If Miss Viola Beaton were a character in a novel, she’d be the heroine’s best friend. The one who gave trusted advice, who poured a nip of brandy into her friend’s tea, offered a shoulder to cry on, and served as a staunch ally in times of adversity.

She often felt like a supporting character in her own life.

She’d been a bridesmaid three times now, and, while she was very happy for her friends, it was sometimes difficult to know that she’d always be backstage, the bridesmaid and never the bride.

Her twenty-four years of existence had revolved around the blazing sun of her father, Louis Beaton, once Britain’s foremost musical composer—whose works were commissioned by kings and lauded across the globe—now disgraced, in poor health, and buried by a mountain of debt.

Their circumstances were so straitened that Viola had been forced to take employment as music instructor to the Duke of Westbury’s five sisters.

Today her pupils were rehearsing the pieces they were to perform at a musical evening to be hosted here, at Westbury House, the duke’s London mansion, in less than one month.

Music was what she lived for, what she loved, and she was determined that the Delamar sisters would shine brightly amidst the polished and elegant debutantes of the ton.

Lady Blanche, the eldest, sat at a gleaming pianoforte playing Mozart’s Sonata no. 11. Not a strand of blond hair dared escape her carefully coiled coiffure, and her back remained stiff and straight as her fingers ranged methodically across the ivory keys. She was technically proficient but played with a lack of feeling that Viola found more jarring than wrong notes.

Blanche’s four younger sisters were arranged before the pianoforte to simulate an audience. When Viola had begun giving them lessons, she’d had difficulty telling them apart. Their names all began with the letter B, and they all shared the famous Delamar brilliant blue eyes. But now that she’d been instructing them for several years, she knew them as well as if they were the sisters she’d never had.

Lady Blanche expected perfection of herself, and those around her. She took her role as eldest very seriously, scolding her younger sisters and attempting to mold them in her own polished image. She had her work cut out for her. Bernadette was a retiring, bookish young lady with not one elegant or musical bone in her body. She could butcher the simplest of tunes and render it a jangling cacophony. Viola adored her all the same.

The twins, Belinda and Betsy, shared the same brown hair and big blue eyes, but they were like night and day in all else. Belinda was high-spirited, obsessed with being fashionable, and longed to be admired by a large collection of beaus, while Betsy was a hoyden who couldn’t care less about gentlemen, unless it was to best them at cricket.