by Anne Gracie
She swung one leg over the sill, heaved and she was in. She crouched a moment in the darkness, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the gloom, breathing deeply until her racing heart slowed.
Now to seek what she had come for. She crept toward the dressing table.
“Have you come to kill me?” The hoarse whisper coming out of the darkness almost stopped Abby’s heart. She swung around, scanning the room, braced to flee. Nothing moved, only shadows lit by the faint shimmer of moonlight from the windows where she’d pulled back the curtains. No sign of anyone.
“I said, have you come to kill me?” It came from the bed. Sounding more irritated than frightened.
“No, of course not!” Abby whispered back. She tiptoed closer to the bed, straining her eyes in the darkness. What she’d taken for a bundle of clothes piled on the bed was an old woman lying awkwardly, fallen between her pillows, her bedclothes rumpled in a twist.
“You’re a gel. Wearing breeches, but I can still tell you’re a gel.”
“Yes.” Abby waited. If the woman screamed or tried to raise the alarm she’d dive out of the window. It was risky, but better than being hanged or transported.
“You’re not here to kill me?”
“No.”
“Pity.”
Abby blinked. “Pity?”
“A dog in my state would be put out of its misery with a bullet.” There was a pause. “You don’t have a bullet, do you?” Said with an edge of hopefulness.
“No, and even if I did, I wouldn’t shoot you.” She wouldn’t—couldn’t shoot anyone.
The old lady sighed. “So you’re just here to steal?”
“Y—er—” Abby bit her lip. The bald truth of it made her uncomfortable.
“I doubt there’s anything left to make it worth your while.”
By now, Abby’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom. The old woman was right. The room contained a lot of heavy furniture, thick with dust, and not very much else. No polished silver bibelots or small, valuable ornaments, no strings of jewelry, and just one painting on the wall, a watercolor, fairly amateurish, of a young boy. Nothing that a desperate young woman could slip into a pocket and steal away with. Not even a valuable rug on the floor. No rug at all, only dust.
From the outside this house had looked quite grand, if rather old.
But the place reeked of neglect. Abby wrinkled her nose.
That wasn’t all it reeked of. The old woman stank. Clearly she’d been bedridden for some time, and whoever was taking care of her—well, if anyone ought to be shot—
“Could I have some water?”
“Of course.” Abby filled a glass from a jug on a side table.
The old lady reached for it, a trembling claw of a hand.
“Here, let me help you.” Abby slid an arm beneath the old woman’s shoulders, raising her so she could drink, holding the glass to her lips. She was all bones and skin, as light and frail as a bird.
She drank thirstily, the whole glassful. “Thank you,” she said with a gasp, and subsided weakly. “I needed that.”
Abby smoothed the pillows and tugged the bedclothes into a more comfortable arrangement. The old lady watched her from huge sunken eyes that glittered in the faint light.
“Odd sort of burglar you are. Breeches aside.”
Abby didn’t reply. She refilled the glass and set it on the table next to the bed, moving a tea tray out of the way.
“Beginner, are you?”
Abby said nothing. For an old, sick woman she was very acute.
The tray contained a spoon, a cup and a bowl of something that looked like wallpaper paste, dried and crusted around the rim. She picked it up and sniffed cautiously.
“Gruel.” The old woman pulled a face. “Disgusting muck.”
It certainly looked and smelled unappetizing. And old.
“How long has it been here?” Abby asked.
“Since this morning. They’ll bring more up tomorrow.” She sniffed. “I won’t eat that either.”
No wonder she was so thin and frail. “Who brings the food—your family?”
The old lady gave a snort of mirthless laughter. “Servants. Got to keep me alive, don’t they? Otherwise they won’t get paid.”
“You have servants?” Abby wasn’t sure she believed her. What kind of servants would leave their employer in this state?
She tiptoed to the door, opened it and peered out into the corridor. The chill night air hung still and silent, no sign of life. The floor was thick with dust here too. She crept down the corridor and looked into the next room. It smelled musty and unused. The furniture sat shrouded in dusty holland covers.
She checked every room along the corridor until she came to the stairs. All were the same: neglected, dusty, unused.
There couldn’t be servants. Nobody had cleaned here in months.
She returned to the old woman’s bedchamber. “Is there anything else I can get you before I leave, Mrs. . . ?”
The old lady held out her hand in a courtly gesture. “Davenham, Lady Beatrice Davenham, my dear. How do you do?”
Abby took the old lady’s hand, started to introduce herself, “Miss—” and just in time recalled her circumstances. “How do you do. I’m sorry, Lady Beatrice, but I can’t tell you my name.”
“Perfectly understandable, given your current profession. So, what are you going to do?”
“Do?” For a moment Abby couldn’t think what she meant.
“Well, you didn’t climb in my window just to bring me a glass of water, did you, Miss Burglar?”
“Oh, that. I don’t know.” Despair filled her throat. What was she going to do? Jane . . .
“You weren’t born to this life. You’ve the accent of a lady.”
Abby bit her lip.
“So why take such a risk? You must be desperate.”
Abby shrugged. She wasn’t going to admit or explain anything. Lady Beatrice might be physically incapacitated, but she was very sharp. And Abby, even though she hadn’t yet stolen a thing, had committed a serious crime.
All for nothing. There was nothing here to take. Sick dread washed over her. If she couldn’t get the money for the doctor . . . She had to get back to Jane.
“Lady Beatrice, I have to go now,” she whispered, for all the world as if she were taking leave after paying a morning call.
A three a.m. morning call.
She hesitated. “Is there anyone I could contact for you? The doctor, perhaps? How long since he was here?” A doctor would surely come for a titled old lady, even if she had no money. Surely?
Lady Beatrice shrugged thin shoulders. “Weeks? Months? Don’t remember.”
“What about family? Is there someone I could contact on your behalf?”
“No family left. Just my nephew, Max, in India or the spice islands or some such foreign place.”
“I could write to him if you had an address.”
She dismissed Max with a wave of her hand. “It wouldn’t make any difference. He’s been gone for years. He hasn’t even written in . . . I don’t know how long.”
“Friends, then? You must have friends you could call on for help.”
Lady Beatrice snorted. “I haven’t had a caller in . . . I don’t remember . . . months? Everyone’s forgotten me.” A sliver of pale moonlight caught the gleam of a tear as it slid slowly down the withered cheek. She scrubbed it fiercely away. “But I don’t need anyone. I’m all right as I am.”
Abby didn’t bother to contradict her. It was obvious to both of them that Lady Beatrice was far from all right, but a person’s pride was to be respected. “Surely there’s someone I could write to.”
“There’s no one. I’ll die soon enough and then I’ll be no trouble to anyone.” A sigh wheezed out of her. “I’m sorry your visit was in vain, Miss Burglar.” She lifted a wizened claw, held it up against the faint light from outside and looked at her fingers as if puzzled. “Don’t know where my rings went. You would have been welcome to them.”
“Good-bye, my dear, thank you for calling on me.” As gracious as if Abby had indeed made a morning call.
Morning. It was almost dawn. Birds were waking, chittering noisily in the half dark. They said people often died just before the dawn. Mama had.
Her throat tight with dread, Abby rapidly made her way down the drainpipe and back across the wall. She raised the attic window and wriggled back inside.
Damaris, wrapped in a shawl against the chill, crouched beside Jane’s pallet. Jane was no longer tossing or muttering. She lay on her pallet, still and silent. As Abby dropped to the floor the other girl rose and turned toward her. Her face was wet with tears.
A fist closed around Abby’s heart. “Oh, no . . . Oh, Jane . . .”
“Her fever’s broken,” Damaris whispered. “She’s sleeping. She’s going to be all right.”
* * *
The illness that had come on so rapidly went almost as fast, and by the end of the next day, Jane had woken from a long, healing sleep and was able to sit up and talk and drink a little soup.
Unfortunately Damaris had let slip to Jane and Daisy what Abby had done. Jane was shocked. “Abby! You didn’t! You went out to steal?”
Abby glanced at Damaris, who mouthed a silent apology. Abby shrugged. “You were so ill, I had to do something.”
“You climbed across all them rooftops? Over that wall? In the dark?” Daisy shook her head, half in admiration, half disapproving. “I never would’ve believed it, miss. I thought you was respectable to the backbone.”
Abby flushed. She’d thought so too, until recently. “Respectability is a lot easier when you have money.”
“But what if you were caught?” Jane said.
“We had no money, Jane. I had to do something.”
“Have you forgotten what happened to Papa? What if you’d been shot? And all for nothing.” She dashed a tear away.
Abby bit her lip. There was no way to explain how desperate she’d felt. Jane had only a hazy memory of her illness, and now, even for Abby, with her sister’s eyes bright and clear instead of clouded with fever, that desperation felt almost like a bad dream.
“Promise me you’ll never do such a risky thing again,” Jane said. “Thank goodness nobody saw you.”
Abby dropped her gaze, but not quickly enough.
Jane gasped. “Abby, no! Someone saw you? Who?”
“An old lady—Lady Beatrice Davenham—but it’s all right; she won’t tell.”
“How do you know?” Jane demanded.
“Did she see you climb back in here?” Damaris asked.
“She’ll report you,” Daisy said. “We’ll have to leave this place.”
“No, no, truly she won’t tell a soul,” Abby assured them. “She even offered me her rings, only she didn’t have any.”
“So she’s barmy?” Daisy said hopefully.
“No, quite the opposite, at least she seemed so to me at the time, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if she might be deluded after all.”
She told them about Lady Beatrice. “And I can’t tell whether she’s living in that big old house alone, ill and poverty-stricken, or whether she really has got servants who are neglecting her dreadfully. Someone gives her gruel, but it’s awful and she doesn’t eat it. Nobody cleans her room—it’s thick with dust—and they certainly don’t wash her; she stinks. And if there are servants, they leave her in the dark from dusk until dawn, and her water jug was not even on the bedside table, within reach.”
There was a short silence; then Damaris said, “You liked this old lady, didn’t you?”
Abby nodded. “There’s—I don’t know—something gallant about her. You should have seen the way she introduced herself.” She glanced at her sister. “It could have been the queen’s drawing room, Jane, she was so elegant and assured. But she’s desperately unhappy. She asked me to shoot her, to put her out of her misery.”
The girls fell silent.
Daisy frowned. “You’re not thinking of doin’ something stupid again, are you, Miss Abby? I mean, we can’t even help ourselves at the moment.”
Abby sighed. “I know. Things are desperate enough for us without taking on anyone else’s troubles. But I can’t stop thinking about her. At least we all have one another; she’s alone and ill and bedridden and in desperate trouble.”
“You can’t go back there,” Jane said quickly.
“I can’t leave her like that, Jane,” Abby said. “I just can’t. If you’d seen her, you’d feel the same.”
Jane gave her a troubled look. “But what can you do?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m going to call on her tomorrow and see what I can find out. Then I’ll think of something.”
“Nothing illegal?” Daisy warned.
Abby smiled. For a girl with such a shady background, Daisy was remarkably straitlaced. “No, I promise.” Once had been nerve-racking enough.
“And what are we going to do?” Damaris said quietly. “It’s obvious the plan to go to Bath won’t work. We’re worse off now than we were six weeks ago.”
They fell silent.
Damaris said, “I have no claim on any of you. If I leave—”
“And me,” Daisy added. “I’m nothing to any of you either, just—”
“No!” Abby cut her off. “The two of you gave me my sister back in the first place. And since Jane’s illness I’m even more determined we must stay together. I don’t know what I would have done without you. What if it had been you who caught the fever, Damaris? Or Daisy? And you’d been alone?”
Each girl’s face showed she knew what that would have meant.
Abby linked her arms through theirs. “I know things are about as bad as they can be, but please, no matter what, let us stay as a family, as sisters?”
They glanced at one another and nodded. “Sisters.”
“But not if you reckon on doing anything against the law,” Daisy said firmly. “I ain’t never been a thief and I ain’t starting now. I don’t want to get transported to the other side of the world.”
Abby laughed. “Don’t worry; there’s no danger of that.”
Chapter Four
“What one means one day, you know, one may not mean the next. Circumstances change, opinions alter.”
—JANE AUSTEN, NORTHANGER ABBEY
Malacca, formerly in the Dutch East Indies
“Glaring at it won’t make it any more legible.” Patrick Flynn sipped his rum punch and added, “Though mebbe you’re trying to make it burst into flames, in which case . . .” He gave his friend a sardonic look.
Max, Lord Davenham, took no notice. He scowled at the letter. He threw it down, glared at it again, then snatched it up and held it to the light, trying for the dozenth time to make out the words that had been washed away when some damned fool had let the letter fall into seawater, somewhere on the journey from London. Only half had been dunked, which meant that half the letter was legible and the other half had the words washed away, leaving only blurs of faint lilac, water stains and traces of salt. And because the letter had been folded, the legibility came in strips, with every third sentence petering out into a lilac wash for several lines before commencing again, usually on some new subject.
“It’s the first letter I’ve had in months, dammit! And I can’t read a blasted thing.”
“If it’s business—”
“It isn’t.”
“Ah.” Flynn leaned forward and pushed his friend’s glass, so far untouched, toward him.
“Damn, but it’s sticky today.” The third in the partnership of Flynn & Co. Oriental Trading, Blake Ashton, flopped loosely into a comfortable cane chair, turned it for better access to the sea breeze and signaled a servant to bring him a drink. “Roll on, wet season.”
His drink arrived. He drained the glass, ordered another and glanced at the pile of l
etters in front of Max. “Anything interesting?”
Max growled something unintelligible, picked up the water-stained letter again, held it to the light again and scowled at it for a long moment—again.
Blake Ashton glanced at Flynn and raised an eyebrow.
“From London,” Flynn said. “From a lady. But someone dropped it in water, and though it’s dry now, all the interesting bits have been washed away. Or so I gather.” He jerked his head at Max. “He hasn’t shared.”
Blake’s brows rose further. “A lady, eh? You dark horse, Max.”
Max tossed the letter on the table with an exclamation of disgust. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not that sort of letter.”
“How can you tell?” Flynn murmured provocatively. “Since you can’t read most of it.” He turned to Blake. “Definitely a lady’s hand, and in a beautiful shade of lilac.”
Blake chuckled. Max slanted Flynn a black look. “She’s not that sort of lady.”
Flynn’s green eyes glinted. He swirled his rum punch. “How do you know? You haven’t been home in years. She might be a widow now, and longing for the handsome youth who first captured her heart, or a young lady who’s been nursing a tendre for you since she was a tender wee thing in pigtails.”
“There’s nobody like that,” Max said brusquely.
Blake gave him a sharp look. “But I thought—”
Max cut him off. He’d let something slip once and Blake had probed about it ever since. But in nine years Max had told nobody the full tale of his devil’s bargain, and he didn’t intend to start now. “It’s from an old lady. Some friend of my aunt’s.”
“Oh.” Flynn immediately lost interest. He leaned forward and pushed the pile of business correspondence toward Max. “So, are we ready to start?”
Max nodded, though his mind was far from easy about that letter. Particularly the line, I fear they are taking shameless advantage of your . . .
Your who? His aunt? He couldn’t tell; it was all blurred. But he could read enough of it to recognize that it was from Lady Beddington, a longtime crony of his aunt’s, and who else would Lady Beddington be writing to him about, if not his aunt?