The Iron Heir's Unwanted Bride

The envelope from the bank came at seven in the morning, and by noon our gates had a padlock I had never seen before. I stood in the gravel drive with two suitcases and watched the men in gray coveralls wheel the piano out of the front room. My mother's piano. They had wrapped it in moving blankets like something wounded. "You should not watch," said Corinne from behind me. My half-sister. Nineteen, six years younger than me, and already better at grief than I was. She had packed my things because I had stood in my bedroom for forty minutes holding a single earring. "Let them do it," I said. "I want to see who buys it." Nobody bought it. It went into a warehouse truck with the silver and the paintings and the chair my father used to read in. The estate of Gerald Vance, restructured under court order. Consigned to the firm that handled bankruptcies for people who used to matter. My father had been dead four months. The scandal had been alive for six. "Rosalind," Corinne said. "The car." There was no car. There was a ride I had paid for with the last of my personal account, and there was the steamer that left the harbor at four, and there was a man in Aldercrest, two hundred miles up the coast, whose family had signed a piece of paper with mine thirty years ago. I knew what the paper said. I had read it that morning, for the hundredth time. To be joined, the eldest daughter of the Vance family and the eldest son of the Colton family, upon the twenty-fifth birthday of the said daughter. My twenty-fifth birthday was in nine days. "Will he take us in?" Corinne asked. "He has to." "He doesn't have to do anything." "He signed a contract." "So did my mother," Corinne said, and did not look at me, and got into the car. We rode to the harbor with two suitcases between us and the smell of the sea coming through the window, and I did not cry, because I had learned in the last six months that crying was a thing you did in private, and there was no private anymore. The steamer was called the Marisol. Ten days up the coast, stopping at four ports, and I spent most of them on the deck with a coat I did not take off, practicing what I would say. I am Rosalind Vance. My father was Gerald Vance. You knew him. I am sorry to arrive like this. I am not asking for charity. I am asking you to honor an agreement. Corinne stayed below. She got seasick and she did not complain about it, which was somehow worse than if she had. On the eighth night she came up on deck and stood beside me at the rail and said, "What if he says no?" "Then we go back to the city." "To what?" I did not answer, because there was no answer. Our accounts were frozen. Our house was gone. My father's name was a punchline in three newspapers. There was nothing to go back to. I had been raised to marry. That was the whole of my education. French, watercolors, how to seat a dinner party, how to be pleasant at a table where nobody liked me. And every one of those skills had been aimed at a man I had met exactly twice, at eleven and at seventeen, both times at a distance, both times briefly. I remembered him as tall. I remembered him as polite in the way of someone who had been told to be polite. On the tenth day, the Marisol came into Aldercrest harbor, and I saw the town for the first time. It was smaller than I had imagined. A working waterfront, a curved road along the cliffs, a hill above the harbor with the big houses on it, white and gray and set back behind hedges. The Coltons' house was the largest. I could see it from the deck, up there on the hill, with a gate I would not be allowed to walk through unless someone opened it. "Come on," I said to Corinne. "We need to find the address." We took a taxi up the hill. The driver asked where we were from. I said the city. He said the city was finished, everybody knew that, and I said yes, and we did not speak again until we reached the house. At the gate, a man in a coat came out and looked at our suitcases and looked at us. "Delivery?" he said. "Visitors," I said. "For Mr. Colton." "Which Mr. Colton?" "Mr. Charles Colton. The eldest." He looked at me for a long moment, and I understood that he was trying to place me and could not, and that he had already decided we were not the kind of visitors who came through this gate. "Wait here," he said, and went back inside. We waited eleven minutes. I counted. Corinne stood very straight beside me with her hands folded, and I remembered our mother telling me once that Corinne had the face of a girl who had been told she was prettier than she was, and that this would ruin her, and that I was to look after her. Our mother had been dead for eight years. She had said that about Corinne because Corinne was not her daughter, and I had never told Corinne, and I never would. The gate opened.