“I always begin the morning with a stroll. It’s good for the constitution.”
“But it’s scarcely six o’clock. When did you rise?”
“Four. I always rise at four.”
It must be some kind of predilection of the rich and educated—making a study of self-denial. She’d seen such tastes on Charlotte Street—a hunger to pretend to be lower than one’s station. She hoped that were she ever possessed of abundance she would have the good sense to enjoy it. To dine on cream and sleep ’til noon and buy a pianoforte and play the dreamy songs that always filtered through her thoughts. She’d buy a cozy house of her own in London and a hundred books.
She’d live in a nest of music and ideas, answering to no one.
Henry helped her into the curricle. “Are you warm enough?” he asked, climbing up beside her.
“Toasty as a roasting lamb,” she sputtered through chattering teeth.
He frowned, seeming unsure how this was possible. “You’re … over-warm?”
“No, Henry. It would be impossible to be over-warm in this weather. I was attempting to amuse you with irony.”
She burrowed deeper in her ermine, so that only her eyes were exposed to the cold air. Her body ran cold at the best of times. She longed for warmth.
Henry, she noticed, barely seemed to shiver. A man of his build no doubt generated as much warmth as a brazier. She stole a look at his coat—an expensive wool by the looks of it—and ardently wished she could crawl inside it. Nothing like the warmth a man gave off, when one was freezing.
She slid a little closer to him, wondering if she might steal a bit of his heat for herself. She paused, waiting for him to object, but he did not seem to notice. She edged a little closer, until she could make out the feeling of his arm against her cloak. She paused, hoping if she went very, very slowly she might snuggle even closer, when a gust of wind came at them and buffeted her face with icy air.
“Bleeding cursed cockles,” she hissed, shrouding her face in Henry’s shoulder.
“Alice, please don’t curse,” Henry said so sharply she looked up.
His expression was aghast, though she could not make out if it was at her language, or at his own outburst, or at the fact that she was nearly in his lap.
She had not meant to shock him, nor to pounce on him. But now that she had, well. She rather liked it.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But it’s like the frozen steppes of Hell out here today.”
He gasped.
Literally gasped, like someone had punched him in the ribs.
“Alice,” he pronounced clearly, gravely, the way one might say it if one were training a dog. He moved away, detaching his body from her grip.
She slunk to her side of the carriage, pouting. She supposed she should take care not to further traumatize him with her corruption before he’d delivered her to Fleetwend, since he was doing her a kindness, and since it would not serve her to earn his ill will. She could be well-mannered for a few hours, even if she was an awful changeling child who had a dying mother and no feeling in her limbs.
Perhaps.
“Another hour and we’ll be at the next coaching inn,” Henry said gruffly. “You can warm up by the fire.”
“I’m fine,” she sighed. “I wasn’t complaining to you, just to the world in general. Ignore my rotted whinging. We haven’t time to spare. I need to get home to my sisters.”
He clicked his tongue, urging the horses into a slightly faster clip, though they were already at a trot.
“When is the last time you saw them?” he asked her. “Your sisters, I mean.”
Her heart gave a little gulp. Too long.
“It’s been over a year. I rarely return home.”
The time in London had flown by—feeling at once like an era, rich and memorable, and at the same time like a minute, over before she’d realized it had passed.
“That must be difficult,” Henry said.
Since he already found her thoroughly wicked, she would not tell him that the most difficult thing was that it had not been difficult at all.
It had been glorious.
The pinnacle of her life.
“When did you last visit home?” she asked, preferring to deflect the question than to further indict her character.
He hesitated. “Five years.”
She sucked in her breath. This was genuinely shocking.
“I’ve seen my mother at my cousin’s house. But my father has not wished me home.”
She could not help but shake her head. “Half a decade!”
“Yes, and not a day has passed that I did not wish it could be different. ’Tis a sad thing, to be away from one’s family.”
She sighed, not entirely agreeing but knowing that to object would further convince him of her wickedness. “Yes.”
“Why don’t you return more often?” he asked. “Does Mistress Brearley not grant you leave?”
She tensed at the implication her employer was anything but generous. “She grants me a week’s leave twice a year. As she does all her servants and artisans. But my family relies on my wages, so I prefer to work rather than to take it.”
“Artisans?” he asked, looking confused.
“The governesses and masters and others who see to members’ needs.”
He nodded quickly. “Ah, of course. Prostitutes.”
Perhaps she could remember he was a threat.
“Call them what you like—they don’t mind. But what they do requires more skill than rutting. It takes talent to read a person’s desires, even more to fulfill them, especially when it comes to ropes and whips and other things that can cause harm if not practiced with great care. Catrine, the rope mistress, was an acrobat who performed at the Theatre Royal. Eloise trained fine horses before she trained fine men to serve her—”
“And what of you?” he interrupted. “How is it that you came to work for Mistress Brearley?”
As he asked the question, a drop of something cold and wet landed on her nose.
Snow?
No, surely not. It rarely snowed this far south, even in the winter. She glanced up at the sky. It was flat and gray, cloudless and low.
“Mistress Brearley is a relation of my father’s family. I wrote to her seeking a position when my father died. It was my mother’s hope that I would go to London for some polishing. Learn to keep a gracious home for my future husband.” Stop being so damned odd and dreamy and wanton-skirted, or at least exhaust the impulse away from home, where she would not destroy the family’s prospects.
The expression this provoked from him could only be described as “ill.” “Your mother wished for you to prepare for matrimony by working for a whipping governess?”
Alice chuckled at his tone. “I assure you she was not aware of the nature of the establishment when I took the position.”
A tendon in his jaw spasmed. “Mistress Brearley lied about the position? I would have thought her above such tricks. Despicable, entrapping innocent girls.”
“No she certainly did not. Elena told me the truth when I wrote to her inquiring for a job, and I kept it from my mother. Mama would have forbidden me to go and I had no other connections in London.”
“Alice, why? Why would you wish to work in such a place, knowing what it was?” He sounded like this idea physically pained him.