A Secret Ambition

I

"We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don't teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are." Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

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I.              

January 1828

"Do you know, I believe rather like the idea of you taking up the harp, Lily dear," Cecily declared. Lily's grandmother was rather leisurely draped upon her bed stirring a cup of tea that had been brought up as a refreshment to aid in the packing.

Cecily plotting was clearly fatiguing her.

"What makes you say that, Cecily?" Grace asked in an amused tone as she folded and placed another of Lily's gowns securely into her trunk.

"Well, I rather think the pianoforte is a little common now. You could not throw a stone without hitting a girl who can play a tune in London. But the harp? It is far more elegant, in my opinion. I am imagining Lily's suitors being entertained in Ashwood's drawing room while she sits at the harp and plays like a Grecian goddess."

Lily could certainly play the pianoforte well enough. She was not particularly inspired by the instrument to truly dedicate herself to it, but if one demanded her to play, she would not embarrass herself. After attending finishing school a few years earlier and being amongst the most elegant girls in England, Lily knew that her skills on the instrument could not compare.

She was granted a small peace of mind at the time in knowing that Perrie was infinitely less talented than she on the pianoforte.

Lily thankfully had her back to her mother and grandmother as she organised her dressing table trinkets into a small trunk. She was glad of this because they could not see the deep scarlet of her cheeks as they discussed Lily's plans to seek tutelage on the harp.

What they did not know, however, was that it was all a ruse, and God forbid, if ever she was commanded to pluck the strings on the harp, she would be discovered.

Lily was fully prepared to be discovered one day, and a day not long from the present. But it was a risk that she had to take. She had long been determined to make her own way in the world before she was sentenced to the marriage mart, and yet her world never expanded beyond the four walls of the great house she had grown up in.

Perhaps Lily had expected that life might come and find her if she was determined enough, but that had not happened. Years had passed, and she had aged, and come March, she would be eighteen herself.

It was not lost on Lily that she was now the exact age that Perrie had been when she had been compromised into marriage. And while she would not belittle her sister's happiness or negate anything that she had found in her marriage to Joe, Lily only knew in herself that at her current age, were she told that she would have to marry, or have to do anything that would so significantly alter her life, she would be terrified.

Life had not come to find Lily Beresford. Life experience was not found at home. Her window for autonomy was quickly closing, and come April, she would be a debutante.