"You won't have to." Martha's expression turned almost conspiratorial. "My nephew works in the stables two estates over. He owes me a favor decades old. I'll see what can be arranged."
The four days passed in a strange, suspended blur: chores by daylight, careful stitching by candlelight, her stepmother's cold silence pressing against her like weather. Clarissa and Ophelia, for their part, seemed to have decided that ignoring Avalene entirely was the safest strategy, as though acknowledging her might somehow validate the Duke's attention and make it more real than they could bear.
On the evening of the ball, the house buzzed with a barely restrained panic that had nothing to do with Avalene at all: Clarissa's hem wouldn't sit right; Ophelia's hair refused to hold its curl in the humidity. Their mother moved between them like a general on the eve of battle, barking instructions to maids who scurried to obey.
And in all that noise and motion, no one so much as glanced toward the narrow staircase where Avalene dressed alone in her small room, fastening her mother's pearls with hands that trembled more from hope than fear.
The gown fit now, the alterations holding true, the deep blue fabric catching the candlelight the way it must have caught it decades before on a woman Avalene barely remembered, but somehow still carried inside her in the shape of her hands and the set of her jaw. She looked at herself in the small, spotted mirror above her washstand and hardly recognized the woman looking back—not because the dress had transformed her into someone else, but because for the first time in years, she recognized herself at all.
She slipped out the servant's entrance just as the family carriage pulled away down the drive without her, exactly as expected. Martha was waiting by the garden gate, a plain but sturdy cart hitched to a single patient horse, her nephew holding the reins with the solemn pride of a man entrusted with something important.
"It isn't a carriage befitting a lady," Martha said. "But it'll get you there."
"It's more than I hoped for three days ago," Avalene said, and meant every word.
The ride to Ashcombe Hall took the better part of an hour, the cart jostling over country roads while Avalene held her skirts carefully clear of the wheels and watched the dark countryside slide past, her heart climbing steadily toward her throat. By the time the estate came into view—windows blazing gold against the night, music spilling faintly through the open doors, a line of grand carriages disgorging their occupants at the entrance—her nerve had very nearly failed her entirely.
She had the driver stop short of the main entrance, unwilling to arrive in a farm cart before an audience of nobility already primed to look for reasons to dismiss her. She thanked Martha's nephew, gathered her skirts, and walked the last stretch of gravel path alone, the enormous house rising before her like something out of a story she'd never expected to be allowed inside.
At the doors, a footman took one look at her plain, unlisted arrival and opened his mouth to turn her away, until a voice cut cleanly through the noise of the entrance hall.