted her head from the parcel on her lap, uncertain if she should have been amused or offended. As it was, she looked up with cool, grey eyes and surveyed the room. It had once been a most beautiful morning room. She could still remember her mother receiving friends here, the delicate way she had of pouring tea, wisps of steam in the sunlight, the light laughter of particular friends and the ruffles dripping about their wrists as they cooed and passed her around.

But her mother had been gone for a long time, and the room's pretty green-striped wallpaper had faded in the glare of the sun, and was peeling away. There were cobwebs where no one dusted, and her cousins, draped over the drab sofas like drooping hothouse flowers; out of place in their brightly coloured silks and masses of hair piled high on their heads.

"Now who could have given Cassie such a thing?" Exclaimed little Mary Beth in dismay. She was the youngest of the four Beaumain sisters and the sweetest in what was widely accepted to be a family of giddy - if malicious - beauties, who liked to talk in italics.

"It's alright," said Cassiopeia. "It was kind of them. I am going away, and I daresay, I shall have need of stockings, no matter the colour."

"But to be a governess," murmured Anastasia, the eldest sister, languidly. She wound a loose lock of hair around her finger the way she did her numerous suitors. "How dreadful it must be to have to work, and for strangers."

Penelope, the third sister, shuddered and covered the eyes that were often compared to shining jewels with a be-ringed hand. "It is quite quite dreadful and quite your fault, Cassie, that you read so much. I do so hate that a cousin of the Beaumains should be a governess! They are so dull and boring and plain like our own Mrs. Withsham. Or else their employers try to take advantage of them."

"Cassie's not plain!" Said Mary Beth earnestly. "Besides, it's the maids like what's her name, that book, Pamela, who attract attention. And Cassie's not becoming a maid."

"She might as well have," said Eustacia, the second sister, as well-known for her strident (and unpopular) opinions, as she was for her impeccable style. "I do declare that I could never travel alone, let alone to a foreign county, let alone to an unknown family. The name of Beaumain would be ruined. It is quite fast of you, Cassiopeia."

Cassiopeia sighed. Her father had been a Beaumain who had married a mere Miss West. A successful barrister, but nonetheless, only a Miss, and with the impertinence of owning a last name as vague as West. The Beaumains were an old and proud name in Lyria. They had produced several dukes—two High Wizards—among them, and they never settled for less than they intended.

Potamus Cripps Beaumain, for example, the darkest sheep in the family's long history, and who lived almost two centuries ago, had persecuted and murdered magical beings for love of the wicked Lady Laurel. When he found out that the Lady Laurel had been using him to enact mass genocide, and did not exactly love him, he blew the both of them up along with their castle overlooking the Bay of the Moon and left behind a ticking time-bomb of a Curse. Successive generations of High Wizards had tried to discover and undo the Curse before it manifested, but centuries later, they were barely closer to figuring out what it was and no Curse had revealed itself. Yet.

"If you can find it in your hearts to forgive me," said Cassiopeia, "I'm not precisely going to a family of strangers. The Norths were my parents' best friends and they run the Hotel La Lune."

Penelope shrieked. "Off the Bay of the Moon?"

"Yes."

"Oh my," she closed her eyes and sank deeper into the sofa like a cream puff deflating. Then sat up again abruptly. "You do know it is only the most exclusive, most expensive hotel in Lyria!"

"If they were your parents' dearest friends, then I think they ought to have taken you in—just like that!" Eustacia punctuated the last with a sharp snap of her fingers.

Mary Beth fervently nodded her agreement.

"They did want to," Cassiopeia tried to explain, "but it would have felt so strange at my age, to be adopted, and to have to change my name from West to North. And with Papa so recently gone ..." She swallowed the sudden lump in her throat and rushed through her next words. "Well, anyway, I told them so, and said I would like to earn my keep, and they agreed to take me on as a tutor for their two daughters." They still looked at her doubtfully, so she tried for a chipper tone. "It was generous of them. I'm sure I'll have my hands full. If anything, it would stop me from falling into the sullens!"

What she didn't tell them, was that their dashing Uncle Otis Beaumain, after the death of Cassiopeia's mother, and in the last years of his life, had taken to gambling and amassed huge debts that had taken most of the estate to pay off. And now she was in a house that was falling to pieces. It had been a relief to know that she could sell off the old house, take what little remained of her once-sizeable inheritance, and escape to the edge of the world- as the Bay of the Moon had once been known. She could start a new life.

"Well," said Anastasia in her lovely, smoky drawl. "Let's hope they're not too full. Other people might, but a Beaumain never lets her hands get tied. It's how we've survived for so long."