Page 12 of The Wallflower Ruse

The next morning, after sleeping on a truckle bed set up in the partly papered bedchamber, Lucinda packed her few belongings and wrote a quick note to be sent to her mother, saying only that she had arrived safely (and not where she was going now). The kitchen boy went to fetch a hack, and she and Mrs. Boston waited by the drawing room window.

“Are you quite sure your friend will have room for you?” asked Mrs. Boston. “You’re welcome to spend another night here, dear.”

“I’m sure, but if for some reason she cannot, I’ll return here. Thank you for—"

Mrs. Boston interrupted. “Who is that across the street? I haven’t seen her before.”

“Which one?” A woman in a dove grey gown, carrying a marketing basket, was speaking to a maid leaning on her broom.

“The one with the basket. I don’t like the look of her.”

“Why not?” Lucinda asked.

“Because she doesn’t belong here, and she’s chatting with my neighbor’s maid. She may be asking innocent-sounding questions with a view to burgling the house.”

“Or she may simply be asking directions,” Lucinda said. The woman held on to her wide-brimmed bonnet, from under which wisps of fair hair danced in the breeze.

“You don’t live in London, dear,” Mrs. Boston said. “It’s not like in the country, where everyone knows everyone else.”

A hackney drew up, the kitchen boy clinging on behind. The boy jumped down to open the coach door for Lucinda, and Mrs. Boston said, “Do write to let me know you’ve arrived safely, dear.”

“I shall,” said Lucinda, thanking her again. She went out the door, eyeing the woman with the basket despite herself. The woman said a cheery goodbye to the maid and began to cross the street. What if...?

If Lord Restive were a spy and had realized that he’d been foiled, might he have someone watching her? Someone with a nefarious plan.

No. She wasn’t living in an adventure novel. This was mundane old London...

There was nothing mundane about a secret code. On impulse, she told the jarvey, “Harley Street,” and climbed in. The woman with the basket passed the coach and hurried away in the opposite direction.

“I’m imagining things,” Lucinda told herself, but since she was now committed to going to Harley Street, she resigned herself to visiting the family solicitor and her trustee, Mr. Williams.

Progress through the busy streets was slow, but eventually the hackney came to a halt. The jarvey said, “What number, miss?”

“It’s not far. I’ll walk from here.” She paid the jarvey and walked slowly down the pavement, wondering how much she would be obliged to tell Mr. Williams. Just the blunt truth about her sister, she thought. He would frown and tut, like Mrs. Boston. It would be years before Susannah—and her mother and herself—lived this elopement down. She could only hope it wouldn’t prevent her from finding suitable work.

She rapped on the door and waited, glancing idly about. At the corner, a woman with a basket, holding onto a tiny cap from which her fair hair flew every which way in the breeze, descended from a coach.

Basket, blond hair, grey gown, even the way she stood were the same. Only the hat was different.

Heart thudding, she faced the door again.

Her business with Mr. Williams took too long, including as it did two pots of tea, a plate of macaroons, and reminiscences of respectable, sadly deceased family members such as her father. Mr. Williams tried to call her a hack, but Lucinda refused, saying it was only a short distance to Dorothea’s house. “I have just enough money to get home,” she said. “I refuse to waste it on a walk of less than a mile.”

He offered to give her an advance on her inheritance to pay for the hack, but she refused that as well. “I shall need every penny when I come of full age.”

He sighed his disapproval but rang for the maid to show her out.

“Is there a mews behind the house?” she asked the maid. “I’d rather go that way—it will be quicker.”

The obliging maid helped Lucinda remove her cloak and replace it with a shawl and a lace cap. She probably looked dreadful, but different, which was all that mattered. She hurried down the mews and took a circuitous route to Dorothea’s house.

~ * ~

“How many people have had access to this book?” Restive demanded, pacing back and forth in Dorothea Hale’s drawing room, one of the few places where he could be himself. He liked Dorothea, a stunningly beautiful fair-haired lady who had never attempted to reel him in.

He counted on his fingers. “The chap in France who wrote the message. Davis. Me. Miss Belair, and God knows who else in her house, but if her sister really did elope—”

Dorothea interrupted him. “Her sister is the sort who would elope, heedless of the effect on others, and her mother is a ninny. The servants are just that—servants who’ve been there forever.”