Alice patted the pocket where she kept the coins Molly had gotten for selling the handkerchiefs. “I need to do this on my own.”
Molly thought Alice was worth something. But Alice didn’t believe it herself, and she didn’t think she could manage so much as a friendship if she doubted that. She wasn’t sure how to go about changing her own mind, but she knew she had to start at Barton St. Mary.
The cart left her off at the bottom of the lane that led to the vicarage. The oak trees had been heavy with leaves when she had last seen them, but now they were bare, spindly branches shaking in the wind. Alice drew her pelisse tighter around her. That was something else that was different—she had been poor and shabby, friendless and scared when she had left this place.
She was still poor, but not shabby. Perhaps not friendless. And now that she thought of it, she wasn’t scared. A scared Alice would never have dared come back here.
The door was answered by a housemaid Alice had never seen before, a painfully thin child of at most twelve, wearing what Alice recognized as one of her own old frocks that had been relegated to the rag bin some time ago. It was hardly a surprise that Alice’s father hadn’t been able to keep their old maid without Alice around to do half the work and secretly supplement her wages. This child had likely come from the workhouse. She had shadows under her eyes and a smudge on one cheekbone that could either be dirt or a fading bruise. Alice frowned.
“I’m here to see the vicar,” Alice said. She glanced around the hall. It was dirty. Nobody had cleaned the windows or dusted the woodwork since she left. “You may tell him Miss Stapleton is here.”
The girl’s eyes widened in what was probably a mix of fear and surprise, but she scampered off, leaving Alice to wait in the hall. Alice worried that the child would be punished as the deliverer of unwelcome news, but there came no raised voices nor the sound of objects being flung against the wall. She was seized with the realization that this house was no place for a child: not a waif from the workhouse, not the motherless children of the vicar, nobody. That housemaid didn’t deserve this, and neither had Alice. The hunted look she had seen on the little housemaid’s face had been familiar enough from her brothers and sisters, and on her own reflection in the looking glass.
As if by instinct, she turned towards the looking glass that had always hung in the hall, and nearly stepped back in surprise.
She was the finest thing in this sad room. Her hair was clean and tidy, despite the cart ride. Her pelisse and bonnet were new and fashionable, despite being plain. The face that looked back at her was the same face she seen in the mirror at Eastgate Hall, Molly’s gaze warm and appreciative on her. She had spent three months living soft and eating well, but she had also spent those three months not being afraid. She had been treated kindly and with respect; she had been appreciated.
She took a deep breath. She could do this. She didn’t wait for the maid to return but went directly to her father’s study and prepared to demand what was hers.
It took Molly half a day to find the man she was looking for.
“I’m not a fucking fence, Mol.” Jack Turner was scowling, so maybe nothing much had changed despite the fact that he was now living in a fine house in a respectable part of town. Jack had been the one to get Molly her place as a scullery maid when her mother had wandered off permanently and Molly found herself without anywhere to go. Jack had been a footman then, and later a valet, which were facts it was hard to remember when she saw him in this prettily papered study.
“You really can’t talk that way to a lady,” said the other man in the room. He was handsome, every bit as pretty as the wallpaper and about twice as grand as the house itself. She’d dearly like to know how Jack Turner came to keep this kind of company, but that would have to wait.
“I’m really not a la—” she started to protest.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Wilkins,” Jack said with exaggerated courtesy and a sardonic smile that was meant for the gentleman, “but I’m not a fucking fence.”
“I don’t need you to sell it, Jack.” As if Molly couldn’t find her own fence. “I need you to make sure we don’t hang for taking it.”
“Oh, God, there’s a ‘we’,” Jack groaned. “I should have known. Who are you caught up with? Tell me it’s not Brewster’s gang, because I have no pull left in that quarter.”
“It’s not like that! She’s... good. The man we took the diamond from, he harmed her and this is...” What was the word Jack used to use? “Restitution.”
Jack buried his face in his hands and mumbled something that sounded like, “I’ve created a monster.”
The blond gentleman cleared his throat. “Usually what Jack does at this point is find what information he can on the, ah, other party, so he can blackmail the man into compliance. What’s his name?”
“Horace Tenpenny.”
The two men exchanged a glance. “Tenpenny,” Jack repeated.
“Do you think he’s the same Tenpenny who hasn’t been paying his servants?” the other man asked. “Because it sounds like this isn’t his lucky day at all.”
Molly watched as a rare smile spread across Jack’s face.
“It’ll be a pleasure to assist you, Miss Wilkins,” the blond one said.
Alice knew her father couldn’t have gotten smaller or frailer in the few months since she had been gone, but he seemed diminished. She could not say she was sorry.
“What are you doing here?” he growled by way of greeting. He didn’t offer her a seat and that was just as well, because Alice had no intention of sitting. The chairs were probably filthy anyway without her around to polish them.
“I’ve been thinking about your expenditures,” Alice said. “You get two hundred pounds a year from this living. You spend next to nothing on wages or upkeep to the house. You give nothing to charity. I spent thirty pounds a year on housekeeping. You haven’t had any school fees to pay in ages. Even if you paid fifty pounds a year to the wine merchant”—she cast a disparaging glance at the empty brandy bottle that sat on the corner of his desk—“that ought to leave at least another fifty. So where does it go?”
“You traveled a hundred miles to ask me impertinent questions about my—”
She held up a hand. “No, I came to ask you whether it’s gambling or blackmail. Because if it’s neither, then you must have money saved, and I’m not leaving without part of it, or at the very least a promissory note.”
