Without warning, the last grains of her bravado trickled away.
She could not force her voice past that word; it was lodged in her throat like a bone.
She brought her hands up and tipped her face into them. She was shocked to find they were like ice, given how scalding the shame was.
She breathed into her hands. She heard only the tiny cracks and pops of the fire.
“. . . duel?” Mrs. Hardy supplied gently, after a moment.
Mariana nodded slowly, resignedly, painfully.
She sighed, then pulled her hands away from her face.
To find that Mrs. Durand was holding out to her a snifter containing about one gulp of brandy.
Mariana took it. Sniffed it. Then mimed an ironic toast and bolted it.
“Oh, thank you,” she gasped. “That’s better.”
Neither of their faces betrayed a flicker of judgment. Though she wasn’t certain she detected undue sympathy, either.
Angelique poured the tea. “Sugar?”
“Yes, please. You’re too kind,” she said, amazed, near to tears now. “You’re being so kind.” She looked out toward the foyer. “I fear I frightened your maid. Will she be . . .”
“Oh, I expect Dot is more thrilled than scandalized. She reads the gossip to the maids in the kitchen every morning, and you are a particular favorite,” Angelique said. “We have followed the trajectory of your career since your role alongside Madame LeCroix last year.”
“A bit like the tea tray, the trajectory of my career,” Mariana said ruefully.
At first it had been thrilling to see her name in the gossip columns—she’d been compared to Angelica Catalani—the great Catalani!—for her pureness and depth of tone and her pretty face. She hadn’t known she was only skeet. That it was society’s hobby to launch a person skyward, and then aim and fire and shatter them into smithereens just for the joy of watching them fall.
“We’ve actually had the pleasure of hearing you sing, Miss Wylde,” Mrs. Durand said. “We didn’t recognize you without that magnificent wig and the beauty patches. You died very beautifully onstage. Nearly everyone in the theater had a handkerchief out.”
Mariana was thrilled. “Oh, then you saw the afternoon performance? I was meant to go in Madame Wilhelm’s place for the remainder of the run. Until things . . . took a turn.” Two nights later, as it so happened.
“My husband, Captain Hardy, was offered use of a box owned by an esteemed acquaintance. And while normally he would have needed to be press-ganged into attending an opera, he wanted to please me. So we went. As did Mrs. Durand and her husband, Lord Bolt.”
“It was the aria from Giancarlo Giannini’s new opera. Isn’t it an exquisite piece?” Mariana said wistfully. “He’s gifted . . . the knave,” she added darkly.
Dot had made a somewhat sidling return to the foyer, trailing three other sidling maids. They’d brought a ladder, which they propped up. They began to mill about the chandelier.
“Funny. It usually only requires one maid to douse the chandelier lights,” Delilah murmured acerbically.
“I can’t remember the last time I heard anything so beautiful,” Angelique told Mariana. “I can truthfully say it was an honor to hear you sing, Miss Wylde.”
Mariana did not think compliments and tributes would ever lose their gloss, even though she had come to realize she deserved them. But taking a compliment was always that moment a bit like a curtain being whipped aside in a dark room to reveal a brilliantly sunny day: a certain inner bracing was required to accommodate their full splendor.
“Well. That was better than brandy for warming my cockles, Mrs. Durand. Thank you.”
Delilah got up and closed the door to the room against the shamelessly eavesdropping maids.
Mariana had experienced good luck and bad luck often enough in her life to know that one could easily masquerade as the other. She wasn’t certain what tonight’s events would turn out to be, but given the turn the conversation was taking, she was starting to like her chances of at least getting a room.
Still, she thought she’d better settle that part straightaway.
“You have been very kind to me, so I shall be straight with you. I’ve no other place to go at the moment. I’ve enough to pay for a room for a . . . night or two?” she hazarded.
They had the best game faces, she thought admiringly. They said nothing at all, pleasantly.
“If you can spare a room—any little closet that would fit me would suit, the scullery, this lovely room—and should you not wish to keep me for a guest, I shall set about finding a place on the morrow. If I attempt to return to my own room on Haywood Street, I think the crowd outside would tear me to pieces. And as of now . . .” She drew in a breath. “I’m worried I won’t be allowed to sing in England again.”
“Both would be tragedies,” Angelique said sweetly.
It might have been the brandy, but Mariana laughed. Something about the very dark dryness of that was fortifying.
In fact, something about the place, these women, and this little room, made her feel certain she was safe. That she’d done the right thing at last after a series of inadvertently doing quite the wrong things.
Although this sensation could also be the brandy.
“We sometimes negotiate fees based on special circumstances, Miss Wylde,” Delilah added.
Angelique darted a look at Delilah.
“Here’s a question I’ve been mulling, Miss Wylde. What brings you to The Grand Palace on the Thames? It’s hardly on the beaten path, so it’s unlikely one would stumble across it as they fled. It would have been your specific destination.”
Good heavens, these were clever women.
She took a breath. Then reached beneath the coverlet she was gripping closed, found her reticule, and retrieved the folded scrap of newspaper.
“This was wrapped around a little drinking glass I purchased in a shop some weeks ago. I know you are not quite like me . . . but I kept it, because when I read it I thought . . . here is another woman who has had a complicated life. Who is more than the newspapers would have her seem. And now she’s married to Lord Bolt, because it’s something everyone seems to know now. They had the name of your establishment wrong, but my hack driver, Mr. Malloy, somehow knew how to find it anyway.”
Delilah glanced at Angelique worriedly. She already knew what it was. They both did. It was another of the hateful gossip sheets.
But Angelique, after a brief hesitation, took it from her.
“You must believe me when I say that I hope this does not stir painful memories for you, Mrs. Durand,” Mariana said.
For Angelique, this little paragraph had indeed been shocking. Painful. Terrifying, even.
Now, reading it, she realized that it had become a source of strength. Because it had exposed to the light an old, shameful wound, and in so doing, the wound had finally healed.
Lord Bolt was bound to blow and blow he did at White’s! Seems his devil’s blood got stirred when Lord Hallworth dared to reminisce about a certain Mrs. Angelique Breedlove, dead Derring’s former mistress and current mistress of a boardinghouse called The Rogue’s Palace on the Thames. Hallworth was pinned against the wall with his own cravat for the trouble. No duel was fought and Hallworth croaked out an apology. But there is one doxie in the world who can rest easy knowing Bolt will rush to her defense. Probably because he took Derring’s place.