Well, it had left them at a terrible precipice.
There was no currency of any kind left to her name. She had no fortune. She could not even afford to buy clothes now. There was no one to take her to balls. No one in the distant branches of the family wanted to touch them.
It was as if they had contracted the most horrific disease, and everyone was afraid they might pick it up by mere association. No one wished to upset the Duke of Blackwood or the Scottish Duke of Clyde.
Yes, those dukes had made it absolutely clear that her brother and several of his friends were anathema. She understood it, but it left her in a very difficult place indeed.
She and her sister were completely adrift and without hope for a decent future.
Though their family was great, they had not put any money aside for the independence of their daughters, understanding that the most important aspect of a daughter was in her marriage. She did have money, of course, set aside for a dowry, but that money would go to her husband.
And that was supposed to ensure that she would have a great marriage.
But now Catherine did not want marriage at all.
She was tired of the broken chessboard, the politics, the maneuvering of people across it, and the destruction of a person if they took up the wrong square as her brother had done.
It had not been in a single moment with the Duke of Blackwood that he had achieved such loss. He had been actively doing it for years. He had made her and Lily’s life hell, and she wanted out of hell, and she would somehow manage to do it herself.
Catherine took a long drink of wine.
She glanced at the green bottle in her other hand, poured more wine into the glass, and drank it down all in one.
Two glasses of wine was all she ever allowed herself.
It was tempting to drink the bottle. She wanted to forget. She wanted to feel nothing. She was nineteen years of age, and her entire life felt as if it had slipped away from her. The path she was so certain that she would tread upon had slipped away, all due to the machinations of a selfish male.
She would not be a great lady. She would not become a countess or a marchioness or a duchess.
And she no longer wished it. There was something truly terrifying about the fact that she could believe she was uniting with one of the greatest families in England to achieve a wonderful, honorable future…
Only to find herself with someone like her brother or his friends.
They’d all seemed so pleasant on the outside, charming, but they were all vicious rakes. Though it ripped her heart apart, she could not escape the truth.
At long last, her family line had lost all its nobility, all its chivalry, and it had been reduced to weak shows of power.
How many of the old families of England, how many members of the ton, were like that now? Too many. Catherine wanted nothing to do with that.
The men of the ton could not be trusted. But without money of her own, she would have to find a way to live and live well.
She would have to gain money and power herself, as her ancestors had once seized power.
She did not want Lily to ever have to go on the marriage market and find a man and pray to God that he would treat her well.
Catherine would not take the risk of Lily marrying a man who presented himself as a beautiful gentleman to the world while all along rot was in his soul. The risk was too great.
They both had but one life to live, after all, and she was going to live it on her own terms.
And that meant becoming someone else entirely. There was only one way to do that.
Catherine needed to find her way into an entirely different world than the one she knew. It was a dangerous world, rather like the world her ancestors had come into as conquerors.
She was going to take over the demimondaine.
She clutched the wine bottle and vowed to never lose her resolve or be tempted to slip into forgetting as so many did.
She was done with the ton. There was no freedom for a woman like her in the highest echelons of society.