Tarnished (3 page)

Bloody bells and damn. Tripped up in my own propriety.

I’d have to walk, and quickly. I kept to the shadows as much as I could, my head down as if I were in a hurry. It took far too long, with far too many of the working classes passed along the way, but eventually the cobbles paving the pedestrian crossings changed abruptly underfoot. They curved in shape, familiar as I traversed the boundary into London’s West End.

I lived in Chelsea, a neighborhood known for its wilder ways and all-too-Bohemian residents. The district catered to the artists, the wastrels, those of lighter thought and consequence. I’m told that when my mother chose the house, it had been a neighborhood more suited to scholars and thinkers, but such things change.

The pink sky tinted the pale path in shades of mauve and shadowed purple, and I followed it at a brisk clip. The Cheyne Walk residence that served as my home was not mine. Not yet. In the strictest of terms, it was one of three that belonged to my father—by all accounts, a doctor touched by more than a hint of genius. Or madness, to hear the talk. This townhome was one property, the second was an isolated estate in the countryside. They say my father refused to step foot in it after his own father’s death.

Common drivel claimed it haunted.

The third, a marvelous castle in isolated Scotland, had been engulfed in a terrible fire. This was the inferno that took my father’s life. My mother, Josephine, had the unfortunate luck of perishing beside him. I don’t remember her at all, though gossip suggests I look like her. I have her infuriating shade of deep, ruby-tinted auburn hair, they say—one of my many disadvantages, they typically add in the same breath—and my features are similarly highbrow. Though I lack her height and stature. And, of course, her grace, wit, charm, and talent on the pianoforte.

With both my mother and father burned to death, I was left in the arms of a Glasgow orphanage already too full to worry about the origins of a mildly singed child. I only vaguely recall my time there, and this in snatches of memory and impressions. Generally, I get the feeling that it was overwhelmingly depressing. This may in part be due to the cordial given all the children to keep us sedated and out of trouble.

My whereabouts were unknown for years, and the whole of Mad St. Croix’s estate was left to his executor, and my current guardian. I only have the vaguest impressions of Mr. Oliver Ashmore, but I can assure you with the utmost of earnestness that I don’t like him. Not only is he never about—a circumstance I view as a favor—but he terrifies me.

I’d only ever met him once in all my seven years under his tenure, and I’ve never gotten over it. However, I’ve been told that he scoured heaven and earth to find me, and I think that he might have succeeded sooner were it not for Monsieur Marceaux’s talent scouts.

This is not a point in Mr. Ashmore’s favor. While I don’t remember the orphanage very clearly, I do remember what life was like in Marceaux’s traveling circus rings.

Frightening. Difficult.

And, if one played one’s game very well, a child could live as free as a Gypsy in those colorful tents. But it required time, effort and clever instinct. Although the details of my childhood are terribly unclear, I know that I served as acrobat at times. A pickpocket among the crowds at others. I could climb just about anything, had never learned to be afraid of heights, and with patience, I was taught how to contort my way through nearly anything.

In short, Monsieur Marceaux turned me into the perfect thief. And as long as I continued to bring in goods and crowds, I was worth more as a performer than I was as another girl in the auction rings.

I was thirteen and a cunning little criminal when Mr. Ashmore’s barristers finally located me. God only knew how. The damage had long since been done. I was a thief and a pickpocket, and already dependent on opium to keep nightmares at bay.

I understand it took some effort to wean me from the noxious concoction foisted upon me, both by the orphanage and the circus. Godfrey’s cordial, it’s called—an old trick of opium and treacle often utilized by orphanages, nurses and impatient governesses. To compound matters, Marceaux, no gentleman by any stretch of the word, liked to keep his children supplied with raw opium.

As a tool for good behavior, there’s little better. Because of this, my first months in London were terrible. Fraught with nightmares and with illness.

Yet, in London I remained.

I slipped through the decorative grate separating the property from that of Lord William Pennington beside it. The man didn’t live there—what upstanding gentleman in his right mind would choose to reside in a neighborhood teeming with Bohemian wastrels and dreamers?—but his lady wife’s mother had no such complaints. She enjoyed the privacy of thick, towering shrubs, which worked especially in my favor. How many times had I come through the property? Dozens. Hundreds.

I made it six steps into the side yard when a familiar whistle caught my attention. I looked up.

Betsy braced her hands on the windowsill two stories above, her round face set in disapproving lines. “There you are,” she hissed. She’d been watching for me, then, and that meant I was dangerously late.

Elizabeth Phillips had been my maid from the moment I was too old for a nanny and too much a handful for one governess. As mischievous as I was, Betsy was often complicit with my many schemes; perhaps not the sort of helpmeet a concerned lord and master should have chosen for his young charge.

Betsy threw a twisted rope ladder out of the second-story window, and I caught it easily in both hands. I had smuggled the ladder into my room ages ago, and had used it more times than I could count as I flitted between lives.

“Quickly,” Betsy urged, and withdrew back into the room. Concealed by Lord Pennington’s looming shrubbery, I seized the twisted rope. Scaling it was the work of moments, and Betsy caught my hand as I eased over the sill.

“
Allez, hop,
” I said cheerfully as I leapt lightly down. “Am I terribly late?”

“You’re cutting it dangerously close,” Betsy said, rebuke clear on her apple-cheeked features. “Let’s get you clean a’fore you stain the pillows.”

“Just the hair,” I began, and froze as I caught a glimpse at myself in the mirror. “Bloody bells!”

Betsy gasped. But unlike her, who glared reproachfully at my adaption of the lower class’s uncivil crudeness, I was more appalled by the state of my appearance.

As I feared, the lampblack I coated through my hair had smudged over my forehead and cheeks, leaving sooty fingerprints across my dirty face. Only the circular seal of my fog-prevention goggles had kept the pale skin around my eyes clean, giving me a wide-eyed, startled effect. Even my mouth, unfortunately full by nature, bore a black smudge across the lower edge, which gave every impression of losing a fight with a brick wall.

“I have to find a way to change my hair,” I said fervently. “It smears like ink at the first sign of damp.”

“It’s
always
damp. And you need a bath, first,” she corrected sternly, and plucked the rope from my hands. “Quickly.”

“A bath, then,” I agreed. I shed my belt, draping the pouch across an elegant rose-patterned chair, and carefully assured it wouldn’t slide to the floor. I didn’t have the components to fix either my goggles or my respirator should they break.

Betsy spun me around. “Did you get your man, miss?” Her quick fingers loosened my stays, and I took a deep breath as the constricting panels fell away. Idly curving one hand around my aching breast, I rubbed at the pained curve as she helped me out of my collecting uniform. Buckled corset and accompanying knives, same color shirt, the camisole I wore beneath. Trousers, worn leather boots and underthings were all separated into two piles. One for her to wash and mend at her own home, and one for the less suspicious items to be washed with the rest of my things.

I grimaced. “More or less,” I said, but kept my tone to a hush. Through the soles of my now bare feet, I could feel the fine tremors as the household staff prepared for the day.

I’d sleep through most of it, and as Betsy helped me into the now lukewarm bath, I sighed with pleasure. My eyes eased closed. “Lovely.”

“So you were paid, then?”

This made my eyes snap open, and I frowned. “Not yet. I had to leave him by the gate,” I admitted. “The time—Oof!”

Betsy’s fingers pushed on my head. I submerged beneath the surface, squeezing my eyes shut again as a sooty cloud floated into the scented water. Heedless of my stinging scalp, she pulled and scrubbed and wrung until the bathwater turned nearly black.

She was talking as I surfaced, sputtering. “How on earth will you gain your fee?” she asked baldly, her mitigated Bow Bell accent sharp and flat and entirely informal.

That was my fault. Betsy was my friend, and I’d always encouraged her independence in my rooms. But I glowered at her as she helped me from the tub. “I’ll go back tonight and collect it.”

“That’s so soon!” Her eyes were dark and wide, like a sweet calf’s eyes, but they frowned at me now in consternation as she took a towel to my freshly clean skin. She was so serious beneath the fringe of rumpled brown curls over her forehead that I grinned, tucking my wet hair over my shoulders.

“You worry too much,” I told her. “It’s a lark, that’s all.”

“It’s dangerous, is what it is.”

“That, too.” Of course it was. On many, many counts. “But I want my bounty. The Menagerie has it.”

Even mentioning the decadent pleasure garden was enough to make my friend shiver and fall silent. I sat on the vanity stool, tucking my soft robe around me, and waited patiently as she dried my hair between two towels.

I was filled with energy. With the knowledge that not only had I successfully completed another bounty, but that I’d been unhappily forced to leave him on the Menagerie’s front stoop.

As if I were afraid to face the garden’s dark host.

Gooseflesh crawled over my spine, and I shook my head hard. I wasn’t afraid of Micajah Hawke. He annoyed me, like a gadfly.

A particularly handsome gadfly, but a stinging insect nonetheless. He’d give me my due. He had no reason not to: after all, I’d delivered Mr. Cummings as the bounty note requested. Maybe not personally, but there’d been nothing about personal attendance in the request.

My eyes focused on my reflection, now all but glowing with cleanliness and good health. My cheeks were pink, and my green eyes shone vividly now that my hair was once more back to its natural color.

As Betsy worked my auburn hair through her hands, the daylight creeping through my window picked out gleaming strands of jewel red and uncanny hints of near violet. A fashionable fringe draped across my forehead, but the rest fell nearly to my waist in unruly curls.

I hated it, my hair. Not only was it a terribly unfashionable color in the social mores of London above, but it was entirely too memorable anywhere else. I had my mother’s hair, for better or for worse, and it was for this reason I ran lampblack through it when I escaped below. Dark hair was so much less noticeable. If I could, I would have cut it as short as a boy’s for easier tending, but I didn’t dare.

Betsy met my eyes in the silvered glass and tugged on a loose curl. “Stop that.”

“What, exactly?”

“You’re scowling, miss. Something fierce.”

I stuck out my tongue. Betsy sighed in deep-seated resignation, but I chuckled as I rose from the vanity seat. “You sound like Fanny.”

“She’s got a point, she does,” my maid warned. “You’ll look like that weathered old bat in Lord Pennington’s loft.”

“Would that I had but half her talent.” I giggled. The bedclothes were already turned down. I slid beneath them, and Betsy tucked the bedding around me, dark eyes glinting merrily.

“Would that you had half the view,” she said, tongue-in-cheek.

Lord Pennington’s mother-in-law was of great amusement to us both; a wily woman who had taken to painting the most extraordinary nudes from the not-impenetrable privacy of her veranda.

“Hush.” I laughed. “You’re a wicked girl, Betsy Phillips, and I’ll be the first to tell your husband.”

“If he doesn’t know by now—”

I covered my mouth. “Stop, stop,” I pleaded, laughter muffled. “Before Fanny comes barging in demanding to drag me to her early markets.”

“That one’s sound asleep this morning,” Betsy assured me. Her smile faded as she tucked the blankets up around my shoulders. “Will you sleep all right?”

My eyes flicked to the crystal decanter on my nightstand. Ruby liquid glinted in the lamplight, as brilliant as the jeweled glints in my hair, and my pulse skittered.

Laudanum. I didn’t sleep well as a rule. Fanny thought it had to do with the boundless energy that had demonized this house from the moment I first set foot in it. She was only half correct. The nightmares I suffered when I attempted sleep without opium had kept the household up for months before the physicians had prescribed laudanum to help. They assured Fanny I’d grow out of it.

The nightmares had lessened, it’s true, but the laudanum had not.

But Betsy didn’t like the idea, and my chaperone kept a close watch on my use. I’d had to hide my opium grains from Betsy before, and I’d learned to measure out my requests for only the most difficult nights. I shook my head, settling back against my pillows. “No laudanum tonight, I think.” I smothered a false yawn, and Betsy smoothed the blankets.