“Truly charming?” Alexandra challenged, “Or simply in comparison with your other conversation companion? My inscrutable brother-in-law.”
Cecelia wheezed out a nervous giggle, leaving the question unanswered. “Speaking of him, Genny, I’ll say the extra cleaning staff did a smashing job. One could never tell that only yesterday this entire place was crawling with police.”
With him.
She could feel his presence here. A sword over her head. A threat in her ear. A liquid weight low in her belly.
A thrilling, perplexing clench between her thighs.
I kissed Ramsay.
“The police did less damage than I feared,” Genny said with a relieved sigh. “More clutter than anything. We were even able to open for the evening. Now, let me take you on the tour.”
Belowstairs at Miss Henrietta’s School for Cultured Young Ladies was a revelation.
Because it was, in fact, a school for cultured young ladies. And uncultured ones. Older mothers. Immigrants. And people who might otherwise be sent to the workhouse.
Cecelia was barely aware of the enthusiastic Lilly joining their tour group as Genny led her and the Rogues past classrooms packed to the gills with women and, yes, even little girls, describing each class with aplomb and pride.
The ingenious arrangement both dazzled and humbled Cecelia. Some ladies sewed elaborate costumes, presumably for the employees abovestairs, training to be seamstresses and modistes. Others toiled in the kitchen with the chef, feeding the students, employees, and customers lavish meals while learning about a career in service to a grand house.
There were ongoing lessons in deportment, speech, civics, penmanship, and basic mathematics.
Genny led her past rooms of foreign ladies learning English, and beyond that, women operating a mock switchboard that resembled the one for the new telephone service the government had begun installing in the city.
Cecelia paused there, hoping to catch her breath as she took it all in. How brilliant. How utterly—
“One wonders”—Francesca’s sharp tone cut through her thoughts as her friend regarded Genny with narrow-eyed suspicion—“how these women, the young girls especially, afford their tuition.”
“The house pays it,” Lilly rushed to answer. “And men aren’t allowed belowstairs. Not ever. Even all the instructors are women.” She glanced over the line of ladies pulling large plugs from the switchboards and reconnecting them. Some worked with confidence, and others struggled, squinted, and became flustered beneath the regard of visitors.
To ease them, Cecelia moved down the hall away from the classrooms, toward a large arched door at the back of the manse. “How extraordinary,” she marveled, strange and unwanted tears threatening to brim in her eyes as the enormity of her new position impressed itself upon her. She turned to Lilly.
“You pay for their educations by—by entertaining the wealthy with vice? How do you feel about the arrangement?”
“It’s our choice and we make it.” Lilly’s answer rang with resolution.
Cecelia paused, searching the girl’s kohl-lined hazel eyes for fear or deception.
“Why?” Alexandra whispered.
“Why give any of those hard-won earnings to people you don’t care about?” Francesca pressed further. “Are you quite certain Henrietta doesn’t—didn’t force you to?”
Lilly’s eyes darkened, and her wig trembled with her outrage as she stepped from beneath the duchess’s touch. “I have the most honest profession in the world, Your Grace,” she answered with a dignified calm, though it was obvious she’d been offended. “I’d rather dress in pretty clothes than sew them. And I’d much rather fleece wealthy men for money than serve their food or clean out their chamber pots. I like what I do. Most days I love it. Show me many people who are so lucky.”
“Truly?” Cecelia asked, a bit heartened by the emphatic declaration. “Do many of the other employees feel the same?”
Lilly patted her on the arm. “Here at Miss Henrietta’s, we’re lavished with handmade clothing tailored just to us. We get to sleep late and play all night. We’re served meals that any toff would be proud to eat. We’re provided rotating days off and medical care when we need it. This is far better than what’s out there on the streets or in factories. All that’s required of us is to keep our mouths closed, our ears and eyes open, and we each give an equal percentage of our earnings to the running of the school.”
“Well…” Francesca breathed in disbelief. “I’ll be buggered.”
Genny stepped forward, smoothing her hands over the lavender bodice that accentuated the pink hues in her ivory skin. “Many of the girls here are the daughters, mothers, sisters, or other kin of the women who work or have worked upstairs. The customers often lavish the lucky girls with jewelry, money, and gifts that they’re allowed to keep or send to their families.”
“But … what about the other day, Lilly? You’re not expected to … service the clientele?”
Her brown shoulders shook with laughter as she met Genny’s eyes. “That was my own business, ma’am. Some women find a full-time keeper, and a few rare ones get themselves husbands.”
“Husbands?” Alexandra gasped.
Lilly let out a guffaw, the only slip in her articulate and cultured manner thus far that whispered of a life once lived in a very different part of London. “I receive more marriage proposals monthly than London’s most sought-after debutantes, I’d wager. But I have too many men I enjoy in my bed to tie myself to just one.”
Cecelia found herself filling with a strange well of emotion. Relief, she initially thought. Then pride. And after that … joy. Her legacy wasn’t simply a den of vice, it was an entire philanthropic endeavor. How brilliant. She could think of no other word but that. Brilliant.
Marvelous, perhaps.
And terrifying. That a man could take this all from her. A man of single-minded resolve and fathomless fortitude. A man on a relentless quest for justice. Bedeviled with an almost pathological aversion to what he considered sin.
And also, an unspeakably wicked tongue.
I kissed Ramsay.
“Would you care to see upstairs now?” Genny offered, gesturing to the arched doors at the end of the corridor.
“Lead on,” Cecelia murmured, clustering close to Alexandra and Francesca as they followed Genny out into the garden square in the center of the building protected on all sides by the manse.
The cool of the gardens caressed her face, the high walls of the edifice creating shade even in the summer. The lush evergreen grass and vibrant blossoms reminded Cecelia of another garden.
Cecelia’s gaze locked to the hedgerow where she’d first spied Lilly with Lord Crawford. She stared at the spot, fixated by a sight transposing itself over the memory. A man with gold in his hair and ice in his eyes. And the woman—the woman had a familiar form and features.
The ones she looked at in the mirror every morning.
A copulation that had never taken place. And never would. Because Sir Cassius Gerard Ramsay wasn’t the type of man to dally out of doors.
He wasn’t the type to dally at all.
Except …
“I kissed Ramsay!”
The gardens fell silent. Not just silent. But still. Too still.