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Dear Molly,

Long ago, a very wise woman offered me valuable advice: “Be careful, for what at first you hate, you may come to love later.” I never paid much heed, not to this nor to anything else she tried to warn me about. It took me years to understand how right she was and how the heart can be so capricious.

As you read this diary, I expect you’re experiencing no small measure of shock. And as you have now seen, the man you know as Mr.Preston, the doorman of the Regency Grand, was in fact closer to me, more critical to my early life than I ever let on—and closer to you, too, but more on that later…

For the moment, I entreat you to accompany me to Gray Manor on the day of the Braun Summit, a day when one man—Magnus Braun—would decide the fate of my entire family and change the course of our lives. But fate is a trickster, as unpredictable as the heart, and though my father should have played the pivotal role in that day’s events, I found myself cast as the unlikely lead—a part I was not prepared for and one I did not entirely understand.

In the days leading to the summit, Gray Manor became the seat of chaos. Uncle Willy had indeed found temporary staff to pose as full-time employees, so the house was teeming with servants who had no idea what it was they were supposed to be doing. These townspeople donned ill-fitting uniforms and tried to play their parts. There were maids with no notion of how to clean, chauffeurs with no cars to drive, and a sous-chef whose culinary prowess began and ended with the ability to butter bread. Mrs.Mead soon found herself teaching a young maid how to polish silver, and Uncle Willy informed the shocked new footmen that their chief purpose was not shining shoes but serving meals.

In preparation for the summit, Papa, more gaunt and harried than ever, held arduous strategy sessions with his board of directors in the vast main-floor boardroom of the manor. Somber men dressed in suits carrying ominous black briefcases marched in and out of our home with their heads stoically bowed. If by accident I met one in a corridor, I would curtsy and say “sir.” Distress was writ large on their faces. Like experienced physicians, they’d come with medicine, but they’d heard the death rattle and knew what was to come.

Meanwhile, my mother, smelling of vodka and lime, conveyed the truth of our situation in the plainest terms. “Even if we could liquidate everything, Flora, there still isn’t enough to save us from ruin.”

“Perhaps Magnus will take pity on us,” I suggested hopefully. “If he takes over Gray Investments, maybe Papa can work for him.”

Mama laughed bitterly as she clinked the ice cubes in her glass. “You don’t understand men at all. Emasculation is a sport—one man’s blood loss is another man’s transfusion. If Magnus wants to swallow us whole, he will. It’s that simple.”

“Then why hire all these servants to make it seem like we have endless means?” I asked. “What’s the point?”

“The point, Flora, is honor. The band must play as the Titanic sinks.”

If the threat of a sinking ship wasn’t bad enough, there was also the fact that the young man I was no longer permitted to call John (a.k.a. Mr.Self-Important Preston) was one of Uncle Willy’s temporary hires. He’d pulled his son out of classes for a full week, and wherever Uncle Willy went in the manor, his son followed, copying his father’s every move, bowing and scraping, opening and closing doors, passing serving dishes at meals, and generally acting like a pompous, lumbering baboon.

With each passing day, I despised that young man more. He lacked the poise of a proper footman, serving me from the right instead of the left at dinner, and deigning to ask me if I wanted bread instead of silently handing me the basket. I could not eat what he boorishly heaped onto my plate, nor could I bear to look at him, handsome though he was. When I passed him in the corridors, the very scent of him—for he’d taken to dousing himself with excess quantities of his father’s eau de toilette —made me retch. I didn’t know then how love and hate exist in such close proximity, and when we fear love the most, we pretend to feel its opposite. Plus, I knew my parents would mock me for harboring feelings for a man below my station, so I convinced myself that what I felt was raging ire.

I was overcome with vicious thoughts about the young Mr.Preston. Like Goneril in King Lear (which was on our syllabus), I longed to pluck out his eyes. Never once did I stop to ponder what exactly the young lad had done to deserve such an oversize serving of my vitriol or if perhaps there was some other emotion brewing beneath my extreme outrage. I relished pointing out his failings, especially in my parents’ presence. Once, at dinner, I noticed the way he stood to one side, a smirk on his face, judging us all.

“A footman keeps his hands behind him, not in front of him like a jockstrap,” I remarked without so much as looking up from my plate.

Mama covered her smile with her napkin. “Now, Flora, we can’t expect the new help to know everything right away. Good service is learned over time.”

“Only a waiter in a bad restaurant places a napkin over his arm,” Imuttered.

Mr.Preston Junior removed the offending napkin and placed it on the sideboard. “Please excuse my boorish ways,” he said to Mama and Papa. “I’m grateful for your daughter’s guidance, knowing her manners—and yours—are both nonpareil and anachronistic.”

Papa and Mama exchanged a perplexed look. “Quite the vocabulary you have, young man,” Papa said, but neither he nor Mama had quite grasped that he’d just insulted us all.

The day of the much-anticipated summit, I was glad to leave the manor and go to school, for at least there I wouldn’t run into John. In class, the headmaster gave out grades on our Romeo and Juliet essays and instructed me to go home and tell the fill-in footman on scholarship the “delightful news”—that his essay had earned the highest mark in class.

A chauffeur rushed me back to the manor once classes were over, as I was expected to be on display once the Braun Summit began. Mama and Papa insisted I join the staff receiving line, greeting the heads of the firm as they entered our well-appointed boardroom.

The harrowing ride home left me nauseated. The chauffeur had never driven a luxury vehicle before, which, he helpfully explained, did not ride at all like a horse. To make matters worse, when we pulled up to the manor, a procession of black cars already lined the semicircular drive, each awaiting its turn to drop off one of Braun’s corporate magnates, more dreaded men in black who, for better or for worse, were about to seal my family’s fate.

When at last my driver arrived at the manor’s stately entrance, Uncle Willy was not greeting guests at the door as usual. He’d been tasked with overseeing the boardroom procession, and in his place were two young footmen, one of them Uncle Willy’s son, looking exasperatingly dashing in a tailored black suit with a matching bow tie, his dark hair smoothed back, and for the first time ever wearing the appropriate amount of his father’s eau de toilette.

As he helped me remove my coat, I begrudgingly delivered the headmaster’s message. “Your essay took top place,” I said.

“Really?” he replied. “And how did you do?”

“Second place,” I said, “not that it’s any of your business.”

He smiled ear to ear as he held my coat on one arm. “See? You should have studied with me when you had the chance. Us common folk are smarter than you think.”

If I’d had a scalpel in that moment, I would have taken swift pleasure in the surgical removal of his snarky, self-righteous grin. I rapidly changed the subject from his prize-worthy essay to the headmaster’s reminder about the assignment due in a few days—a paper on the application of an Aesop fable to a true-to-life situation. This was a task I’d been dreading because I simply could not see in any of the fables a correlation to the real world.

“I noticed Aesop’s book of fables was missing from Papa’s library. Might you be so kind as to promptly return my father’s book to its proper shelf so that I might have the benefit of perusing it?” I asked the obnoxious Mr.Preston.

“Of course,” he said as he grabbed a hanger and eased my coat onto it. “I don’t need the book anymore because my essay’s finished.” He eyed me smugly as he clanked the hanger onto a rack.

“And which fable did you choose, might I ask?”

“The lion and the mouse,” he replied. “Do you know it?”

Indeed, I did. A tiny, insignificant mouse saves a fearsome lion by chewing through the hunter’s net to free it. The moral of the story? Even the powerless are mighty in the right circumstances.

“My offer of a study date stands,” said John quietly. “Who knows? I might be a mighty mouse who can free you from your academic tangle.”

Bile rose in my gorge. How dare he suggest I wasn’t perfectly capable of freeing myself! “That won’t be necessary,” I replied as I turned on my heel and marched away, but I quickly swiveled to face him and added, “Do remember to bow to your betters after taking their coats. I’m sure your father taught you that much.”

“Of course, Your Ladyship,” he replied. “Thank you ever so much for the reminder.” He bowed then, so obsequiously he all but kissed the floor.

I huffed in disgust as I walked away.

—

Following behind a funereal procession of my father’s men in black, I headed to the boardroom, which was at the very back of the manor, right across from the conservatory. It was a long, thin room, with wide-open double doors in front. The various directors from both firms were finding places at the table—Braun’s board on one side, and my father’s on the other. If you squinted, it would have been hard to tell the two sides apart, but there were subtle differences. Unlike Papa’s men, Magnus Braun’s men had removed their modern jackets and slung them on the backs of their chairs. They leaned back comfortably, whereas my father’s employees were as rigid as dominoes in a row—ready to be toppled with the flick of a finger.

Papa’s servants stood in a line on the Gray side of the room, an impressive show of strength and tradition. Uncle Willy was at the head, while Mrs.Mead and her maids, looking jittery and uncomfortable, graced the tail.

My mother greeted every guest who entered the boardroom with an ersatz smile. She wore a green A-line Chanel dress that showed off the small waist she was so proud of. She kept touching the double row of diamonds on her necklace, a piece so heavy it called to mind the yoke of a draft animal. She welcomed Braun’s men with all the false charm she could muster, but when I approached the double doors, her face fell.

“You’re wearing your school uniform,” she whispered as she clutched my wrist. “Get upstairs and change—quickly—then join the staff line.”

I heeded her command and hurried upstairs, changing into the dress Mrs.Mead had laid out on my bed—green, like my mother’s, with a low, scooped neckline. When I arrived back at the boardroom, the procession was over and my father was walking Magnus Braun to the head of the table. The servants held their places, and I joined the end of the line.

At the front of the boardroom, my father stood beside Magnus Braun, a man I’d heard so much about but had never laid eyes on. He was my father’s age, with piercing blue eyes and blond hair streaked with gray. Like a falcon accustomed to its high perch, he carried himself with an easy grace. He was the only man in the room wearing a colored suit—indigo blue, contemporary and Italian, nothing like my father’s traditional Savile Row.

Papa was just finishing a saccharine introduction, pontificating on the great glory of two powerful firms, alike in dignity, coming together for the good of all.

When he finished, Magnus spoke, his voice a precision blade. “This matter doesn’t require quite so much pomp and circumstance,” he said as he looked at the receiving line of servants standing awkwardly to one side. “Reginald, as you know, my board of directors conducted a thorough review of your company assets. Given your debt load and liabilities, we’re determined to purchase Gray Investments outright. In fact, the purchase was made this morning, which means the controlling interest now rests with Braun Financial, resulting in the official and immediate termination of your firm. All that’s required are signatures, though that’s a formality. Still,” he said, pulling out a Cartier pen from his breast pocket, “let’s get it done.”

My father’s eyes grew wide, an expression of abject shock claiming his face. “But this was avoidable,” he insisted. “My men have worked for weeks to pave a path toward an amicable merger between our firms. Is there no other way?”

“You’ve valuated your company on its past, not on its present, and you’re no longer worth what you say you are. We’ve given you ample time to produce further assets of value, and you’ve failed. Let me put it simply: you’ve got nothing I want,” Magnus said.

This elicited polite chortles from his men and coughs from my father’s.

Just then, the boardroom doors creaked open, and the two footmen serving in the front foyer—one of them Mr.Preston Junior—attempted to enter stealthily.

Magnus tracked them with his cold, predatory gaze. “I must say, Reginald, this is an impressive parade of servants. I haven’t seen anything like it since the last century.”

More chortles and guffaws.

Uncle Willy’s annoying son took his place in line beside me. He touched my arm, trying hard to get my attention, then he shoved a book into my hands.

“Will you stop?” I hissed at him, as I snatched Aesop’s fables, clutching it to my chest.

The commotion did not go unnoticed. Magnus Braun’s raptorial eyes landed on me. “You,” he said. “What are you doing here? You’re no servant.”

I didn’t know what to say. What is the etiquette when your father’s archrival announces he’s gobbling up the family firm and then engages you in small talk?

I took a step forward. “Sir, are you addressing me?” I asked.

“I am addressing you,” he replied. “You clearly have no place in that line. So what are you doing here?”

“Flora, you heard the man,” said my father. “Go to your room.” He said it as if I were a disobedient toddler staying up past my bedtime, when in fact my presence had been ordered by him and Mama.

“What’s that book you’re holding?” Magnus asked as he pointed at it with his Cartier pen.

“Aesop’s fables,” I replied as I gripped the book tighter, my hands shaking.

“A scholar? And a girl?” Magnus said as he sauntered past my father, all the way to where I stood in line on the other side of the room. “What do you think about…all of this?” he asked, gesturing to the men in black seated at the giant boardroom table.

“With all due respect,” I said, “I know very little about business affairs and even less about the affairs of men.”

“The affairs of men!” He laughed then, as did most of the men gathered in the room.

“That being what it is,” I continued, “I’ve been listening, and I can’t help but think about the book I’m holding and how it applies to this particular situation.”

Magnus eyed me curiously. “Explain,” he demanded.

“There’s a parable in this book about a tiny mouse that chews through a hunter’s net to save a mighty lion caught in it.”

“So?” said Magnus. “What’s your point?”

“That the mighty fall,” I said. “And the mightier they are, the more they underestimate others.” I looked from my father to Magnus Braun. “It’s a peril for the lion, just as it’s a peril in the world of business.”

Magnus tapped his Cartier pen on the palm of his hand, a wide grin consuming his face. “Flora Gray. If I’m not mistaken, that’s your name.”

“It is,” I confirmed. I had no idea how he knew.

“It’s a fitting name,” he replied.

“Her name was my choice,” said Papa from the other end of the room. “The moment I laid eyes on her, I knew she was my precious flower, so I named her Flora.”

“How old are you?” Magnus asked, talking only to me.

“She’s—”

“Seventeen,” I replied.

“What does your future hold?” Magnus asked.

“Studying at university, I hope,” I replied with a discreet curtsy.

“We haven’t agreed to send her,” said my father. “It’s a matter of—”

“Your father and I are different in critical ways, but we have one thing in common,” said Magnus. “We each have but one child. Mine is a son—Algernon. You should meet him. Would that be of interest to you?”

“Of course it would!” my mother screeched from her place by the boardroom doors. “Flora would be delighted.”

“Would she?” Magnus asked, his fierce blue eyes meeting mine.

Knowing what was expected, I nodded.

“Now, Audrey. What’s this ball you mentioned on my way in?” Magnus asked my mother.

“The Workers’ Ball,” Mama replied. “We would be honored to host you and your wife as our guests.”

“Shall I bring my son?” Magnus asked me.

“As you wish,” I replied, my head politely bowed.

“Then it’s decided,” said Magnus as he held out his Cartier pen. “A gift for the scholar,” he said, offering it to me.

“But you need it to sign the papers.”

“The papers can wait,” he said with a shrug.

I took the pen he held out to me and muttered my thanks.

Magnus Braun then clapped his hands once. “We’re done here. Let’s go,” he said.

In unison, his men in black rose, grabbing their sartorial jackets and matching black briefcases.

“See you at the ball,” Magnus said as he followed his men out of the boardroom.