"You've been buried in the country for months. We must have a party. A proper one. Not one of your dreary county affairs with ruddy-faced squires."
"But a real gathering. Our friends. For a week. Think of it."
"The hunting will be superb in January." She framed it as a gift to him, a way to liven his spirits. But it was a power play, pure and simple. A house party orchestrated by her and filled with her allies would place her firmly at the center of Thornwick Park, relegating Philippa to the role of a mere hostess in her own home.
A functionary in Adela's court. It would be the tea party on a grander, more public scale. Alaric, distracted and still grappling with his changing perceptions, agreed without much thought. A house party seemed like a harmless diversion.
He was blind to the strategic implications, to the social warfare Adela intended to wage. Adela was triumphant. She immediately set her plans in motion. Her pen flew as she wrote to caterers, wine merchants, florists, and musicians in London.
She drew up a guest list composed of the most fashionable and most expensive members of their set. She planned elaborate menus, a ball, and a theatrical performance. Every detail was designed to showcase her taste, her connections, and her indispensability to the Duke. She did not consult Philippa.
She did not consult the household accounts. She simply spent, assuming the Thornfield coffers were as bottomless as the Duke's title was ancient. The bills, addressed to the Duke of Thornfield, began to arrive at the estate like a flock of predatory birds. Each one carried a demand for a sum more staggering than the last.
They landed on a desk in a quiet morning room, where a woman with a remarkable eye for figures was about to discover the true cost of her husband's mistress. The first bill to arrive was from a London wine merchant for a consignment of French champagne and claret that cost more than the annual revenue from three of the estate's tenant farms combined. Philippa stared at the figure, her pen frozen above the ledger. She assumed it was a mistake, an error in accounting.
Then the next bill came, from a Bond Street florist for the transportation and arrangement of hothouse flowers to fill the grand rooms of Thornwick for a week in January. The sum was obscene. It was followed by invoices from a theatrical troupe, a French chef being brought from London, a Bond Street stationer for engraved invitations, and a silk merchant for new draperies in the guest suites. Philippa laid the bills out on her desk one by one.
They were not mistakes. They were declarations of war. A war of extravagance waged by Adela Montague against the solvency of the Thornfield estate, with Philippa's quiet, painstaking work as the intended casualty. For months, she had been painstakingly stitching the estate's finances back together, finding small economies, plugging leaks, slowly, carefully building a small surplus.