“Oh, here come your defenders again,” she crowed. “Perhaps one of them will marry you and see how well your liberal views work when you’re mistress of his house.”
“I’m not interested in marrying a man who’s looking for a housekeeper,” I snapped. “You can have him. Apparently you have the requisite skills. Though apparently that hasn’t been enough to secure you a husband so far.”
Dunreaven’s eyes flickered up from the newspaper, and he gave me a warning look. Ease off, here be dragons. But too late now.
Millicent’s entire face sucked inward in momentary rage, then she shrilled, “Father! Astra’s maid has been passing around seditious materials below stairs and upsetting the other servants. She needs to be gone from the house, don’t you agree?”
Poor Caddonfoot, roused from his doze by the fire on the other side of the room, snuffled, blinked, and said: “What? What’s this? Astra’s … maid?”
“It’s nothing at all, Daddy—go back to sleep,” Cee implored.
“Yes, it’s nothing. Millicent’s just in a sniping mood,” Joyce added.
“Oh, right,” he mumbled as he dropped back off.
* * *
I took to the garden to stomp and smoke my rage out in the gathering twilight. The stars were just appearing, and I paused to look up and pick out Andromeda and Cassiopeia, winking back at me. Andromeda had faced far worse trials than I: her own parents had chained her up as a sacrifice to a sea monster. When held up against that, my own situation seemed ridiculous. But to be lectured about being lazy and useless by someone who had never earned a thing in her life! It made me want to hit something.
I puffed at my cigarette for a while, then looked down from the stars and saw Lord Dunreaven coming my way.
“I felt like a bit of fresh air,” he explained as he approached.
“You’ve had nothing but fresh air all day. You’re saturated with the stuff.”
“You can never have too much. I hear it gives you a good appetite and a glowing complexion.”
I couldn’t help but smile just a little.
“I’m sorry, would you rather be alone?” he asked.
“No, it’s all right.”
He, too, looked skyward. “Poor Cassiopeia, chained to her throne for all eternity.”
“That’s what happens when you upset the Nereids. Few things seemed to rile the old gods more than boasting you were better than them.”
He chuckled. “They were a very human lot.”
“Frighteningly so. All our frailties and squabbles paired with immense power.”
“All the better to remember not to upset them, then.”
“Have you come out to lecture me?” I asked sharply.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Good.”
My cigarette had burned down, and I stamped it out in the grass. From an inner pocket, Dunreaven retrieved a silver cigarette case decorated with a raised design of a sailboat. He flipped it open, held it toward me, then struck a match. As I leaned in to light my cigarette, I took the opportunity to study him more closely.
“Your eyes aren’t green,” I observed as he waved out the tiny flame. “I thought they were, last night, but they’re not. I think they’re hazel.”
“I am not what I first appear,” he told me as he lit a cigarette for himself.
“Oh? Are you a spy? Some kind of imposter?”
He smiled and the tip of his cigarette glowed. “Would you be more interested if I were?”
“Perhaps. I could write a novel about you, to fill my hours.”
“You couldn’t simply put a seafaring earl in your novel?”
“Literature is already full of earls and sailors.”
“It’s also full of spies and imposters.”
“True. But there are few spies and imposters who are also earls. With hazel eyes. Are you a socialist as well? That would make things really interesting.”
He shook his head. “I hate to disappoint you, but no.”
“Pity. So much for your literary immortality.”
“I’m sure the world is richer for that.”
I laughed.
A mist was creeping in, and I blamed that and the fact I was dressed in a bit of gossamer nothing for the goose pimples breaking out over my arms. I must have shivered, because Dunreaven suddenly put his cigarette in his mouth, removed his jacket, and draped it over my shoulders. I should have handed it back immediately, like a proper young lady. But it was still cozy warm from his body and smelled like woodsmoke and aftershave and something else I couldn’t quite identify—could it be sea spray, or was I imagining that?—so instead I found myself snuggling in and thanking him.
We walked a few moments in silence, then he asked, “Will you keep the maid?”
“Do you think I should get rid of her?” I countered.
“It’s not my decision.”
“That doesn’t stop most people from airing an opinion.”
He chuckled. “I’m not ‘most people.’”
“No, indeed. Most people wouldn’t have gone knocking on a young lady’s wall in the middle of the night.”
“You’ve found me out!” he cheered.
“You made it quite obvious at lunch.”
“It was never meant to be a great mystery.”
“Wasn’t it? Would you care to explain yourself? Or had the brandy and the fine Canova bust gone to your head?” I waved him on with the hand that held my cigarette.
“You strike me as the sort of woman who appreciates someone who does things a little out of the ordinary.” He grinned quite beautifully. “You enjoyed it didn’t you?”
I smiled blandly. “I admit nothing.”
“You will make me work for it!” he said, laughing.
“Of course! Aren’t I worth the effort?”
He took a long drag of his cigarette, making the end glow bright. “Very.” He stamped the finished cigarette out. “Now, is your maid worth it? All the trouble with Lady Millicent, I mean.” He indicated the house with a jerk of his head.
I sighed. “She’s an excellent maid, and it’s a difficult time for anyone to be unemployed. I would be sorry to lose her.”
“Well,” he said, “if she does the job she’s been hired for and you get on with her, then I say you should keep her, and let her believe what she wants. Just warn her about making waves in certain households.”
“My, my, a liberal-minded aristocrat. I feel like I’ve just seen a unicorn!”
“I told you, I’m not what I first appear.”
“Are you an eligible earl?”
“I suppose I am.”
“Then you are exactly what you first appear. It’s the second and subsequent glances that count.”
“And do I warrant a second glance?”
We had nearly reached the house, which saved me from answering. I tossed the cigarette away, shrugged out of the jacket and handed it back to him. “Thank you for the company, but if Millicent sees us coming back in together, she’ll have me taken to a cellar and shot tonight. So do be a gentleman and take another turn around the garden while I go in.”
He took the jacket, bowed low, and sauntered off.
* * *
The dressing gong rang just as I reached my room. Reilly was already there, setting out jewelry and fussing with my dress. As soon as she saw me, she stopped what she was doing and stood waiting for me to either fire her or start getting ready.
“Should we start with my hair?” I suggested, sliding onto the bench at the dressing table.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her sag slightly with relief. She sprayed a comb with a little perfume before working it through my hair, then fetched a curling iron warming on the radiator.
“Have you always been political?” I asked as she got to work reviving my waves.
“No, miss,” she answered with a soft laugh. “If you had asked me five years ago, I don’t know if I could have named my own member of Parliament.”
“What turned you into such a firebrand, then?”
She bit her lip as she focused on twirling a piece of hair just so around the iron. “The mines and the strike,” she finally answered. Off my questioning look, she went on, “Where I grew up, most of the men went down the mines. Sent underground as young as twelve to breathe the dust and the muck and break themselves with the haulin’.” Her accent was starting to thicken as she became more agitated. Letters dropped like flies. “I’ve known many gone down that way, come up coughin’ black ’n blood till ’e couldna speak mor’n three words together. There’s no sun on ’em, and when they’re ’urt, there’s no help. One lad who died in an explosion, ’is family was given three hundred ’n fifty pounds as compensation.”
I gaped. “Three-hundred and fifty pounds?” I might not know what stockings cost, but I was sure a human life was worth far more than that. And here I was, complaining about only having a thousand a year.
“Those that live do no better,” Reilly continued. “Their pay’s gone from six quid a week to less ’n four. So, they went on strike. You know there was a strike?”
“Yes, of course.” It was four years ago, but I still remembered people complaining about it. One neighbor of ours wailed about being unable to get to London for a shopping trip because all the transport workers had walked out. Others looked on the strike as a lark: a bit of a break from the routine of visits and parties. The boys temporarily took over driving buses, and the girls posed for photographs while punching tickets and serving tea to strikebreaking workers.
“They didn’t want trouble,” Reilly insisted, “but it was the only way to get anyone’s attention. But the strike didn’t do nothin’, and to keep their jobs the miners ’ad to take longer hours and worse pay.” She jabbed a pin into my hair a little too viciously, but it seemed wrong for me to wince. “My oldest brother ’as five little ’uns and can hardly afford to feed ’em. They cry because they’re ’ungry. I send what I can, but …” She shook her head. “The government passed a law that restricts strike action and picketin’, so nothin’ll ever change, not so long as the law’s there. That’s the law I want repealed.”
“But you just said the strike didn’t work,” I pointed out.
“Not this time, but maybe the next time or the next,” she said hopefully. “We ‘ave to keep tryin’, miss.”
I sat for a while in silence, absorbing that. Despite my sheltered upbringing, I wasn’t entirely unaware of the difficulties people were facing. Just the other day, I’d put a few coins in a cup held by a one-legged man I had come across near Oxford Street. In his other hand he’d held a sign: “War veteran. Please help.” There were three medals, polished to a sunbeam shine, pinned to his chest.
He was hardly alone. On trips to Leicester I’d seen plenty of people in the streets, begging. Some were in rags, while others had clearly dressed in their best, hoping that looking “respectable” would earn them more pity. But no matter what they wore, they all had the same look in their eyes. A hopelessness and despair. I noticed there seemed to be more of them in the last few years. I’d assumed these were the unfortunate unemployed. I hadn’t realized that even people with jobs couldn’t make ends meet.
And to think of women complaining about spoiled shopping trips while the children of their husbands’ employees cried from hunger! It actually gave me a bitter taste in my mouth. “I think perhaps you do need to do something,” I murmured, angrily tapping a lipstick against the polished surface of the dressing table. “Someone has to.”
Reilly’s watery eyes widened, as if she were shocked by that response.
I swiveled to face her. “Is there anything else I need to know? Now is the time for you to be completely honest with me.”
“I—” her eyes darted and she turned a little pale. “I was arrested, miss,” she said in a rush, flinching, as if she expected me to start battering her.
“Arrested? What for?”
“I went to a rally and things got … overheated,” she explained. “I hit a policeman with my umbrella, and he arrested me. I know I shouldnae ’ave done it, and I was sorry.”
“I’m sure you were,” I said. “Does all of this have anything to do with you changing jobs so often in the last two years?”
She hung her head and nodded. “My first mistress died, as I told you. I was at the second place when I was arrested. They found out because I was locked up overnight. My mistress was a kind lady, so she agreed to write me a reference and not say anything, but I had to go. At the next place they didn’t take kindly to me talkin’ to the other servants about unions. It were three months after that afore I saw your advertisement. I was nearly out of savings, and they wouldn’t let me have unemployment because I turned down a job as a skivvy.”
“And if you ran out of money, where would you go?”
Reilly shrugged and blinked fast, as though trying to hold back tears.
“Besides your former mistress, does anyone know about your arrest? Anyone who might talk to, say, Lady Millicent any time soon?”
She shook her head.
I tapped the lipstick again, thinking, then decided. “I’m not going to fire you, Reilly. But I think for the remainder of our time here you’d better keep to yourself and avoid mentioning petitions. And I should warn you that my aunt is not liberal-minded, so if she hears about you talking unions in her household, she may insist I send you on your way. What you do in your own time is your business, of course, but for everyone’s comfort, it may be best to remain subtle while we’re in London. Agreed?”
Reilly nodded.
“Right, then.” I stopped abusing the lipstick and started applying it. “There’s the second dressing gong now; I’d better hurry.”
“Yes, miss.”
Chapter Five
“Home again, head still firmly attached!” Toby crowed as I came in, trailing Reilly and the cab driver with the luggage. “The weekend must have gone better than I expected.”
“It passed without human bloodshed,” I confirmed.
He handed me a lit cigarette and ushered me into the drawing room. “Mother’s gone to feed and lecture the Great Unwashed, so feel free to savor that ciggie.”
I sank into an armchair and took a satisfying drag.
Toby lit a cigarette of his own and reclined on the sofa. “Right, then. Full report, if you please.”
I sighed. “Well, Millicent’s on the warpath; Joyce’s father kept looking at me like I was a pear tart with extra custard; I made friends with Belinda Avery; and the men bagged more than fifteen hundred birds.”
Toby laughed. “Not a bad time all around, then.”
“I suppose not.”
“And how’s Ducky? Did he find a pair of brain cells to rub together, or were you stuck with just the one all weekend?”
“Don’t be cruel, Toby.”
Toby gave me a look. “You’re not softening up, are you? I refuse to pull crackers with that man every Christmas for the rest of my life.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m certainly not galloping down the aisle with him. Someone should, though. Aunt El’s right: he’s lonely. He needs a nice girl who wants to fill his house with children and fawn over him.”
“Cecilia, then,” he said, laughing. “Or Belinda.”
I sat up, astonished. “Toby, that’s brilliant!”
“Is it? I’m fairly sure that’s the first and the last time anyone will say that to me.”
“No, really, Toby, that’s an excellent idea: Cee and Beckworth!”
He laughed. “Becoming a matchmaker now, are we?”
“Hardly. I think I’ll stop at just this match.”
“Still not interested in one of your own? I thought the arrival of that suggested otherwise.” He pointed to a large vase filled with lilies and asters on a side table. I tossed the finished cigarette into the fire and walked over to the bouquet.
“What’ve you done with the card?” I asked.
“As if I’d steal a card from you. Th
ere wasn’t one.”
“More secret admirer nonsense?” I rolled my eyes and returned to the chair.
Toby examined me for a moment, then handed over another cigarette. “Are you going to tell me who they’re from?”
“Lord Dunreaven, almost certainly. He favors secret messages.”
Toby frowned. “Dunreaven? The name’s familiar: give me a clue?”
“Earl in the royal navy. A literal golden boy.”
He mulled that over, then brightened. “Oh, Jeremy! Is he back on dry land? Good for him. I thought the sea would have swallowed him up, like all the other men in his family. I’m glad Poseidon spat him back out. We were at St. Dunstan’s together, you know. He was always good about defending the smaller boys from bullies. Knew how to throw a good punch when necessary. I wish he’d followed the rest of us to Harrow, I could have used the help.”
“Isn’t abuse part of the experience? Makes a man out of you and all that?”
“Well, it didn’t work for me. When that failed, Mother thought that Father dying would somehow provide motivation, but, well, I doubt the grindstone suffered for lack of my nose.” He smiled cheekily at me. “So, Dunreaven’s sending you messages and flowers, then? Mother will be over the moon when she hears!”
“Will she? Joyce says he doesn’t have much money.”
“And what is ‘not much money’ to Joyce?” Toby snorted. “Most of the grand old families are hard up anyway, especially if they lost someone in the war and had to pay all those death duties. Nobody really minds if a lord is penniless; he can trade on his title.”
“Lords are luckier than I, then,” I observed tersely. “Please don’t say anything to your mother, Toby. I don’t need her nagging about this. It was nothing, just a bit of flirtation, if even that.” I hoped he couldn’t see my cheeks pinkening at the memory of that warm, sea-spiced jacket wrapping around me. “And anyway, Millicent seems to have staked a claim, and it’s best that I not get further entangled with that one.”
“No, indeed. And on that note, were you going to tell me about Comrade Reilly, or were you hoping to keep that all to yourself?” He grinned wickedly as I gaped.
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