Happy October from Kiera!

Silence reigned in the carriage. Celandine glanced at the stony faces of her sisters before directing her gaze resolutely out through the dust-covered window, although there was little enough to see through the grime. She scrubbed the tip of a pink-encased finger across the pane, rendering her delicate lawn glove indelibly stained but without significantly improving visibility. 

Drat, she thought, regarding the offending smear with a disgruntled curl of her lip. Ruined, and there would be nowhere to replace them where they were going. 

Another, covert glance at Emmaline and Harriet confirmed that trying to engage them in further conversation would be pointless: they refused to see her point of view, and she couldn’t tolerate any more of their platitudes. No indeed. To put a positive slant on their mother’s imprudent marriage was beyond her ability. 

Thus they were at An Impasse.

She hunched her shoulders away from them, her thoughts circling like a fish in a bowl, round and round. The wedding day had been nauseating. Not only had Mama been attired in a gown altogether more suited to one of her daughters than a woman of the advanced age of forty, the groom—older even than Mama—defied description. Words failed her. Although, naturally, when writing to her friend she had done her best to portray the picture he’d presented. His silhouette, pinched in at the waist by a corset so tight he spent the day wheezing, his over-tight pantaloons, his last-century buckled shoes and that purple waistcoat. She shuddered. How awful would his house be?

She plucked at the fabric of her skirt. It was a disaster. Her sisters could pontificate all they liked about how the countryside would be a welcome relief from the heat of the city. To her the confines of hedges and dusty byways were a noose fit for a criminal. It mattered not that the Season finished some weeks ago: to be forced to reside in a backwater, in what had been described as a cottage, was beyond bearing.