Page 7 of The English Wife

Janie had forgotten the paper. Her fingers tightened around the page as she hurried after Anne, up the stairs. “I was simply disposing of it.”

“Whatever you like.” Anne’s tone was derisory, but Janie didn’t miss the glance she darted at the paper.

Janie would have laughed if it hadn’t been so miserable, all of it. To be reduced to reading the scandal sheets for word of one’s own family.

Somewhere along the sides of the frozen river, the search went on for Annabelle’s body. Or so they presumed. Their sensibilities, it seemed, were too delicate to be imposed upon by the police. Whatever they knew of their own tragedy came at third hand. They were starved for news, all of them, as isolated as Robinson Crusoe on his island.

Anne, with all her tricks and her charm; Janie’s mother, with her lineage and her money. All of their powers were reduced to nothing when it came to the workings of the masculine world of the law.

Janie looked anxiously at her cousin. “What happens next?”

Anne deliberately misunderstood her. “Supper, I should think.”

Janie pressed her eyes shut, schooling herself to patience. Grieving came upon people in different ways, and if it made Anne even more prickly than usual … well, there could be no doubt that she was grieving, or that she had the right to grieve. If there had been one person in the world who Anne truly loved, it was Bay.

There were times Janie had wondered if there might be something more between her brother and her cousin, if the rumors of Annabelle’s affair with the architect were just a screen for—

No. Janie bit down hard on her lower lip. Now she was being as bad as the scandal-mongers howling at the gate. Bay had loved Annabelle. If Janie was sure of anything, she was sure of that. Not the fevered love the papers meant to convey, something harsh and jealous, but a comfort with their own company, the intimacy of a hand on a shoulder in passing, a message conveyed with a look.

Words might lie, but not that.

Janie paused at the foot of the stairs, stopping Anne with a fleeting touch to her arm, the most contact they had had in weeks. “What they’re saying—Bay would never have done that. He would never have hurt Annabelle. Not Bay.”

“Because you knew him so well.”

Anne had always known just where to slide the knife. Janie forced herself to honesty, even if honesty felt raw and painful. “I wish I had.”

Ever since she was little, all she had wanted was for her brother to notice her. It wasn’t that Bay was particularly outgoing. His smile was a slow thing; his wit quiet. But there had been something about that very reserve that had promised riches to those admitted to the inner circle.

That would never happen now. Bay was gone, and all his subtle charm with him. Janie would never be privy to his confidences, never have him turn to her as he had to Anne.

Except that once, at the last, when his lips had spoken a name she didn’t know.

Janie stood at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the newel post. She felt foolish asking, but if anyone would know, it would be her cousin.

“Anne,” she asked. “Who’s George?”

London, 1894

February

“Fancy a free supper?” Kitty popped into Georgie’s dressing room without knocking, banging the door cheerfully behind her.

Georgie eyed her friend in the streaked glass of her mirror. “What is it this time?”

Kitty adjusted her hat, frowned at the results, and tweaked it again, examining herself this way and that. “Not what—who. A Sir Something and his rich American friend.”

Kitty had removed the wig she wore as Maria in the Ali Baba’s musical evisceration of Twelfth Night, but her cheeks were still streaked with red, her face lavishly painted and powdered. Coupled with her feathered hat and new crimson brocade walking dress, it made her look, thought Georgie, like the more prosperous sort of streetwalker.

Picking up a cloth, Georgie scrubbed vigorously and ineffectually at the grease paint on her cheek. It was a bad job, she knew. No matter how much cream she used, how much soap, it never entirely came off. She went into each performance with the shadow of the last beneath it. “How can you tell the American is rich?”

Kitty winked at her in the mirror. “Aren’t they all?”

The ones who showed up in London were, at any rate, and London was the entirety of Kitty’s world. There must, Georgie was quite sure, be poor Americans, struggling Americans, ordinary humdrum Americans, but they weren’t the ones who showed up at the stage door of the Ali Baba, eager for a little Old World decadence.

“I don’t know. We have a matinee tomorrow.” Georgie didn’t fault Kitty for supplementing her income. Anyone who had lived as she had knew you did what you must to pay the rent. But it made her uncomfortable all the same.

“Here. Let me.” Kitty obligingly yanked the tapes of Georgie’s corset closed and began hooking up the back of her dress. Georgie’s dresser was meant to do that, but she had sloughed off the previous week, complaining about the size of her pay packet. They’d been playing to half-empty houses for the past six months, and it was beginning to show. They were already dressing themselves; they’d be making their own sets next. “I just need you to entertain the friend.”