“You thought I was nicking the silver or meeting with a fancy man.” There had been a time when Molly had done both of those things, often and with great enthusiasm, and she rather wished she could protest complete innocence. Instead, she raised an eyebrow and glared at her accuser.
“Elf in tree!” Katie tugged a lock of Molly’s hair to get her mother’s attention. “Elf,” she insisted. “Tree.” She was almost three and had recently discovered that by saying words, she often got things. “Mama. Elf. Tree.”
“She wants me to finish her bedtime story,” Molly said. And that was well and good, but Molly had no intention of telling the story with Miss Stapleton hovering by the door. “Sorry, love, but I’ll read you the story another time.”
“The elf in the tree?” Miss Stapleton murmured almost to herself, her brows drawing together. “Is it a cherry tree?” she asked Katie.
“Cherry! Elf!” Katie agreed, clapping her fat little baby hands.
Molly watched in dismay as Miss Stapleton’s eyes searched the room, finally alighting on the stack of papers on the table. “Are those my stories?” she asked, her voice thin and strained.
“Well. You were about to throw them in the fire, so I thought you wouldn’t mind.” Molly knew she didn’t need to feel guilty, but she did anyway. She had enough guilt left over from the past that sometimes it seeped out where it didn’t belong. “You might as well sit,” she said grudgingly, gesturing to the chair Mrs. Fitz had been sitting in.
When Katie had still been a babe in arms, Molly spent a week’s wages on a prettily bound book of children’s stories, only to discover that each story culminated in a child being punished and shamed for acts of a naughtiness so mild that Molly wanted to throw the book out the nearest window. She knew theft and violence and the rest of the ways she had kept body and soul together were wrong; she wasn’t some kind of heathen. But she couldn’t get herself exercised about fictional children stealing muffins when a few streets away there were children who would risk their lives for a chance to steal a loaf of bread. Molly wasn’t proud of the stealing and cheating she had done, but she didn’t regret it either, because what was a gentleman’s watch fob compared to a month of meals in her belly?
When Miss Stapleton said she had written stories for her nieces, Molly expected them to be packed with dull moralizing and heaping with shame. She had thought that maybe they would be a bucket of cold water over whatever embers of warmth she felt for Miss Stapleton. Instead she had found page after page of elves and fairies cavorting about and getting into harmless mischief. There had been no sermonizing, no punishment, only, well, fun. She hadn’t thought Miss Stapleton capable of anything even in the neighborhood of fun. Looking at her now—straight-backed, pale-faced, worn out from an evening of high-minded snooping—she seemed about as dry as dust. But now Molly knew she might actually like Miss Stapleton, and she rather wished she didn’t.
The child had Molly’s honey-brown hair and eyes to match, and clung to her mother’s neck as she listened to the tale of the elf in the cherry tree. She was too young to follow the story, and before long the cadence of her mother’s voice lulled her to sleep, her little hands unclasping and falling to her sides, her head dropping back against Molly’s arm.
Alice’s lap felt empty. She had put her nieces to bed like that countless times—stories told in hushed tones, babies held in aching arms. She’d likely never see her nieces again, and even if she managed to worm her way back into her family’s good graces, the girls might be half grown by then, well beyond the age for stories and cuddles.
Now she had tears prickling in her eyes, and that would not do at all. She had already embarrassed herself just by coming here. If she started crying, she’d look a proper bedlamite.
A gray-haired woman appeared in the doorway. Molly carefully rose to her feet and passed her the sleeping child, then dug in her pockets for a few coins to slide into the woman’s apron pocket. She must spend all her wages keeping her daughter here—the room was clean and quiet, the air was fresh by London standards, and the child was plump and rosy-cheeked.
“You,” Molly said to Alice, not meeting her eyes. “Come on.”
Outside, night had fallen and the wind was bitterly cold. Alice tried to wrap her pelisse more tightly around herself, but the cold seeped through the layers of wool and silk right to her bones.
“It’s less than half an hour if we walk quickly,” Molly said, her gaze straight ahead. “You’ll live.”
“Perhaps we ought to take a hackney?” Walking through a strange part of London in the dark, unaccompanied by a man, seemed a poor idea regardless of the weather. “I have a few shillings.”
“Bollocks on shillings,” Molly said, striding briskly along the pavements. “Bollocks on hackneys. I always walk, and since you’ve decided to tail me, you’ll walk too.”
Alice felt the heat of embarrassment spread through her body, the only warmth in her. “I do apologize—”
“Bollocks on that too.”
Alice didn’t quite know how to argue with that. She wasn’t accustomed to hearing coarse language. For all her father’s faults, he had always spoken like a gentleman, although now it occurred to Alice that she might prefer a bit of honest profanity to the alternating miseries of crockery-throwing and sermonizing. Surely she ought to be shocked and insulted to hear herself addressed in such a rude and common manner, but she found that Molly’s vulgar words gave her a frisson of excitement. Molly’s total lack of deference, her failure to stand on ceremony with a gentlewoman, ought to feel like an insult, but instead made Alice feel warm despite the chill in the air.
“Are you quite certain it’s safe?” Alice ventured.
“Lord,” Molly said with a huff of laughter. “I’d like to see anybody try and bother us. I’ve three knives and a reputation for bloodshed.”
GoodGod. What did that evenmean?
“The only real danger is that you might freeze to death,” Molly continued. “Do they not have weather in Norfolk or wherever it is you’re from?”
Oh, if she only knew how cold it had gotten at the vicarage. “I used to wear wool stockings and flannel petticoats. Sometimes three or four petticoats at a time.” And so many shawls that she now felt quite naked without one.
Molly was silent a moment. “And now you don’t.” There was something in her voice that Alice couldn’t quite make out. Something a bit rough.
“Of course not. You know perfectly well what undergarments ladies wear in London. Only a chemise and a couple of thin petticoats. I don’t even wear a corset most days. You dress Mrs. Wraxhall several times a day. You know all this.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think about it.” Before Alice could reflect on whether this meant that Molly thought about Alice’s underthings, or lack thereof, Molly spoke briskly. “Anyway. Come close. I don’t know how either of us would explain it to Mrs. Wraxhall if you caught a chill. Last thing I need is a corpse.” She tugged Alice against her, looping her arm through Alice’s.
Alice nearly lost her footing at the warmth and softness of the other woman. She almost tripped over her feet and landed in a gutter.
