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Avena smiled mischievously, color appearing on her cheeks. “Not yer business if I do see Mr. Dawson, Miss Angel.”
“No, I don’t suppose it is. Nor is it my business if you sneaked out late last night to meet him.”
Avena’s smile turned into a broad, proud grin. “We didn’t do nuthin’…anything but take a walk in the moonlight. I’m a good girl, now.” She giggled behind her hand as if she were a schoolgirl. “Bixby’s been wantin’ a piece of tail so bad, he asked me last night if I thought he was the kind of man I might be willin’ to marry.”
“Sounds romantic,” Sapphire told Avena, genuinely happy for her. “You will say yes if he asks you, won’t you?”
“Can’t imagine bein’ married to a man like that,” Avena murmured dreamily. “Me, Mrs. Bixby Dawson, a tailor’s wife!”
“He’d be lucky to have you as his wife, Avena,” Sapphire said, unable to suppress a twinge of something akin to jealousy. It wasn’t that she wanted any part of Mr. Bixby or any man like him, but she did find herself longing for someone who cared for her the way the tailor seemed to care for Avena. “If you wouldn’t mind going down the street, I would like some more ribbon for my costume for the masquerade ball Saturday evening. Another three or four yards would be wonderful.” She sat on the bed, her mother’s wood and leather casket beside her. She waited until Avena had gone and then opened the lid.
Angelique watched Sapphire in the mirror. “You seem quiet this morning. What’s the matter? Why aren’t you more excited? You’ll be the belle of the ball Saturday night.”
“You mean you will,” Sapphire corrected, carefully setting aside her father’s love letters to locate the pr
ecious sapphire in its velvet bag.
Angelique set down the curling iron and rose, crossing the room to sit beside Sapphire on the bed. She wrapped an arm around her. “Tell me what’s wrong. You’ve been having such a wonderful time these past few weeks, meeting all these exciting men. Men you would never have had the opportunity to meet in Martinique. Why, they say half the eligible men in London are madly in love with you.” She giggled, giving Sapphire a peck on the cheek. “And a few who are not eligible, I understand.”
Sapphire lifted the gem out of the small trunk and held it in her palm, feeling its weight. “I can’t continue to string these men along this way. They’re beginning to press me for a decision. I knew this was a bad idea.” She looked up, her tone full of introspection. “Angel, they think I’m going to accept money from them to allow them to…” She couldn’t finish her sentence, and not just because of the subject. She’d been feeling guilty for weeks.
Everyone in London was buzzing about who she was and who she claimed to be, but still she had heard nothing from Mr. Thixton. She had heard that he moved out of the Wessex town house and into a hotel. Then yesterday she had heard that he proposed to Lady Wessex’s eldest daughter, Camille, and that a whirlwind wedding was being planned before he returned to America. Somehow, Sapphire had a difficult time imagining Mr. Thixton with someone like Camille—but who was she to say and what did she care? She despised the American blackguard and Camille Stillmore could have him!
The dilemma for Sapphire, however, was that if Blake Thixton left without allowing her to at least discuss the matter of her birth with him, she didn’t know what to do next. Aunt Lucia said that her Mr. Stowe would find proof of Sophie’s marriage to Edward, but Sapphire didn’t know what she was supposed to do in the meantime. It had never occurred to her that she might not accomplish what she’d set out to do, and now she felt as if she were drifting in a dinghy without sail or oars on the vast ocean they had traversed to reach England.
“So you can’t string them along much longer. Fine,” Angelique said, resting her hands in her lap. “Then perhaps you should take one of them up on their offer.”
Sapphire turned to stare at Angel.
“It wouldn’t be such a bad life, you know,” she said playfully.
At some point during the past week, Angelique had decided to bestow her favors solely upon Lord Thomas, Portia Stillmore’s previous beau. She’d not moved out of the rented apartments she shared with Sapphire and Lucia, but she and Henry were making daily ventures into the city to search for the perfect place for them to reside together. Henry said his parents were threatening to cut off his inheritance if he didn’t cease his behavior, cut all ties with the Fabergine demimondaine at once and return to Miss Stillmore’s side. Angelique said her Henry was not the sort to take kindly to orders, even if his father was providing three hundred pounds a year in allowance, and paying his debts, besides.
“I can’t take a lover, Angel, and you know it.” Sapphire set the heavy velvet bag in her lap and reached out to take her friend’s hand in hers. “It’s not what I want. It’s not who I am.”
She shrugged. “So tell your suitors you’ve changed the price. Women do it all the time. Tell them you want one of them to marry you.”
“What?”
Angelique rose to pace in front of the bed. “If marriage is the price you want for your virginity, tell them so. Didn’t Lord Thomas ask you to marry him yesterday at the horse races?”
Sapphire rolled her eyes, then picked up the velvet bag to move it from one hand to the other. “He wasn’t serious. You saw him—he was quite tippled.”
Angelique snickered. “Weren’t they all?”
Sapphire smiled. She had enjoyed herself yesterday, first at a garden party where she had played croquet with half a dozen eligible men all vying for her attention, then at afternoon tea at the horse races where the gentlemen had overindulged in a rum punch. “I’m not in love with Charles,” she said. “I don’t want to marry him.”
“So what about Mr. Salmons or Mr. Cortez?” Angelique asked expectantly. “Lord Raleigh?”
Sapphire shook her head.
Angelique threw up her hands and returned to the stool at the vanity. “You and your silly notions of love. I thought you’d given them up for more reasonable desires—companionship, compatibility.” She glanced in the mirror, her eyes twinkling. “Lust.”
“Now you’re just making fun of me.” Sapphire walked to the window to look down on the street full of activity, with carriages and wagons and two-seater hackneys rolling in both directions, merchants and buyers hustling up and down. “Is it so wrong to want more than you have?” she mused aloud, thinking about Avena’s dreams and how they might just come true.
“Certainly not.” Angelique dropped the curling iron on the vanity. “Cold,” she muttered. “It will have to be heated in the coals again.” She spun around on the stool to face Sapphire. “It’s not wrong to want things, to dream, but it’s wrong not to enjoy life as it comes. It’s wrong to never take pleasure in today, in anticipation of what might happen better tomorrow.”
“It’s not that I never take pleasure in what I do.” Sapphire tossed the velvet pouch up and down with one hand. Suddenly, all she could think of was Mr. Thixton and her secret, one she hadn’t even shared with Angelique. Just thinking about it made her cheeks grow warm.
