Ways to Be Wicked (15 page)

While Tom was visiting Jamie, Sylvie was learning how to be a pirate. The bawdy female kind, that was.

Josephine and Sylvie and a small crew of hastily recruited seamstresses had been very busy, and now all the girls stood before The General outfitted in pantaloons. Voluminous, nearly skirts, dark in color but sheer in weight, and, if one peered closely, or happened to catch a fortunate glimpse of them in just the right light—and it would be certain that the White Lily and The General would contrive to show them in the right light—deeply scandalous. They wore sashes and grand, ruffled white shirts, and miniature wooden cutlasses hung from their hips. The splendid little pirate hats topped their heads.

And then the results of the hammering and swearing Sylvie had heard behind doors were wheeled out onto the stage, a magnificent, miniature, rather convincing pirate ship, complete with sails of stretched sheets, a flag of skull and crossbones, and a gangplank. A hatch was carved in the hollow middle from which Captain Daisy would burst and sing the bawdy pirate chantey while the girls danced nearby.

Despite the context in which he employed his gifts, Sylvie could not deny that The General was indeed gifted if he had overseen this little masterpiece.

“Ye’ll ’ave to make it bigger than that,” Molly sniggered, when she saw the hatch.

“Where the bloody hell is Daisy?” The General bellowed.

The woman in question was just now emerging from the long hall that led to her dressing room, bedecked in her own significantly larger version of the pirate clothes, her commanding behind swinging behind her.

“Thank you for gracing us with your presence, Daisy.” The General said it mildly, but somehow managed to engrave the sentence in sarcasm.

“Yer welcome, General,” she said sweetly.

She swaggered her way up onto the stage, strode up the gangplank, and began to lower herself into the hatch. She was in up to her hips when, for some reason, she stopped lowering.

Daisy went still; her eyes widened in surprise. She twisted to the left. She twisted to the right. Stopped again. Looked confused.

Then alarmed.

“She’s wearin’ the ship,” Molly whispered loud enough for everyone to hear.

A rustle of evil little giggles.

Daisy, a little panicked now, twisted rapidly to the left and right again, and then again, a great redheaded windmill. But she couldn’t screw her body any farther into the hold of the small pirate ship.

“
Stuck
. . . Daisy?” The General asked idly.

Daisy jerked her head violently toward him. Her glare could have melted the windows of the theater.

It
did
rather look as though she were wearing a ship for a skirt, Sylvie noted.

“Jenny, Lizzie, if you would give Miss Jones a hand.” The General sounded bored.

Lizzie and Jenny scrambled up the gangplank and knelt to push on Daisy’s shoulders. Daisy sank a
bit
lower into the hatch, but her bosom effectively prevented her from going any farther. It lay on the deck in front of her and billowed up around her chin. She peered out from it, eyes bulging and glaring, cheeks scarlet.

“The hatch was cut to the measurements you gave to Josephine last week, Miss Jones,” The General informed her.

Daisy’s vehement response was muffled by her bosom. She tried to give her head a toss; it was all but immobilized between the pillows of her breasts. So she settled for flapping her arms and a making a rude hand gesture.

“One more good push should do it, girls,” The General said, and Sylvie could have sworn his eyes had an unholy glint. “Tamp her down in there.”

Daisy flailed her arms in vehement objection.

“On second thought, girls, we’d best pull her far enough up again so she can at least sing.” the General allowed. “We’ve lost enough time out of the schedule as it is.”

He reviewed his watch while Jenny and Lizzie tugged on Daisy’s arms until her entire torso was visible again.

“All right, then! All aboard, maties,” The General called, as though the wedging of Daisy was a minor inconvenience. “And I shall demonstrate the dance for you.” He brandished a small cutlass. “It’s a simple one. It requires a bit of this”—he made an unmistakable gesture with his hand and his sample cutlass, causing giggles—“and a bit of...Swordplay.” And at this he winked.

More giggles.

Oh, dear God.
Sylvie whirled about as though looking for an escape.
I can’t do it. I can’t,
can’t
rub my cutlass like that. I’ll sleep on the street.
Surely, please God, she wouldn’t be required to—

“Daisy, when the girls have mastered the dance somewhat,
then
we’ll do the song.

Just then Sylvie remembered she’d contributed a line of verse to the song. And. . .

Well, damned if there wasn’t a small part–a
very
small part—of her that wanted to hear Daisy sing it.

Daisy, a fuming torso popping up from the deck of the ship, would be forced to wait her turn to perform. Sylvie half suspected The General had done this purposely.

“Josephine—the song please,” The General ordered.

Josephine lowered her hands, and the merry burst of music sprang through the theater. The General clambered up onstage with the girls, and demonstrated with his own cutlass.

“And a one, and two, and
thrust
your sword and slide, slide, and turn and clash swords with your neighbor and
again
...”

And in this way he and Josephine took them through the song and dance five times. At last he decided to allow them to do it alone. He took a seat and called out the steps from the audience.

“Step, step, and
thrust
your sword—”

Molly thrust her sword right into Sylvie’s rear. Sylvie jumped.

“Sorry!” Molly said
sotto voce,
eyes wide and contrite. “So sorry!”

Sylvie gave a shallow, cool nod, and kept up with The General’s commands.

“Look lively, girls! And one, two, and turn and
thrust
and—”

Molly poked Sylvie sharply in the arse again, sending Sylvie nearly straight up in the air.

“. . . one and two and I never said anything about hopping, Sylvie, and
slide
and four...”

“Lud, I
am
sorry!” Molly murmured. “I’ll be more careful.”

“I. Would. Be. Grateful,” Sylvie murmured through a clenched jaw, as she thrust and slid.

“And turn, slide, and
rub
your cutlass,
rub
your cutlass, turn, turn,
thrust
—”

Molly thrust into Sylvie again. “Oh, I’m sor—”

Sylvie whirled around and clubbed Molly across the behind.

Molly shrieked and stumbled forward briefly, then regained her balance and swung her cutlass wildly at Sylvie. But Sylvie was quicker and smaller, and she dodged, bent, took calculated aim at Molly’s ankles, and much to her satisfaction, down Molly went.

But Molly proved surprisingly nimble for one so plush. She was upright again in an instant, shrieking her outrage like a scalded parrot and wielding her cutlass like a club, and Sylvie parried expertly. The other girls flocked around them squealing encouragement and wagers.

But with one final parry and a clever and possibly unfair hook of her leg behind Molly’s knees, Sylvie had Molly flat on her back and a wooden cutlass pointed at her throat.

They were both breathing like bellows.

“Cor!”
Rose breathed.

Josephine had stopped playing the pianoforte long ago. All there was now was silence.

Which stretched as The General regarded the two heaving girls almost curiously, as if they were animals in a menagerie.

“Sylvie,” The General drawled, finally. “May I have a word with you, please? Girls, the rest of you are dismissed for now.”

Sylvie lifted the tip of her cutlass from Molly’s throat and, with a small flourish, tucked it back into its tiny little sewn sheath. With dignity, all eyes upon her, she glided across the stage, trod lightly down the short flight of steps to the floor of the theater, and approached, chin up as if she was in fact the queen granting him an audience.

“Sack her.” These were words disguised as a cough, and they came from the stage.

Sylvie followed The General without protest into a room she hadn’t seen before, and he closed the door decisively behind the two of them. It was another profoundly masculine room, the theme of the theater condensed in plush overlarge furniture, cigar-and-woodsmoke-permeated air, and lurid murals featuring explicit images of gamboling satyrs and nymphs.

The General halted and turned to her. “Let me begin by saying that I think Tom was dead wrong to hire you.”

Sylvie stiffened immediately. “Are you going to...” What was the English term she had just heard? “Sack me?”

“‘Sack you’?” He repeated, darkly amused. “No. That’s not for me to do, Sylvie, as Mr. Shaughnessy hired you, and we
all
answer to Tom, ultimately. And he no doubt had his reasons; Tom has flights of brilliance, and flights of insanity, and fortunately the former typically outnumber the latter. I shall reserve judgment on which flight
you
happen to be though I do have my opinion. But you should know, Sylvie, that I’m on to you.”

“‘On to me’?” All the casual English expressions were making her more irritable, and were doing nothing to cause her cursed temper to curl up in a quiet corner. She wished the little man would come to his point.

He turned suddenly and paced almost restlessly across the room, a distance away from her. He stopped and idly fingered a tassel on a curtain.

Then spun about so quickly the tails of his coat whipped his legs.

“The Paris Opera,
Le Cygne Noir.
” He said it as though accusing her of murder.

Sylvie’s heart nearly stopped.

His face went slowly rueful, a little abstracted with awe. “You were magnificent.”

Sylvie looked down the mile or so it seemed she needed to see into The General’s face, and wondered distantly that there was never anything comic about this man, despite his near-miniature proportions. He never commanded anything other than respect.

She gave a short nod finally, acknowledging his compliment. She knew when she was magnificent, and when she was not, and she knew she
had
been magnificent in the performance he cited. A “thank you” would have sounded condescending, and The General seemed to know it, because he gave his own short nod.

“So what are you doing
here
?” he demanded.

“I came to London in search of a relative. I found them not at home. I hadn’t any money or a place to stay. I needed to work.”

“Why the false name, Miss Hat? Are you in trouble with the law? Are you running away from someone?”

She remained stubbornly silent.

He studied her a moment longer. “This”—he gestured, apparently to the White Lily, and everything about it—“is not a joke. I believe you greatly underestimate Tom Shaughnessy. He built this—
all
of this—from nothing. He couldn’t even
read
when I met him, and he managed to accomplish this. I don’t know if you could ever comprehend the kind of nothing Tom came from, but I assure you, what you see here amounts to very nearly a miracle. And if that’s a joke, Miss Hat, then it’s the sort of joke that keeps a roof over your pretty head and food in your stomach at the moment, isn’t it?”

The General was succeeding in making her feel ashamed. He was right. She might not have indulged her temper, she might have tried a little harder to rein it in, she might not have whacked Molly with a cutlass, if he were Monsieur Favre conducting a ballet at the Paris Opera, and not an autocratic dwarf in control of a bawdy theater.

The General didn’t seem to require a response from her, regardless. He clearly saw the answer he wanted in her face.

“A theater like this treads a fine line with the authorities; it’s a delicate balance. If you endanger it in any way, or call undue attention to it...I shall see that you pay for it.”

She looked at him, this man whose head barely reached the pit of her arm, knew a brief moment of indignation and the impulse to protest.

And then she could not help but respect his loyalty and admire it. She nodded shortly, accepting the threat.

“Do you think you can settle your differences with Molly in some fashion other than swordplay and in some other location than the stage during rehearsal?”

Damned if the man wasn’t making her cheeks flame in precisely the same way Monsieur Favre was able to. She smiled, a way of collecting her own dignity.

“Mr. Shaughnessy says he is lucky in his friends.” An attempt to disarm him.

The General wasn’t to be disarmed. “Tom Shaughnessy’s friends are lucky in him,” he said curtly.

A respectful, if not warm, quiet ensued.

“What were you doing in Paris?” she asked suddenly.

“Drinking,” he said grimly.

“Why are
you
here?”

“I like watching pretty girls dancing in very little clothing.”

And then he grinned at her, a grin so Tom-like in nature she nearly grinned in response. “And I enjoy making audiences full of wealthy men happy, because it makes
me
wealthy,” he added. “There’s an art to that, too, Miss Lamoreux, whether or not you believe it.”

She fought to keep her eyebrows from dashing upward in rank skepticism.

“There’s a room at the top of the theater. Attic room. Spiders and dust in it, no doubt. I’ll find a broom for you. And if you should...” He cleared his throat. “If you should care to. . . use the room when you are not required to rehearse...I shouldn’t tell Tom. He would not approve of the waste of your time, as there’s no money in it, Miss Lamoreux, and you are his employee. This theater does belong to him, and your time belongs to him as well, at least during the day.”

The General was offering her a place to dance, should she care to use it.

He might simply have offered it as an attempt to rein in her artistic temperament and thus make his own life more

peaceful.

But she smiled softly at him anyway.

The General, she realized, did not precisely like her. But at his very soul, she suspected he was an artist. He probably understood what this would mean to her.