“Give or take.”
Miss Stapleton was silent a moment, her lips slightly parted as if deep in thought. “No,” she finally said. “I can’t take money for handwork.”
“Bugger,” Molly answered, not pointing out that she hadn’t offered the lady a share of the take.
“I beg your pardon.” Miss Stapleton drew herself up, quite affronted.
“Bugger,” Molly repeated, annunciating carefully. “Bugger not taking money for your work. You haven’t a pot to piss in.”
Miss Stapleton’s eyes widened. “This is very crass.”
“Yeah, it is.” Ordinarily Molly observed all the dull proprieties with the gentry, but this lady needed to get her head on straight. “So is starving to death.”
“I’m not about to starve,” Miss Stapleton protested.
Molly ignored that, because they both knew that the only reason the lady had food in her belly was Mrs. Wraxhall’s delight in taking the piss out of that red-faced vicar. Instead, she began to carefully unwrap the parcel, taking out the handkerchiefs one by one.
She let out a low whistle when she saw them spread out before her, snowy linen embellished with a riot of colors. There were a dozen in total, each one of them bearing every color of the rainbow.
“I dare say they’re very vulgar,” Miss Stapleton said. “It’s just as well my sister will never see them.”
Molly was about to say that Miss Stapleton’s entire family could go straight to hell, where handkerchiefs would be the least of their worries, but something on one of the handkerchiefs caught her eye. “Oh, bless me. Look at that little fellow.” An elfin creature peeped out from behind a row of delicately embroidered hollyhocks. She examined another handkerchief and found a tiny fairy, no bigger than the nail on her smallest finger, sleeping inside a daffodil.
And to think, all this for blowing your nose. “My little—” Molly stopped. She had nearly finished that sentence in a way that would have required a good deal of explanation. “They’re pretty,” she said instead. “Your needlework is very fine.”
Miss Stapleton made a noise that from a regular person would be a snort but for which the upper classes likely had some other name. “I certainly have enough practice. But the pictures are only to go with the stories.” She gestured to the folded stack of papers that still sat in the remnants of the parcel wrapping.
Molly retrieved the papers and saw they were filled, front and back, with a thin, spidery hand. “Stories?”
“I used to tell fairy stories to my nieces. And since I can’t see them anymore, I thought to write them down for my sister to read aloud.”
Can’tsee them, notdon’tsee them. Molly knew enough of the events surrounding Miss Stapleton’s banishment to make a guess. “I know your father tossed you out. Your sister was in on it too?”
The lady swallowed, as if deciding whether Molly was worth a confidence. “My sister doesn’t care to disoblige our father. None of my siblings do.”
“Spineless,” Molly spat.
The lady’s eyes went wide and something flickered across her face. Gratitude? Disgust? Whatever it was, it didn’t last long, because she tossed her head and swept from the room as grandly as a lady could in a dreary gray frock.
Chapter Two
The lady’s maid sneaked out whenever Mrs. Wraxhall dined away from home, Alice was certain of it. Last night Alice had gone into Mrs. Wraxhall’s boudoir in search of a headache powder, and the door to the adjoining maid’s bedroom had been open, the room clearly empty. Nor had the woman been downstairs. The hour was too late for her to conceivably be running an errand for Mrs. Wraxhall, and the only question in Alice’s mind was whether the maid was carrying on with a man or engaged in something even more nefarious.
Tonight, Mrs. Wraxhall was dining out again, and Alice had pleaded to be excused on the grounds that her headache had returned. She sat in the back parlor, by a window that overlooked the mews. Her hands felt empty, pointless, when holding neither pen nor needle, but she could hardly bring herself to begin another doomed handkerchief or another story that would never be read. She leaned back in the too-soft chair and adjusted the draperies so she could see the precise place where the kitchen door opened below.
It didn’t take long before Molly appeared. Even covered head to toe in a black cloak, she was unmistakable, and Alice could make out the sway of her hips and slight swagger of her walk. Alice leapt up and flew down the back stairs on silent feet. She already had on her warmest pelisse, a measure that had earlier felt like wise planning and now smelled like premeditation. Never mind that. She slipped past the bustling kitchen servants and made for the mews.
Molly cut through alleys and passageways with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had traveled this route many times before, taking corners diagonally and not sparing a glance for her surroundings. This shadowy web of streets was Molly’s natural habitat.
Alice, her thoughts divided between keeping Molly in sight and the necessity of not tripping over the hem of her gown, scarcely noticed where they were heading until she realized she was in an entirely unfamiliar part of London. During her few months in town, Alice had only traveled on foot the distance from Mrs. Wraxhall’s front door to the carriage and back again; she had certainly never ventured this far east. At least—she checked over her shoulder, towards where the sun appeared to be setting behind buildings she had never seen before—she was fairly certain this was east.
Finally, after Alice’s ankle boots started to pinch her toes and her fingers had gone numb in her useless kidskin gloves, Molly came to a stop in front of a low brick building. Alice watched as the lady’s maid rapped on the door before stepping wordlessly inside. So, she had been expected by her... paramour, or whatever a man was supposed to be called in these situations.
Whatever the case, this was a decidedly inauspicious place for an assignation. It wasn’t precisely a bad neighborhood, but down at the heels and worn around the edges. In the great divide between gentry and commoner, this row of houses was planted a few crucial inches on the side of the common. Alice, having spent her life helping her family cling to their station a few inches over on the opposite side of the divide, knew the signs of not-quite-gentility all too well: a couple of chickens had strayed out into the street, a few bits of forgotten washing hung in the gap between two houses, an ownerless dog wandered hungrily about the pavements.
It was not the place Alice would have chosen for a romantic interlude, if she were in the business of having interludes of any variety—which, of course, she was not.
Now, though, she had a problem greater than Molly’s bad behavior. She had set out on this harebrained mission without any definite plan, with the result that she was standing, conspicuous and cold, in front of a strange building in an unfamiliar quarter, with the sun rapidly setting, and no idea how to get back to Mrs. Wraxhall’s house.
