Tarnished (4 page)

“Dream sweet,” she said. “Perhaps of broad shoulders in naked marble?”

I smothered a snort. “Wicked girl,” I repeated.

“And well you love me.”

“Mm.” I turned, wrapping my arms around the lacy edge of my pillow, and closed my eyes. “Good night, Betsy.”

“Good night, miss,” she said, and I heard her footsteps ease toward the door. “I’ll be in again, come after noon.”

Plenty of time for rest, I thought, and sighed into my soft pillow. I waited for a good long time, measuring the pulse of my house as the staff set to work. When I was sure that Betsy wouldn’t be returning, I sat up.

The crystal decanter waited, its garish color winking innocently. I picked it up, its faceted edges unyielding in my hands, and pulled the stopper free. The fragrance curled through my lightening bedroom in wisps of spicy cinnamon.

I tipped a portion of the contents into my mouth, barely aware of the still-bitter taste of the draught as it slid through my throat, into my chest. My stomach. It pooled there like a warm balm, and I sighed as I settled back into my bed. I relished the feel of the liquid sleep as it curled through my insides.

I would run out of the laudanum soon. My store of opium grains was gone, used already, though I don’t recall using it all.

If I didn’t collect my bounty later tonight, I’d have to face my night terrors alone.

But that was something for later concern.

It wasn’t long before the laudanum took effect. The sounds of my staff downstairs blurred into a gentle ocean of calm routine. I slept. And as I soared on the heavenly wings of God’s own heralds, I dreamed.

But I never remembered what I dreamed. At least, not when laudanum cushioned my head.

Chapter Two

I
don’t wake happily. The promise of pain shooting through my forehead came to fruition as I cracked open eyes gummed with the detritus of hard sleep.

I squinted in the dim light. Bless her, Betsy had drawn the heavy drapes before she’d left, leaving my bedroom swathed in murky shadow. Dusky rose and lavender faded to shaded brown and gray; much less offensive to my waking sensibilities.

I rolled over, drawing the bedclothes around my shoulders, and groped at the night table without fully opening my eyes.

Glass rattled. Cold edges slid over my fingertips, and blearily, I found the chain I’d been looking for. Grumbling wordlessly, I drew the watch as close to my face as I could and opened the case.

Only minutes before noon.

What was I doing? My mind beckoned as if through tangled webs of woven fog. I’d had plans. Or was it that I deliberately had made no plans?

Was it so very important for me to get out of my warm bed now? I didn’t think so. With a sigh, I closed my eyes firmly and damned the day to fend for itself.

A precise rap shattered my ruminations. The door opened, utterly without sound thanks to the lamp oil I frequently applied to the wide hinges. “Good morning, miss!”

I groaned and threw the covers over my head. All the better to drown out Betsy’s gratingly Cockney cheer.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” She seized the edge of the blankets in both hands. Cold air speared through my thin cotton nightgown, and I swore before the rest of my mind could properly take form.

Betsy’s appalled expression only partially salved my pique. “It’s deucedly cold,” I pointed out.

“Ladies don’t say ‘deucedly,’ ” she shot back, and flung the bedclothes into a corner. “You are going to be late for breakfast, miss, if we don’t hurry you in.”

She made an excellent point. Frances Fortescue was a woman of impeccable propriety.

Or at least, I thought uncharitably as I stood and allowed Betsy to take charge of me, Fanny was an old widow whose propriety extended only as far as the employ of a madman’s daughter could. My governess since I was thirteen, and a widow for as long as I’d known her, she now served as my chaperone in polite society.

An unmarried girl without a mother could not be choosy.

Betsy whipped my nightgown off and quickly helped me dress. For all my waking unkindness, I loved Betsy and Fanny dearly. It only tweaked my conscience a smidge to think such unkind thoughts while Betsy prepared me to face the light of day.

I sat in front of the vanity and studied my reflection as Betsy arranged my hair into a collection of upswept curls and high knots. She used more pins than I suspected necessary, but we’d learned long ago how unmanageable my thick hair could be.

“What is for breakfast?” I asked, pausing midway to yawn behind splayed fingers. “Tell me there’s strawberry jam?”

“You’ll have to ask Mr. Booth.” She smacked my offending hand. “Don’t start yawning now, you’re just out of bed. Didn’t you sleep?”

“Not enough.” My God, it was as if my thoughts were hiding from me deliberately. I shook my head hard, wincing. Waking hadn’t always been this difficult. It seemed as if the older I got, the harder I found it to wake up. I wondered if I’d ever be allowed to sleep through the day entirely.

As if Society didn’t think me odd enough already.

Betsy worked quickly, and within moments, I found myself corseted, bustled, and wearing a pale blue day dress trimmed in peacock green. My shoes were much more delicate than the kid boots I wore below the drift, but my toes complained immediately at the pinch.

Such was the life I led.

Betsy stepped back, beaming. “You look lovely.”

“Who’s to notice?” I muttered, and swept my skirts out of the way as I made my way into the hall. She snorted behind me, but said nothing.

My home has no name, though I’d always envied the lovely titles the peerage gave their estates. Unfortunately, most of the names I imagined as a child included the words “mad” or “deathly” or “tombs.” Terribly morbid.

So nameless it is, but it is no less elegant for it. I stepped into a hall laid with rugs carried from the farthest Orient, furnished with items carted from the heart of Egypt and icy reaches of Viking lands.

My father had enjoyed dark woods and foreign taste, and every room mirrored this leaning. Mr. Ashmore had changed little; in fact, he only added to the mystifying collection each time he visited. The staircase boasted newels carved into life-size lions, mouths agape and hungry eyes glaring. My skirts rustled across the hardwood floors, and I made a face at the brilliantly polished mirror at the other end of the hall.

Rumor suggested it had been a gift from a Russian czar. I silently called bollocks on the idea.

A czar from the steppes would be far more likely to give horses, wouldn’t he?

Through the elegantly papered walls, I could hear the whisper of movement. China delicately clinked as I stepped inside the dining room.

The table was large enough to seat twelve comfortably; however, I rarely bothered with such events. Fanny was seated already, her thin figure wrapped in a demure navy blue day gown. Her gray hair was swept up into an elegant chignon, not a hair out of place.

“There you are. Come sit, my dear, and eat.” Fanny set her tea down beside her plate. Her mouth smiled, papery skin wrinkling, but her pale blue eyes raked over me from top of my pinned hair to the tips of my shoes.

I resisted the urge to curtsy. She’d only explain, unperturbed as ever, that curtsying was reserved for more elegant times or some such social rubbish. I didn’t care to sit through another lecture, so I swept into a seat with as much restraint as I could muster.

Paper crinkled under my elbow.

Bless the butler who had managed this household for as long as I’d lived in it. Washington Barrett Booth and his wife, Esther, had always been here. They hadn’t raised me in the same way as the hired nannies, but I loved them both as if they had.

And Booth never failed to supply me with the morning paper.

Fanny thought it the dominion of gentlemen to be bothered with the news. I thought
that
archaic and useless. Still, I gave her the courtesy of a smile as I replied, “Good morning, Fanny. Did you sleep well?”

“Quite, thank you. And yourself, my dear?”

Terribly. “Just fine, thank you,” I lied. Bold, black print caught my eye. My fingers itched to open the paper, but the uneven
step-thunk
,
step-thunk
of Booth’s familiar approach halted me. “Good morning, Booth,” I chirped.

The butler was at least sixty years old, if he was a day. Unlike many men of an age, he had a full head of thick, white leonine hair, and the most impressive sideburns I’d ever seen. His clothing was never anything but distinguished and neat, his hands gloved, and his manner impeccable.

Only the ornate brass crutch affixed to the carefully hidden stump of his right knee marred the effect. He’d lost his leg at war. I felt it gave him the appearance of savage nobility, like a gentleman pirate, and told Booth so when I first met him.

He hadn’t laughed. Very gravely, he bowed and thanked me graciously for my assessment, thereby winning my thirteen-year-old heart forever.

Now, his gray eyes twinkled quietly as he set a silver tray at my elbow. “Good morning, miss,” he replied. “Madam.”

Fanny sipped at her tea, inclining her head, but I gave the man my brightest smile. Meal laid out, he turned and once more faded out of sight.
Step-thunk, step-thunk.

“You aren’t going to read that swill while you eat, are you?”

I looked up from the paper I had unfolded across my lap, blinking as innocuously as I knew how. “It’s not swill, Fanny. How else is a girl to understand what’s happening in the world around her?”

She grimaced, lips pinching together the way she did when she swallowed an argument, and waved a weathered hand at me. “If you must. At least eat. It will be a long time until dinner.”

“I’ll be sure to take tea on time,” I said, but my eyes were skimming the print across the newspaper. The
London Times
spared no ink for the broadsheet. “ ‘Ghastly Murder in the East End,’ ” I read aloud. “Dreadful mutilation of a woman.”

Her teacup clattered loudly. “Cherry, really.” The reproach in Fanny’s voice was enough. I shrugged, reaching around the paper to collect a wedge of toast, smeared liberally with jam. Strawberries, I noted with pleasure. My favorite.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Shall we focus on today’s schedule?”

I knew better than to speak with my mouth full, so I said nothing, knowing the woman could carry a conversation all by herself with ease.

The paper called the murderer “Leather Apron.” Hardly helpful. That could be any one of a number of working-class men below the drift. Betsy’s own husband was a journeyman blacksmith, and I was sure he owned at least one apron made of leather to keep the sparks at bay.

“Now, we have an appointment with Madame Toulouse this week,” Fanny continued briskly. “Be sure to consider carefully your wardrobe. We’ll want at least three new dinner gowns and as many day dresses as pique our interest.” She paused to sip at her tea. “The
Ladies’ Monthly Review
has featured a new gown from Paris. The Directoire fashion is returning.”

“I want tea gowns,” I mumbled around the sweetened toast.

“Not with your mouth full.” I winced behind the paper and swallowed hastily, but she was already adding, “Absolutely not. Tea gowns are nothing more than indecency cloaked as fashion. They are not appropriate for an unmarried lady, and we’ve better things to purchase for you than gowns that will never see the light of day.” Without missing even a breath, she added, “And speaking of going out, the Honorable Theodore Helmsley has sent an invite to a formal.”

I rolled my eyes from behind the safety of the paper. “He’s just Teddy.”

“He is a viscount’s son, albeit the youngest of three and unlikely to inherit anything.” Fanny’s china clinked, this one a firm sound that suggested she was once more following her own path of conversation.

My chaperone’s every gesture was a dialect in and of itself.

“Which baffles the mind,” she continued. “Your relationship with him defies explanation. Why on earth are you wasting your time on a man who stands to inherit nothing?”

“I don’t intend to marry him, Fanny,” I said, but only absently exasperated. My attention focused on the article. A woman, one of many prostitutes in the East End, had been found with her throat brutally slashed. Gruesome.

“Well, if he hasn’t asked for your hand by this time,” Fanny said briskly, “it’s unlikely that he’d be so inclined to offer anytime soon. You’re twenty years old, my dear, and take it from me—”

The prostitute’s entrails had been wound around her neck? I grimaced, the toast suddenly ash in my mouth. I swallowed it down with effort, but the details in the print were too horrible to put down. Organs shredded like so much raw meat. Vast quantities of blood, as if murdered in a rage.

“—Are you at all listening to me?”

“Yes, of course, Fanny,” I murmured.

I knew a great many of the streetwalkers of the East End. Not all, of course; there were far too many women selling themselves for me to know more than a passing face or recognize a distinct call in the night. Women driven below by the higher wages earned turning tricks for coin, or exiled from a society unable to forgive the transgressions of independent thought.

I couldn’t turn my back on them.

Especially since I knew I was only an outed secret away from the same fate.

“Cherry.”

I scanned the broadsheet again. It didn’t give me a name. Who was killed? The odds were low that I knew her, but then again, such a brutal murder had to have clues. Perhaps I could investigate.

“Cherry?”

And who was Leather Apron? Was it in any relation to the terrible murder of the August before? The broadsheet seemed to suggest that the two were related, and certainly the details were equally as gruesome—

“Cherry St. Croix!”

I jerked the paper down, crumpled it in my lap and sat straighter in my chair. “Yes, madam,” I said smartly.

Fanny’s eyes glittered in dangerous warning. Her rigid posture never bent so much as a millimeter, but I could sense her genteel bristle even from across the long table. “You haven’t,” she said with the icy control I’d learned to recognize at a young age, “heard a single word I’ve said, have you?”

I wracked my memory. Cinnamon-peppered clouds of laudanum and the newsprint words were all I found. “No, madam,” I replied. Very quietly, I pushed the newspaper off my lap and reached for my tea.

Fanny’s eyes slitted. “Earl Cornelius Kerrigan Compton is returned from his station with Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. He is, as you might have known if you paid any such attention to the news that matters, the eldest son of the Marchioness Northampton.”

It took every iota of control I had not to cringe.