The Countess Conspiracy by Courtney Milan Read Free Book Online Page A

nut-brown hair was arranged perfectly. She had a softer version of Violet’s own face: a little less nose, a little more lip. More sparkle in her eyes, fewer wrinkles in her brow. It made her pretty, something Violet had never been able to achieve. It made her soft, and Violet had never been that either. Violet was all angles, a blunt, bludgeoning thing.
    “You know,” Violet told her sister carefully, “it wasn’t as if Mama acted the way she did without reason.”
    Lily reached out and took Violet’s hand. “That gossip is long dead. Those lies can’t hurt my children now.”
    Violet looked away. It hadn’t been gossip. It had been scandal, one that could have destroyed them all.
    “Lies?” she asked softly. “What lies?”
    Lily waved a hand impatiently. “Yes, yes. I know. Never acknowledge the things that can hurt you.”
    Violet hadn’t been referring to their mother’s rules.
    But Lily made a sound of exasperation. “We’re family. And I
know
you feel as I do. What Mama did to us—what she made of us—was insupportable. She made us untrusting, hard things for no reason at all.”
    God, Lily actually believed that. Had she never seen how desperate matters were? When the ugly details of the coroner’s report had surfaced—those coded words of
likely accident
—the whispers had started. Violet had heard them over her father’s casket. She’d stood there, fourteen years old, feeling awkward and ungainly, holding her nose in the air because she didn’t know how else to keep from crying. She’d clutched her mother’s black-gloved hand, feeling her mother grip too tightly in return.
    The next day, her mother had sat down with Lily and Violet at breakfast.
    “I am writing a book,” she had announced. “A book on proper deportment, and you two are going to exemplify its teachings.”
    Lily and Violet had stared in numb, grieved confusion. “There will be a great many rules,” Mama had told them. “Public rules, which will appear in the printed guide itself, and private rules, which you must adhere to more closely.”
    At the time, Violet hadn’t understood. She’d begun her mother’s lessons in bewilderment.
    A lady never acknowledges an insult.
That was the public rule, the one that was eventually printed in
The Ladies’ Guide to Proper Deportment.
But the Shadow Guide—as she and Lily had called the private rules their mother had given them—was more explicit.
    A lady never acknowledges an insult, but she never forgets one either. She pays it back, no matter how long it takes.
    A lady never lies,
the Guide cheerily proclaimed.
Her good word is her most precious possession.
    A lady never gets caught lying,
the Shadow Guide grimly countered,
but there are six things every lady always lies about.
    A lady shares her good fortune,
taught the Guide. But the Shadow Guide explained:
A lady protects what is hers, and she doesn’t let anyone else have a piece.
    Over the year of their mourning, their mother had drummed every rule into the two sisters. Nobody had ever known the lies they told, because they never got caught.
    And when they’d come out in society, it was their mother’s newly-published book of rules, the
Ladies’ Guide to Deportment,
that had dominated the conversation. Not the question of whether their father was a suicide. A clever woman, their mother. She’d made everyone watch her daughters for the wrong clues, and taught her girls to hide the things nobody was allowed to see.
    They’d been perfect, utterly perfect liars, lying with their smiles and their best behaviors.
    Lily might think that was awful, but Violet could see that training for what it had been: necessary. Lily had never forgiven their mother; Violet held the woman in awe.
    As a child, she’d never thought of her mother’s private grief. She’d never thought how much it would hurt her mother to smile through the worst innuendo. She recognized it now: Their mother had raised her head and soldiered on,