Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles (18 page)

It wasn’t until I jerked my chin high, startling myself awake, did I realize I’d nodded sometime between mutters. The fog had drifted to my knees, placing us only a few minutes away from docking.

I knuckled my eyes, oddly gritty, as if I’d gotten too much chalk in them.

The unease that had shadowed me since my near discovery was gone. Now, I felt empty. Drained. I left the docks by my usual route, and was nearly home when the Westminster bells tolled out the four o’clock warning.

Just in time.

I could barely bother myself with keeping to the shadows. I stumbled across the hedgerows, heedless of the rustle and snap of twigs around me. Dragging myself up the rope ladder took much more effort than I expected. My limbs felt filled with lead, aching already from the unexpected struggles of the night.

Perhaps I was getting too heavy.

Monsieur Marceaux kept his performing charges on a strict, often hungry regimen. Meals were structured, the hours were long and we worked hard. We had to perform well, and there were delicate considerations of weight and balance to maintain. But on the other side of that grimy coin, only his performers received regular meals.

I remember often being hungry.

My window was still ajar, and I crawled inside with muttered words even I couldn’t translate; curses or complaints. With suddenly bone-tired fingers, I pulled and yanked at my clothing, managed somehow to strip down to my underclothes, shook out what I could of my pins, and crawled into bed.

The instant my sooty brow touched the soft linen, I fell to sleep.

But it was not kind. I dreamed that I ran, that I passed league after league, aware that something I could not see remained just behind me. I ran harder, sweating, gasping, until my legs gave and I fell to the same cobbled street I’d been running on forever.

Sweat dripped to the stone, splattered over my fingers, and I saw it was red. Red like the blood of a street girl’s throat as the knife slashed it through.

I tried to scream; I must have, for I woke in dark with fear like a drum pounding in my chest and sweat cooling on my skin. My throat ached, closed off as if I strangled on my own voice.

Had I made a sound?

Every part of me felt ill, from the tips of my throbbing toes to the ends of my hair.

I turned, buried my face in a pillow and clutched it hard enough to burn against the taut skin of my knuckles. Tremors assailed me, tore through my body until I was forced to clench my teeth, lest I bite through my own cheek.

Everything hurt. Everything clamored.

I’d gone to sleep and woken in hell and I hadn’t the faintest how to stop it without the laudanum I no longer had.

This, I was to learn later, was only the beginning of a nightmare that would worsen with time. I had no conception then that the ailment I suffered through wasn’t a case of night terrors.

But for now, as I lay curled in my soot- and sweat-streaked bedclothes, I rocked myself into a mindless sort of oblivion where my shuddering breaths and muffled gasps were stolen by the feathers in my pillow and time ceased to matter. How long I sweated, twitching and restlessly swaying, I don’t know. Somehow, unconsciousness stole through my aching head and I must have slept again.

If I dreamed a second time, I did not remember.

Chapter Thirteen

“D
ear me, what terrible calamity brings you to the table so early?”

I looked up from the
London Times
, pasting a smile upon my lips as Fanny swept into the room. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I’d come to the breakfast table first.

The surprise she’d initially greeted me with faded to worry as she took her seat, lovely in charcoal trimmed with dandelion yellow. “Are you feeling quite the thing?”

“I simply rose early,” I said, reassuringly enough despite the near-lie. “I did not sleep terribly well.”

“And how,” she agreed, nodding with utter propriety at Booth as he laid out a tray before her. Her usual fare, as she preferred it. Fanny’s breakfast did not often change, though the fruits in her jam would with the season. “My poor dear, were you terribly upset by those awful creatures?”

“Thank you, Booth,” I murmured as he set before me another small pot of tea. My second of the morning. He bowed, turned and made his slow, dignified way back to the kitchens where his wife labored.
Step-thunk
.
Step-thunk
.

When the spasmodic reverberation of his step faded, I looked back at my paper and said through it, “Certainly not. I simply wasn’t feeling well.”

“As you say.” But the tone of my chaperone’s voice did not suggest that she believed me.

Perhaps rightfully so. Those
awful creatures
had followed me home.

Among the Society columns in today’s edition of the
Times
, found earlier after Zylphia had performed a minor miracle and turned me to rights early this morning, the latest
on dit
from the Ladies of Admirable Mores and Behavior waited for me. It was not kind. My name was not attached—such things may be too crass, even for the salon—but I had no doubts that today’s moral came at my expense.

To imagine such boldness in the demeanor of a young lady is to wonder at the education that surely has gone missing in her household. Would that such a young, impressionable girl’s mother had the presence of mind to refrain from abandoning her child to the improper and ofttimes vulgar fancies of nannies and simple governesses.

The passage, read for what seemed the hundredth time, no longer caused red streaks across my sight.

In truth our hypothetical lady of example may have no choice in her own behaviors. Remember that her mother stooped so far as to wed a common tradesman; an act so far beyond the pale, that one may only reach an assumption that such poor decisions must run truer in the blood than previously credited. Truth, gentle young misses, is rarely so kind when one comes from a lengthy line of ill choices. Remember that all young ladies of decent breeding must choose that which benefits her father, and if she is wed, then her husband; for those choices will then fall to your daughters to suffer.

And this, I thought in sightless anger, was deemed the polite form of bullying.

I did not know who penned this one. As ever, anything that came from the marchioness’s salon fell under the overarching designation of LAMB’s communal title. I could easily imagine Lady Sarah Elizabeth’s smug smile as she counseled,
Mothers! Mind the gentlemen with whom your daughters consort, for those persons of hedonistic predispositions or affinities to the unnatural will only lead your cherished daughters astray.

Teddy and my father, all in one fell swoop. It was no secret among Society that the Viscount Armistice Helmsley the Third had a wild taste for hedonism, and encouraged all three of his sons to follow suit.

Though Teddy was the third son and thus quite safe from Season matchmakers, his reputation would continue to suffer as long as he befriended me.

“—and I believe you should wear the rose gown for today’s luncheon.”

I blinked, forcing my attention away from the small print in front of me, and lowered the paper to frown questioningly at my chaperone. “I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t scowl so,” she admonished, and paused to take a sip from her cup. I waited, deliberately—with effort—smoothing the lines my features had settled into. “You do recall Lord Compton’s invite, do you not?”

I stuffed a bit of bread crust into my mouth and said around it, “Hardly an invite.”

Her pale brows drew together in censure. “Cherry.”

Grimacing, I dutifully swallowed my fare before adding, “He practically forced my attendance. I don’t—”

“You don’t want to go, yes, yes.” She sighed, a dry sound of exasperation. “Let’s not have this argument today, my dear. You’ll wear the rose, you’ll charm the earl, and everything will go perfectly.”

“Fanny.” I stopped at her raised eyebrow, took a breath, and tried again in gentler tones. “I do not want to marry Lord Compton. I do not want to marry at all! Why must you insist on placing me in this untenable situation?”

But she did not react with anger as I’d expected, or with dismissal. Instead, setting her china delicately upon its saucer, she looked me in the eye—her own oddly misty—and said with utter frankness, “Because I watched you while you danced, Cherry, and I have never seen you look so happy.”

I stared at her.

Her thin, lined mouth pulled at a corner; a smile tinged with sorrow and with delight all at once. “He engenders something in you, my dove. You may not admit it yourself, but these old eyes have seen enough of the world to know what it means when a woman moves so gracefully with a man in the ballroom.”

Heat suffused my cheeks. “He is an excellent dancer,” I pointed out. “Of course we move well, he was covering my graceless steps.”

“You may choose to ignore what you know already,” Fanny said, her smile widening as if I’d only just proven her point. “We are still going.”

This time, I was quick enough to raise my paper before I made a face. “Into the lion’s den,” I muttered.

“Don’t mumble.”

I stuck my tongue out at the print, made a show of shaking the paper into shape, turning pages as loudly as possible, before my eye fell upon a column placed amid the rest.

The Scientific Mind
, I read in small, nearly overwhelmed letters,
as Evidenced by a woman whose Mind is better suited to Science than the Induced Boredom of the home.

All right. I would take back my snide commentary of last night’s adventures. Perhaps it wasn’t only men who would go on and on. I read the letter slowly, taking my time to absorb the piece written to the masses in supplication for understanding.

I had known of the women’s movement—I thought the highly rational tea gowns of the Aesthetic reform a brilliant invention and had long petitioned Fanny to allow me to wear them, albeit in vain—and I followed the periodicals written by Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson with
great
interest.

She was the only licensed female physician in Britain. According to this letter, which I already suspected was not penned by the good doctor for it referenced her direct, this made Dr. Anderson the only doctor worth consulting.

A woman’s mind is by definition a mind suited to searching for the unknown. Centuries of subjection by the male of the species has left us with only one task—to raise the young of the men who choose us. But by that very definition, do we not exercise an aptitude for creative and logical endeavors?

It went on like this for some time, until I realized that what I was reading was not a letter regarding merely suffrage in science. I read a call to arms. A demand for intelligent women to stand united behind the banner unwittingly thrust over the path of the author’s heroine, Dr. Anderson.

I whistled soundlessly, pursing my lips and pretending the note so I would not disturb my chaperone’s welcome silence.

University College has gone so far as to claim a “lowering of standards,”
the author continued, and I could all but see the scorn dripping from the words.

Brilliant women determined to partake of an education that a majority of male students simply idle through are now placed not on a pedestal, but upon a stoop; the meanest of urchins who may scrap together the tuition will be welcomed more honestly and with greater warmth than a woman whose intellect cowers that of the professor’s, yet who will never progress beyond that of assistant or helpmeet.

Raising my eyebrows, I searched again for the author and nearly laughed aloud when I saw it.
Miss Hortense Hensworth
.

So the wallflower had thorns, after all.

Good girl
, I thought.
Give them the very devil.

T
he contents of Miss Hensworth’s letter still brought a muted chuckle to my lips as Zylphia prepared me for the dreaded luncheon. I mulled it over while my maid worked her magic; it wasn’t until she plucked a delicate perfume glass from my fingers that I realized it was the fourth time she’d done so.

Her eyes met mine as she tilted my face up. “What’s bothering you,
cherie
?”

“You mean besides this luncheon?” I asked flippantly.

Her brow furrowed, lovely black eyebrows meeting in her tea-dark skin. “I mean besides that, yes. Your bed looked as if you’d rolled in soot on your way home, and you never sleep without removing the black from your hair.”

True. On both counts. I affected a shrug, unsure how to explain my night. “You were out last night. I was too tired to draw a bath myself.”

“Are you even capable?” Her wry smile smoothed the sting. “The very fact I was already out suggests you should not have been.”

I frowned from beneath the thick fall of red she draped over my face. “I am a collector, Zylla, and have been since before you came. Remember that.”

“Don’t use that tone with me,” she shot back. “I’m not truly your maid and you and I both know it. Whatever you’re up to, it’s getting more dangerous by the day.” My head wrenched as she pulled hard on a handful, twisting it into place.

I couldn’t argue that. I’d filled her in on the details this morning, and she’d obviously had time to work up a good head of steam. “There was nothing to worry about,” I assured her, for the moment choosing to ignore the veiled threat of her employ. Or lack thereof. “Simply a book, that was then stolen from me.”

“With that Ripper about? It’s a fool what steps below, and a twist alone besides. I don’t like it,” Zylphia insisted, scraping my hair back so she could fashion it into an ornate selection of gleaming twists. Each pin jammed into the thick mass was a line of pressure, nearly pain, in my scalp.

It wasn’t because she pressed too hard. That strange fragility that had haunted my night clung to me still. I sighed and squared my shoulders; covered completely in the lovely rose linen day dress. Deeply rich wine detailed the fabric, accented at the three-quarter sleeves, décolletage and hem with a frothy spill of cream-colored lace.

It turned my hair to sunlit ruby, flattered my pale complexion. Exactly why Fanny demanded its use, I was sure. Even I could admit what lovely things the dusky rose did for my coloring.

Zylphia pinned a fashionably jaunty hat in place, designed primarily to match the dress and tease the eye with a spill of wine-colored roses and the speckled plumage of some poor feathered creature. Its silky ribbons tied at my nape in a darling bow, accentuating the beautiful coiled mass of Zylphia’s handiwork. “There,” she announced. “Go charm your earl,
cherie.
”

I frowned. “Why?”

“Because the alternative is not what you think it is,” she said, with such seriousness that even I hesitated in glib retort.

What was there in her shockingly blue eyes that I did not yet know how to read? A warning?

A regret?

She looked away, collecting my warm outer garb. “I’ll be stepping below for some work,” she said, a complete change of topic not even one of Communion’s Abram men could miss. “In a few days.”

“What kind of work?” I demanded, gaze sharp on her determinedly nonchalant features.

“Personal work,” she said, and smiled. “Fret not, I won’t be gone long.” Before I could press her, she left the room.

She was right on at least one matter. She wasn’t truly a maid at all. I had little control of her, if she chose a headstrong path.

I studied myself critically in the vanity mirror. “Perfectly done.” I sighed. “Fanny will be pleased.”

And so she was. She fussed and fretted as Booth guided the St. Croix gondola along the now-familiar passages between Chelsea and the much finer Northampton estate. I found myself twisting one foot in restless counter to the agitation clamoring underneath my too-sensitive skin.

I did not want to be in this gondola. I did not want to face the marchioness in her den, and I most certainly did not want to put up with the hours and hours of scrutiny I would be walking into.