Excerpt from Black Rabbit Hall by Eve Chase, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"We spend  most of our  time in Cornwall wearing mackintoshes." "Yes, but it's a different kind of rain  in Cornwall. It is! A different kind of sky too. A clear sky with stars. Shooting stars, Amber! Not that smoggy  old thing." She points  at the gray ceiling  of clouds outside  the window. "Hey,  don't look like that. It's something else, isn't it? What is it?"

"It's Matilda's birthday party in nine days," I say quietly, imagining all my classmates giggling  in Kensington Palace's  Orangery in pastel party dresses;  Matilda's older  brother, Fred, down from  Eton,  the way one  side of his mouth curls  up  when  he smiles;  Matilda herself,  my closest  friend, who  is kind  and  funny and  never  pretends to  be less smart than she is, unlike all the other girls. "I absolutely cannot not go."

"It's a shame  it's Matilda's, I know. But it's still one party,  honey." 

I don't say that  I'm not  the  type of girl who gets invited  to lots of parties. But  I think Momma knows  this  because  her voice goes soft: "It may not  feel like  this  now,  Amber, but  you have many  parties to come, I promise." She nods over to the window. "Take a look out there. At the street. What do you see?"

I gaze out  of the  window at the  crescent, the  rivers of wet  pave­ ment,  the  black iron  railings, the  planet  of grass in the  center of the square  where we sometimes eat Bovril toast  on sunny Saturday morn­ ings. "People shaking and closing their umbrellas." I turn to her, won­ dering if this is the right answer. "A nanny pushing a pram?"

"You know what  I seer I see a whole world waiting for you, Amber. Look, there's a young woman in a neat little skirt suit walking to work." Note: Momma doesn't  work, but she wears a navy skirt  suit from  Paris for church on Sundays. I guess that's work too. "I see a couple on a bench kissing"-she raises one eyebrow-"rather passionately, I must say."

I  look  away  from   the   embracing couple   quickly-obviously  I wouldn't if  Momma wasn't  sitting next  to  me-and wonder how it would  feel to kiss someone like that  on  a public bench,  so lost in the kiss I didn't care who saw.

"I guess what  I'm trying to say is that  you're going to have lots of fun before you get married."
 School.  Finishing school. A job at Christie's, maybe. It's hard  to see that  there's much room left for the fun  bit before it stops.

"So you're  not going to worry about  missing  one  party(" Momma fixes the dress flat over her thighs where my head has rumpled it.

"Suppose."

 "Not a very convincing answer." 

I try to hide  my smile  beneath grumpiness, enjoying  the  pretense that  Momma needs  my approval, the  pretense that  I might  not give it, that  it matters at all. I know I am lucky like this.  My school friends all get  bossed  about   by their  mothers, polite,  faintly irritated  English­ women  in stiff dresses who never seem to throw back their  heads and laugh so that  you can see the wiggly bit in their throat. My mother can ride bareback. She wears  denim  jeans when we're in the country. And she's by far the prettiest mother at the school gate.

"Never forget how privileged we are still to have Black Rabbit Hall. So many of Daddy's friends have had to demolish their  country houses and  sell off the  land, or open  their  homes  to the  public, awful  things like that. We must never take it for granted."

Excerpted from Black Rabbit Hall by Eve Chase. Copyright © 2016 by Eve Chase. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.