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“With a six-month lease? Or perhaps twelve months? It really doesn’t matter.” Jennie shrugged. “Unless ’e marries you—which ’e won’t since you’re just an actress ’e can ’ave you whenever ’e wants—then I cannot believe your claim. Love? All men have a wandering eye, and Lord Nash is one of the worst.”
Kitty drew herself up to her full five feet four inches and glared. “You think I can’t keep him. That’s what you’re saying. Well, mark my words, Lord Nash will remain true and loyal. You only have to think of Lady Hamilton to know that there are men who make wives of girls like us.”
Jennie waved a dismissive hand as she turned. “We must continue this diverting conversation another time, Kitty darling, for Mr. Lazarus is shouting for us to get ready to go on stage in ten minutes.”
Kitty found it hard to put away the anger she felt at her conversation with Jennie. Perhaps it was this, combined with the knowledge that she wasn’t being observed tonight by Nash, that made her miss her lines several times. She knew her performance was less than glittering and so was hardly surprised, yet still rather chastened, to be called up to Mr. Lazarus’s sitting room when the show was over.
“Mrs. Lazarus and I wish to speak to you about tonight,” he told her, drawing her to stand in front of the stuffed mannequin purported to be his late wife. “Three times you had to be prompted. That is not at all like you, Miss La Bijou. We have an understudy eager to step up if you continue such disappointing performances.”
This was worse than Kitty had feared. Jennie had made it clear she was only too eager to knock her off her perch. “Please, no. I...was very upset when I went on stage. I know my performance left much to be desired, but I’ve not disappointed the audience on every other night. You’ve said so yourself, Mr. Lazarus.”
He pursed his mouth as he nodded thoughtfully, his thumbs stuck in his waistcoat while he paced around her to stand before the mannequin. “What do you say, Mrs. Lazarus? Should this be a warning only, or is it indeed time to give Jennie an opportunity to play the fair and lovely Juliet?”
After a moment’s silence, he returned to face Kitty. “Mrs. Lazarus believes in giving everyone a single chance. Her charitable nature was one of the reasons I married the good woman, and it is why I continue to seek her advice. So, Miss La Bijou, ensure you get a good night’s sleep, put your worldly cares aside for they do not belong on stage, and we shall see you at the theater tomorrow when you thrill the audience with another of your exceptional performances.”
Gulping her relief after gushing thanks to Mr. Lazarus, Kitty hurried down the staircase to the almost deserted theater. With the actors and actresses having left, it felt, and even smelled, strange. Not just empty, but abandoned. A few candles burned from sconces offering a little light, but Kitty had never seen it with such a cold and loveless feeling. Several girls—little more than children—were sweeping the stage, and one of them looked up when they heard Kitty ask into the darkness, “Nash?”
“If you’s after Lord Nash ’e’s got ’is carriage waitin’ fer yer in the street.”
With huge relief Kitty hurried toward his Lordship’s handsome equipage, the footman jumping down from the running board to open the door for Kitty and help her inside. She closed her eyes as it rocked gently on its journey, and she imagined the comfort she’d feel from having his Lordship’s arms about her as she poured out her distress. She hoped he wouldn’t be too late home to join her. Tonight was the first time since he’d taken her into his bed that he’d been away from her, and she felt strangely bereft.
She’d performed each night for two weeks without a break, so it was little wonder she was exhausted and easily upset, she thought upon waking as the carriage drew to a halt. The coachman came around to open the carriage door and she stepped outside, shocked to find herself in front of Mrs. Mobbs’s lowly residence.
“’Is Lordship says it’s only fer t’night, Miss La Bijou. ’E says ’e will send a carriage ’round to fetch yer jest after noon.”
To fetch her just after noon? She knew what that meant. Tomorrow he would take her to look at the sweet bower he intended to secure for her. She shivered with excitement, wishing she could curl into his side tonight and be woken by his usual lusty dawn lovemaking before another wonderful day began.
“Thank you, Jack,” she said when he’d seen her safely to the door, for it was a neighborhood rife with rogues, and she was only too happy to see the last of it. Mrs. Mobbs was more slovenly and bad-tempered than she’d first thought.
She was certainly bad-tempered when she opened the door to Kitty’s repeated knocking, pushing back the greasy strands of gray hair that had escaped from beneath her grubby nightcap, and pushing out her massive, equally grubbily upholstered bosom with a show of belligerence. “Wot yer doin’ ’ere when yer said, quite certain-like, yer’d not be sleepin’ ’ere agin. I got three in yer bed, so it’s the floor fer yer, miss.”
With awful certainty, Kitty knew that meant no blanket, either. Before she had come to live with Mrs. Mobbs, her only real experience of deprivation had been when visiting the cottagers with her mother on some of their ‘do-gooding’ expeditions. Not that there’d been too many of those. Kitty well remembered the disapproving responses that had made her mother blush, and Lissa cry, before Kitty was old enough to realize that poor people liked to be able to take the moral high ground when it made them feel superior.
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“Well, are yer comin’ in or wot?”
Kitty swung around and hailed John who was just climbing back onto the box. “I’ve changed my mind, Mrs. Mobbs,” she said over her shoulder. “Sorry to have woken you.”
She didn’t wait to hear the inevitable grumbles, or worse, but instead climbed into Lord Nash’s carriage, reassuring Jack that Lord Nash would be delighted to be surprised. Hadn’t she’d spent the past ten days all but having taken up residence with Lord Nash, and, in fact, a number of articles of her clothing were in his keeping. He’d been immensely generous, buying her gifts to supplement her wardrobe, or just to please her during every jaunt they’d taken together. Of course, he’d be delighted to find her in his bed when he returned from his night of gaming or drinking at his club.
Kitty understood it was too early for a marriage proposal, but was satisfied by the intensity of his Lordship’s devotion and confident it would lead to the ring, the legal union her mother had failed to secure. But then, her mother had been weak. Kitty would never have forgiven a man who had betrayed her as Lord Partington had betrayed her mother. She’d never have consented to live with him in sin, and bear his bastards.
Bastards. The description never failed to make Kitty hot with shame, and deeply resentful toward her mother. Her whole life, Kitty had only ever known disapproval. It was only here in London that she felt accepted. She was good at her craft, and the exhilaration of being feted wherever she went, and admired—no, loved—by the handsomest, most eligible young buck in all the country was like an addiction.
“Thank you, John,” she whispered to the coachman who had again tried to persuade her to return to Mrs. Mobbs. She stepped onto the pavement into the dark. It was only a few feet to the railing. Tonight she would take the servants’ entrance.
Susan, the tweeny who slept on a pallet by the kitchen fire, let her in, rubbing her eyes and greeting her sleepily. With mounting excitement, Kitty crept along the corridor toward his Lordship’s bedchamber.
She didn’t knock as she quietly turned the doorknob. She was too excited at the prospect of sliding into bed beside him and surprising him. She hoped he’d returned from his club. What would he do? He’d laugh his delight, kiss her nose and then make wild and passionate love to her. Oh, but he made her ridiculously happy. Kitty had never known such lighthearted joy in her whole life. She was young, beautiful, with the world at her feet, and soon she’d be slotted into the kind of life she ought to have had if her father had behaved as honor dictated.
Kitty had no intention of being an object of derision, like her mother. She wasn’t going to slave for other people, like Lissa, whose whereabouts were still a mystery.
Kitty closed the door quietly behind her, excitement bubbling in her veins. Lissa had always painted herself as the sensible, older sister, but Kitty was the one who was going to distinguish herself in the family for having gone after her dreams and achieving what the rest of her family had not: wealth and respectability.
The room was in darkness, but the window was open, and a slight breeze rustled the curtains, bathing part of the capacious four-poster bed in light from the large, waxing moon outside.
With each step toward the bed, Kitty divested herself of one more article of clothing. She’d be completely naked by the time she slid in beside Nash, she decided. Darling Nash, who appeared to be murmuring in his sleep as he sometimes did. Occasionally, even, he’d thrash about, which he suddenly began to do now. Kitty always comforted him after these nightmares which he said he’d had for as long as he could remember, and somehow it endeared him to Kitty even more. She liked to think of herself as somewhere between his muse and the woman who brought him peace and, yes, comfort.
