Molly’s breath rushed out, relief at a tension she hadn’t known she was feeling. Alice wasn’t going to run from this. She rested a hand on the nip of Alice’s waist, only a wisp of linen in between them. “Good to know I didn’t dream it up.” And now her other hand was on the small of Alice’s back, not so much pulling her near as letting her know that coming closer was an option if she chose to take it. She didn’t want to frighten Alice off with clumsy boldness.
“I had an idea,” Molly said, suspecting that more talking was going to be required before Alice was entirely at her ease. “Tenpenny is a rich man.” Molly had conducted a bit of espionage belowstairs. “He came with six horses. Four hunters and two carriage horses.” Even among nobs, this was extravagant. “He also brought a valet, a coachman, and a pair of grooms.” The grooms and coachman would be no trouble, as they wouldn’t set foot in the house beyond the kitchens. The valet was a man and could be dealt with like any other man—with a little flirtation and a lot of gin.
Alice wrinkled her brow. “No, I don’t think he actually is rich. He depends on an allowance from his aunt and uncle. I overheard some ladies saying he needs to marry well.” Alice had stepped closer, and now was almost in Molly’s arms. Almost. “He certainly spends a great deal of money, though.”
“What do you say we take some of it off his hands?” Too late, Molly realized that she had made a miscalculation. All the warmth drained from Alice’s face. She was, after all, a proper lady, a clergyman’s daughter for God’s sake, and would not look kindly on wanton thievery. “Never mind,” she said quickly, removing her hands from Alice’s waist and stepping backward. “I must be off my head.”
Alice opened her mouth and shut it again, then furrowed her brow, as if she were trying to work out a difficult sum. “But what would we take?”
Alice must have lost her mind. Here she was, not only condoning larceny but also offering to help. Surely this was wrong. It said so in the Bible. It said so in whatever books they wrote laws in.
But try as she might, she couldn’t make herself believe that stealing from Mr. Tenpenny was wrong. With his lies, he had ruined her reputation and gotten her cast off by her family. Wasn’t the Bible filled with rules about what to do when somebody had stolen one’s oxen or chickens or whatnot? Surely having one’s life stolen out from under one’s feet counted for more than livestock.
As for laws, it turned out that she didn’t give a fig for them. They were all made up by gentlemen who didn’t have to worry about having their lives come undone because one man decided to wave his prick about.
“He wore a diamond cravat pin at dinner,” Alice said. She wanted that cravat pin. She wanted six cravat pins. She wanted to pave a road with cravat pins stolen from lying reprobates. She was an avenging angel, she was justice with her scales, she was going to steal a diamond.
“That’s a start,” Molly said, and Alice’s heart soared with the thought that there was more that could be stolen, more that could be done to set things right.
“A thousand pounds,” Alice said, thinking for the first time of the precise cost of her exile, measuring it not in shame and loneliness, but in shillings and pence. Naturally, mere money couldn’t make up for the other things she lost—her home, her family—but it was a start. It was a necessary beginning.
“I doubt it’ll fetch quite that much,” Molly said. “Unless the stone is the size of a quail egg.”
“No, I mean the amount my father owes me. My mother left a thousand pounds for my dowry.” The worddowryleft a bad taste in her mouth, because there had never been any question of her marriage. She would never have abandoned her siblings to her father’s tyranny and it wasn’t as if she had ever met a gentleman who caught her fancy.
You’re more interested in bosoms.
Molly’s words echoed in her ears.
“Is it yours? I mean, would a lawyer say that thousand pounds was properly yours?”
Alice wasn’t certain. All she knew was that it was what her mother had wished and that her father had known it; whether she had made a will or properly settled the money was quite a closed book to her. “It hardly matters. I can’t afford a lawyer to look into it.”
Molly’s mouth was twisted to the side in a pensive expression. “What would you do with it?”
“With a thousand pounds?” Alice knew that she could live off the interest. She could scrape by on even less. But that wasn’t what she wanted. “I’d open a boarding house,” she said, giving voice to an idea that had been lurking at the back of her mind for the past weeks of idleness. “I’m good at keeping house, and I think I’d find it satisfying if I were paid for my troubles.”
“A boarding house,” Molly repeated, and then fell silent for so long that Alice began to wonder if she thought the idea a terrible one—shabby and ungenteel and all the things Alice knew she was, deep down. Finally, Molly nodded, as if she had come to a decision. “Well, I’m for bed.”
That was it? Was their discussion of thievery purely hypothetical? What about Alice’s restitution? And what about the kissing? Was there to be no more kissing? That was even more disappointing.
Molly turned her back to Alice and began wriggling out of her dress, the very picture of modesty, as if they hadn’t been groping and ogling one another by turns for half the day.
“What about the, ah, cravat pin?” Alice asked, because that seemed easier to address than the kissing.
“I’ll take care of that tomorrow,” Molly said, as if it were an utterly commonplace errand she was planning to complete, like sewing on a boot button. “Don’t worry about it.” She made an attempt to wave her hand in dismissal, but her arm was still caught up in her sleeve, arresting her motion.
“For heaven’s sake, let me help you,” Alice said, and it came out as a scold more than an offer.
“It’s all right,” Molly said without turning around. “I’m used to undressing myself.”
“I wasn’t talking about undressing you.” But she went to Molly anyway, helping tug the sleeve away from her arm. “I meant the, ah, cravat pin situation. Let me help you with that.”
“I’m used to handling that sort of thing on my own too, come to think.” Now the other arm was free, and Molly was shimmying out of the dress with a good deal more wiggling and bouncing than Alice could observe with equanimity. Likely Molly was using Alice’s lust to distract her from jewel theft, and wasn’t that something.
“Bollocks onused to,” Alice managed to say. “Let me help.”
Molly threw her dress over the back of her chair, quickly followed by a petticoat and corset. She was standing only in her shift, and Alice’s first instinct was to look away, to neatly fold the petticoat or do anything that would keep her hands busy and her eyes away from Molly’s barely clad body.
