Chapter One
London, January 1818
Alice had her eye on that lady’s maid.
Most lady’s maids Alice had met were either French or at least pretended to be French; failing that, they were Englishwomen of the austere, rail-thin variety. Molly Wilkins was neither, and Alice didn’t know how she was supposed to concentrate on her sewing—or whatever it was she was meant to be doing—when there was an ample bosom or a pert backside within reach at all moments.
Not that there was much of anything to do. Alice had never been so idle in her life. Some lady’s companions were little more than unpaid drudges, and that was the fate she had gladly anticipated when Mrs. Wraxhall rescued her from the vicarage; it had been the only kind of life she had ever known. But no, Mrs. Wraxhall didn’t need an extra set of hands to help with the mending or settle matters of domestic diplomacy among the staff. She had servants for those tasks, as well as for tasks Alice hadn’t even known existed before arriving in London, such as packing gowns between layers of tissue paper, which Molly was doing presently.
When Alice had ventured to ask her benefactress in what small ways she could be of use, Mrs. Wraxhall had waved an airy hand and said, “Simply adorn the drawing room, my dear.” Alice had to bite the inside of her cheek so she didn’t laugh herself into a stupor; she had never adorned a blessed thing in her life, and at twenty-eight wasn’t apt to start now. So she hid in the sewing room, away from Mrs. Wraxhall’s callers, and amused herself with the most useless stitchery she had ever done in her life.
If it weren’t for the not-so-small matter of Molly Wilkins’s bosom and the absolute conviction that the lady’s maid was up to no good, Alice thought she could be quite content in Mrs. Wraxhall’s household. Well, as long as she stayed in the sewing room.
She tore her gaze from the maid and bent over her embroidery. Her silks were in a frightful tangle, possibly because she had spent most of the morning distracted by Molly’s packing of Mrs. Wraxhall’s trunks and hadn’t properly attended to her own work. Not that embroidering handkerchiefs with flowers and fairies and all manner of silliness counted as work—it was just a way to fill the hours in between meals and sleep, a way to use hands that had spent decades at another’s service.
The crux of the matter was that every time Molly leaned over the trunk, her fichu came untucked, giving Alice an eyeful of creamy breasts. And when she tried to tuck her scarf back in, as she was this very minute, much to Alice’s consternation, she made a great show of patting herself down and rearranging the contents of her bodice. Alice tried to tell herself that it was the coarseness of the girl’s behavior that had drawn her attention, but found she couldn’t sustain the lie. That was another problem with idleness—there was nothing to distract her from the unwanted thoughts that flitted in and out of her mind.
“Oh, drat,” Alice said in frustration, realizing she must have dropped her needle while gawping at this latest episode of tucking and self-groping.
“Let me get it, miss,” Molly said with her emphatically not-French accent, falling to her knees on the carpet. Alice struggled to find a place to look that wasn’t Molly’s backside. “Here it is!” Molly held up the needle, smiling in that lazy, crooked way she had. She had a gap between her top teeth that gave her a faintly rakish air and a crinkling around her eyes that made it impossible to guess her age. Only a few years younger than Alice herself, she reckoned, but Alice felt withered and dry in comparison.
Alice’s hands clenched around the edges of her embroidery hoop. “Thank you,” she managed, her voice sounding rusty with disuse.
Instead of handing the needle directly to Alice, Molly slid it into the edge of Alice’s work. It felt impertinent, this practiced gesture. Too familiar. As if they were friends, as if Alice had the capacity for anything like friendship. Alice wasn’t made for that; she was made for more practical things like lending a hand on washing day, or persuading the butcher to wait another month for payment—all the stretching and scraping that went into making things right for her father. Even this fanciful embroidery wasn’t what Alice’s hands were meant for; this was the sort of work that she would have spent all day looking forward to, if she had ever been in the habit of looking forward to things. Now it was all she had in the world.
Perhaps some of that showed on her face, because Molly took her hand. “Everything all right, miss?” Her fingers were warm and her touch gentle, and Alice didn’t know what to do with either warmth or gentleness. Alice didn’t want to look at her eyes to find out whether they shared those qualities. It was taking all her effort to hold on to her knowledge of who she was and what she was made for. The one thing she knew was that a minute too long in Molly Wilkins’s company would send her careening far, far out of her place.
“Look at your hands,” Molly cooed, kneeling at Miss Stapleton’s feet. “Your calluses are nearly gone.” She was trying to make conversation, that was all; she just thought it might be nicer for both of them to have a bit of a chat instead of sitting stone-faced in the sewing room hour after hour. After all, Miss Stapleton could have been downstairs in the drawing room where she belonged. But instead she was here, nearly every day, watching.
Molly was used to being watched—by suspicious gentlefolk who knew a thief when they saw one, or by gentlemen with an eye for mischief—but never like this. Sometimes she thought she could actually feel Miss Stapleton’s gaze on her flesh, but whenever she glanced over, the lady’s eyes were bent down over her work.
She ventured to run her finger along the inside of Miss Stapleton’s wrist. When Miss Stapleton first came to Mrs. Wraxhall’s house, her hands had been as raw as a washerwoman’s. Those hands had scrubbed and polished as much as Molly’s own hands, but the poor girl wasn’t a farthing the richer for it, and that was a sin and a shame. Molly had spent many an hour wondering what good it was for Miss Stapleton to call herself a lady, when as far as Molly could tell, all it meant was that she was unfit to work for wages but without enough coin to buy so much as a shift.
But Molly knew Miss Stapleton hadn’t ever really been a proper lady, not like the ladies Molly had served. Miss Stapleton’s dingy gray frocks, all mended and trimmed dozens of times in a way that screamed poverty, had been a good deal shabbier than Molly’s own clothes. Mrs. Wraxhall had instructed Molly to ensure that Miss Stapleton’s clothing was ruined in the wash. The replacement wardrobe Mrs. Wraxhall insisted on purchasing was much finer, but still boring beyond all reckoning. Never had Molly seen such a proliferation of gray. It was as if Miss Stapleton had her own personal fog that followed her about.
“Have you been using the salve the housekeeper gave you?” she asked.
Miss Stapleton snatched her hand away, so that must have been the wrong thing to say. Chin tilted up, lips pressed tight, dusty blue eyes flashing, she looked at Molly like she had never seen anything so unseemly in her life.
She knows. Molly jumped to her feet and had carefully folded another stack of chemises before remembering that there wasn’t anything to know. There wasn’t anything to find out, and wasn’t that a strange feeling? Molly had been on the straight and narrow for a while now: no bits and bobs of her ladyship’s toilette conveniently going missing, no carrying on with the coachman. Only honest work.
Molly had gone into service to get her foot into the door of one of those big Mayfair houses where they just left silver and ivory lying about, where there were gentlemen who might give her a bracelet or a gold coin for her troubles between the sheets instead of the pittance she’d earn in the rookery for the same work. But she had soon realized that compared to the constant threat of Newgate or starvation, life even as a scullery maid was a blessed relief. She stole less and less and worked more and more. Here she was, well-fed and clean, with a position of respect in the household, and enough money to take care of Katie.
That’s what she ought to be thinking of now. Not Miss Stapleton’s hands, or her eyes, or the mystery of why she sat in the corner of the sewing room like an especially prim shadow. But that was Molly’s problem and always had been. She was no good at doing what she ought to. She could almost hear the voices of every housekeeper and butler she had worked under, a couple coppers, and maybe even her ma, if she could remember that far back, all telling her she was no better than a jumped-up gutter snipe, and would come to no good. Well, she couldn’t afford to bollocks it up this time. She had more than just herself to think of. And she knew that somehow Alice Stapleton was going to be the ruin of everything she had worked for.
Alice couldn’t seem to pry her fingers loose from the parcel. She had tied it up so carefully, with an extra layer of brown paper and double-knotted twine, her sister’s name and direction written carefully on the outside as well as on the sheaf of papers within. She had pressed each handkerchief between a sheet of tissue, as she had seen Molly do to Mrs. Wraxhall’s delicate gowns.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Wraxhall?”
Alice’s benefactress leapt to a start, nearly knocking over her inkwell. “Gracious, Alice! You mustn’t go about creeping up on people like that!”
After a lifetime of tiptoeing around her father, shushing her sisters and brothers, calming the beleaguered servants, and overall making herself as invisible as a person could be, Alice was as stealthy as any cat burglar. “I’m so sorry,” she said, tittering nervously. “You’ll have to tie a bell around my neck, like a cat.”
Mrs. Wraxhall put down her pen and regarded Alice’s person as if contemplating where a bell could be attached. “Not a bell, perhaps, but a string of pearls would not be at all amiss...” she murmured.
The lady had enough money to deck all the spinsters of Mayfair in ropes of pearls if she so chose, and didn’t seem to grasp that her companion was not a doll to be outfitted and adorned at another person’s whim. Her father had been a merchant of some sort, and—according to the housekeeper’s gossip, which Alice ought to have ignored—had all but purchased his daughter an aristocratic husband. The husband, however, was nowhere to be seen. His bedroom door remained locked, and the only signs that he had ever lived in the house were an unused ashtray that rested near the fire in the drawing room, and a cushion that had evidently been used by his dog. Sometimes Alice caught Mrs. Wraxhall looking wistfully at one or the other of these objects, but the sadness always passed quickly from her face, and she reverted to her usual good cheer.
Alice decided to interrupt before Mrs. Wraxhall actually went so far as to send for her jewel box. “I was wondering if you might have one of your servants, the coachman perhaps, bring this to my sister while you’re in Norfolk.” She held out the parcel. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I mean.”
