My Lady Thief

by Emily Larkin

  “And she chose—”

  “She chose to keep her daughter.”

  Grace moistened her lips. “What happened then?”

  Adam looked at the silver platter and the last macaroon, stranded amid a sea of crumbs. “Mrs. Knightley went to live with a friend of her husband’s, a nobleman. After a time, she became his mistress. By all accounts she was a very beautiful woman.”

  “And Bella?”

  “Was with her.”

  Grace was silent for a moment. “But that’s not so bad, is it?” she ventured. “Quite a number of married ladies have . . . have affaires and are still received everywhere.”

  He glanced at her. Where had she learned that? “True, but Mrs. Knightley had more than one protector over a number of years, and then, when her beauty failed her, she descended into London’s slums—taking her daughter with her.”

  Grace plucked at a thread on the arm of the sofa. “Was Mrs. Knightley a . . . a fallen woman in the slums?”

  “Yes,” Adam said.

  Grace bit her lip. She pulled the piece of thread free and wound it around her fingertip. “How long was Bella there?” she asked, not looking at him.

  “Until her mother died. Three or four years, I think. She was twelve when Westwick took her in.”

  “Twelve?” Grace said, glancing at him.

  Adam nodded, remembering the twelve-year-old Grace had been: shy, eager, innocent.

  “How horrible for Bella,” his sister said, her expression sober.

  Adam shrugged. “Westwick educated her, made her heir to his fortune when his sons died without issue, launched her into Society—”

  “No,” Grace said. “I meant, how horrible for Bella to lose both her parents.” She bit her lip and then smiled crookedly at him. “She was younger than I was when Mother died—and she didn’t have a brother.”

  Adam had no memory of his own mother’s death—he’d been in swaddling clothes—but he had a vivid recollection of Grace’s mother dying.

  He looked at his sister, remembering the lost, dazed expression in her eyes, the bleakness in her face, her silent grief as she’d clung to him—and remembering, too, the surge of love he’d felt for her, the fierce need to protect her.

  He cleared his throat. “No,” he said. “Miss Knightley didn’t have a brother.”

  Grace was silent for a moment. “I want to be friends with her.”

  Adam rubbed his brow. “Grace,” he said. “Miss Knightley isn’t good ton.” He hesitated, reluctant to tell her. “In London she’s known as—”

  “Miss Smell o’ Gutters. Yes, I know.”

  Adam winced. Shame heated his face. Miss Smell o’ Gutters. A name that could be laid at his door. No wonder she hates me.

  “I don’t care about that—or about any of it! Any more than Bella cares about what happened between me and Reginald.”

  Adam stared at her helplessly. “Grace . . .” One of his father’s favorite sayings pushed into his mouth: For heaven’s sake, try to behave as a St. Just! He bit it back.

  His sister stood, brushing crumbs from her lap. “Thank you for telling me about Bella.” She bent and kissed his cheek. “I must go. Aunt Seraphina is taking me shopping.” A smile, a swirl of sprigged muslin and golden ringlets, and she was gone.

  Adam sat for a moment, staring at the empty doorway. He lifted a hand to his cheek and lightly rubbed where Grace had kissed him. What had happened to the sister he knew? The tractable, biddable girl? The girl who looked to him for guidance and acquiesced obediently to his wishes?

  She’s growing up. She has a mind of her own.

  It was a thought that filled him with foreboding. The world was suddenly a dangerous place, full of traps for innocent and headstrong young girls.

  I need to find her a husband. Fast.

  Adam muttered a curse beneath his breath. And then he ate the last of the macaroons.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THAT AFTERNOON ARABELLA took her maid, Polly, her sketchbook and pencils, and the stolen ruby earrings to Kensington Gardens. “Come back in three hours,” she told the coachman.

  She strolled with Polly for ten minutes and then exited the gardens. The carriage, with the Westwick coat of arms glinting within its widow’s lozenge, was nowhere in sight.

  Polly hailed a hackney coach. “Rosemary Lane,” she told the jarvey as they climbed inside.

  Rosemary Lane was only a few miles from Kensington Gardens, but the slums of Whitechapel were as far from the grand squares of Mayfair as heaven was from hell. Arabella climbed down from the hackney and stepped over an open gutter, while Polly negotiated with the reluctant jarvey to return for them in an hour.

  Their destination was just off Rosemary Lane, a narrow old-clothes shop with cracked and boarded-over windows. Hinges squealed as Arabella pushed the door open, a bell jangled harshly overhead, and the smell of musty, unwashed clothes invaded her nose. The scents of stale sweat, old perfume, spilled alcohol, and tallow candles mingled sickeningly together. For a moment she had to pause, quelling the nausea that pushed up her throat.

  The shop was dimly lit, full of mounds of used clothing. Coats hung from door mantels and hooks in the ceiling, their cuffs shiny with wear. Racks crowded the room: worn shirts and faded flannel waistcoats, stained trousers, frayed dresses and yellowing petticoats. Scuffed shoes and boots with cracked soles lay in piles on the floor.

  Polly bustled in behind her and shut the door with another squeal of the hinges. “Sally,” she called out. “It’s us.”

  They changed in a small, cramped backroom, unbuttoning each other’s gowns and swiftly unlacing the short stays. Arabella hung her clothes—French muslin gown, linen chemise, cambric petticoat—carefully on hooks, and then stripped off her silk stockings and laid them over the back of a chair. The only item she didn’t remove was the pocket containing Lady Bicknell’s earrings, tied around her waist.

  Having undressed, they dressed hurriedly again, in the clothes of the poor. Arabella pulled on a coarse chemise, a discolored blue dress that was too large for her, rough woolen stockings, a battered pair of men’s lace-up boots, and a stained apron. She wrapped a ragged shawl around her head and shoulders. “Ready?”

  Polly rolled up sleeves that were too long for her and reached for her own shawl. “Yes.”

  They left the old-clothes shop through the back door, stepping into a dark and malodorous alley. Arabella linked her arm with Polly’s and set off briskly in the direction of Berner Street.

  The scuttling rats, the stinking piles of refuse, the rivulets of foul water running down the middle of the streets, were familiar. They didn’t frighten her, but they brought back memories of the three years she’d lived in Whitechapel. The deeper they penetrated the warren of small, dark streets, the stronger the memories became. These were the sounds she remembered from her childhood: drunken shouts, the slurred singing of an inebriated woman, crying children, the yelp of a kicked dog.

  “Nice to be back,” Polly said, tightening her grip on Arabella’s arm. “Ain’t it?” She no longer spoke like a lady’s maid; her accent was pure Cockney.

  Arabella glanced at her. Polly’s jaw was grimly clenched.

  She felt a stab of shame. What had happened to Polly in these filthy streets was far worse than anything she’d experienced. She halted. “Polly, if you want to return to the shop—”

  “And let you walk by yourself?” Polly snorted. “Not likely! And besides—” she took a step, tugging Arabella with her, “—I want to see me brother.”

  Arabella bit her lip and allowed Polly to pull her along. No one paid them any attention, two women in ragged, shapeless clothes. She scanned the street, taking care not to catch anyone’s eyes. Her gaze slid over men’s faces, unshaven and defeated, over the sunken cheeks and despairing eyes of women. I can’t help them all, she repeated in her head. Not all of them.

  But she could help some of them, and it was the children her eyes lingered on: grubby and half-naked, some runnin
g and shouting and playing with each other, others sitting listlessly on filthy doorsteps. I can help some of them. And her fingers strayed to her waist and the hidden rubies.

  In Berner Street, with its soot-stained brick buildings crammed closely together, she glanced again at Polly. The grimness was gone from her maid’s face. Polly’s step quickened as they approached the third house from the corner, and her knock on the battered door was loud and cheerful. “Harry?” she called, pushing open the door. “It’s me, Polly.”

  Arabella followed her into a narrow hallway and shut the door. She blinked, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness, hearing a shout of “Pol!” and the clatter of boots on a wooden floor.

  Arabella grinned as a burly, broken-nosed man swept Polly up in a rib-cracking embrace and kissed her soundly on each cheek. More than fifteen years had passed since she’d made Harry’s acquaintance in a rat-infested alley off Dorset Street, but the boy he’d been was still stamped on his face. He had the same crooked nose and broad grin, the same shrewd eyes beneath a shock of unruly fair hair.

  “Bella’s here, too,” Polly said, and it was Arabella’s turn for a hug that left her breathless.

  “I’m glad you’re ’ere,” Harry said. “I picked up a new girl t’day. You can meet ’er, if you like.”

  “Please,” Arabella said, and her fingers strayed to the hidden pocket again.

  Harry shepherded them into the parlor, a small and sparsely furnished room, and stuck his head out into the hallway. “Tess!” he bellowed. “Our Pol and Bella are ’ere! They’d like to meet Aggie!”

  Arabella sat on a lumpy sofa with frayed upholstery and splitting seams. Compared to her grandmother’s parlor in Mayfair the room was a hovel; compared to where Polly and Harry had grown up—a cramped room in the most dilapidated of Whitechapel’s rookeries—it was a palace. “I have some earrings,” she told Harry. “Rubies.”

  “Good,” he said. “I picked up two more girls last week, and I ’ave me eye on another.”

  The rush of gratitude was so strong that Arabella’s throat tightened and for a moment she couldn’t speak. She looked away from his broad, plain face and busied herself extracting the earrings from the hidden pocket, fumbling her fingers through the narrow slits in her gown and petticoat. “Here.” She held them out to him.

  In these surroundings the earrings didn’t look so garish. Harry held one up and examined it. “Needs cleanin’,” he said. “But they’ll fetch a good price—”

  He slid the earrings into a pocket as the door opened.

  A young woman stood in the doorway, her belly rounded in pregnancy. Tess’s smile showed two missing teeth, but her face was pretty and dimpled. Holding her hand was a scrawny, waif-like girl.

  The girl’s gaze flicked from Harry to Polly, and then to Arabella. For a long moment they stared at each other. Arabella saw a pale, too-thin face and wide, wary eyes beneath a crooked fringe of fair hair. She smiled at the girl. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Aggie.” She held out her hand. “Come and sit here beside me.”

  Aggie hesitated, and then released Tess’s hand and crossed the room. Her dress was filthy, her bare feet almost black with dirt, but her face was clean.

  “Did Tess make you wash your face?” Arabella asked, as the girl sat beside her on the sofa.

  Aggie nodded. “And me ’ands.”

  Arabella looked down at the girl’s hands. Her nails were ragged and dirty, but the skin was clean. Dark bruises ringed Aggie’s left wrist. “How did you get those bruises?”

  “Me ma,” the girl said.

  Arabella glanced at Harry.

  “Trying to sell ’er for a bottle o’ gin,” he said with a grimace. “Weren’t she, Aggie?”

  The girl nodded.

  “But Aggie ran away. And I found ’er.” Harry grinned at the girl, who smiled shyly back.

  “It was very clever of you to run away,” Arabella said. “Very brave.”

  Aggie bit her lip and nodded. She looked down at her lap and twisted a fold of dirty fabric between her fingers.

  “How old are you, Aggie?”

  “I dunno, miss.”

  Somewhere between ten and twelve, Arabella guessed. Dirty and half-starved, but with eyes that were bright with intelligence. “Have Harry and Tess told you what’s going to happen to you now?”

  The girl’s head lifted. Her thin face split into a grin. “I’m gonna go t’ school!”

  Arabella laughed. “You want to go to school?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Did Harry tell you about the school, Aggie?”

  “Missus did.” The girl’s gaze flicked to Harry’s wife, Tess. “She says it’s in the country.”

  “A place called Swanley,” Arabella said, smiling. “Not far from London.”

  “She says it’s for girls like me.”

  “It is.” Girls like Polly and Tess had been, girls like Aggie was now: with lives of poverty and prostitution ahead of them.

  “I’ll learn ’ow to read an’ write, and t’ speak proper,” Aggie said. “And I’ll ’ave me own bed!”

  “Yes, you will.” Aggie would have her own bed, new clothes, and three good meals a day. She’d have encouragement and kindness—and most importantly, she’d have a future.

  Arabella glanced at Harry, standing with an arm around Tess. “We must be going.” She stood and held out her hand to Aggie. After a moment’s hesitation the girl placed her own hand in it.

  “I’m glad to have met you, Aggie. I hope you’ll be very happy at school.”

  Aggie nodded shyly.

  Arabella released the girl’s hand and turned to embrace Tess. “Thank you,” she said.

  Tess blushed and shook her head.

  Harry accompanied them into the dark hallway. He hugged his sister again and opened the front door.

  Arabella paused on the doorstep. “You said you’d seen another girl—?”

  Harry nodded. “In Thrawl Street.” His gaze flicked briefly to his sister. “She’s older ’n Aggie. Been on the game a few months.”

  Polly’s mouth tightened. She looked away.

  “I’ll talk to ’er tomorrow,” Harry said. “See if she wants t’ leave Whitechapel.”

  Arabella nodded. “Thank you.”

  “No,” Harry said, his eyes on his sister. “Thank you.” He glanced back at Arabella. “Want me t’ walk with you?”

  She shook her head. “We’ll be fine.” She knew these streets as well as she knew the streets of Belgravia and Mayfair.

  Harry nodded farewell and closed the door.

  Arabella pulled the shawl forward over her face. She linked her arm with Polly. “Back to Rosemary Lane.” And then Kensington Gardens. And then the Fothergills’ ball.

  The incongruity of it made her feel slightly dizzy for a moment: she stood in Whitechapel, in a street that was little more than an open sewer, and yet in a few hours’ time she’d be in a ballroom, wearing a dress of midnight-blue satin and with pearls in her hair. There’d be music and the scents of mingled perfumes, the shimmer of rich fabrics and the gleam of jewels. Crystal drops would dangle from the chandeliers, glittering as brightly as diamonds.

  Arabella blinked and shook her head, dispelling the momentary dizziness. She stepped forward firmly in the direction of Rosemary Lane.

  * * *

  ADAM SIPPED FROM his champagne glass and scanned the ballroom again. A quadrille was playing. Grace was in one of the sets, a brave smile on her face.

  Miss Knightley’s advice on that score had been unerring, but her other advice—

  His fingers tightened on the stem of the glass. Damned impertinence, is what it is.

  He scanned the ballroom again, searching for dark curls.

  A familiar face caught his attention. The lady had dark hair and pale skin, but there the resemblance to Miss Knightley ended. Lady Vane’s height was above average, her figure ample, her manner gracefully languid.

  Adam relaxed his grip on the champagne glass. His
mood lightened. He swallowed another mouthful of champagne and set off towards his former mistress.

  “Darling!” Mary Vane’s smile was both delighted and sleepy at the same time. She held out her hand to him.

  Adam bowed over her gloved fingers, inhaling the faint, familiar fragrance of her perfume. “I have a favor I’d like to ask of you.”

  “A favor?” Mary waved her fan in a leisurely, graceful movement. “For you, anything.”

  Adam lowered his voice. “I’d like you to write to Lady Bicknell, inviting her to your next charity function.”

  “Lady Bicknell?” Mary wrinkled her nose. “Why on earth would I want to do that? If the woman has any interest in soldiers’ widows, I’ve yet to hear of it.”

  Adam hesitated, then bent his head and spoke into her ear. “I believe she’s been dabbling in a little blackmail. I need to see a specimen of her handwriting.”

  “Blackmail!” Mary stepped back a pace. The sleepiness was gone from her eyes. “Is everything all right, Adam?”

  “Perfectly,” he said. “I just need to prove something.”

  Mary chewed on her lower lip for a moment, surveying him, and then nodded. “Very well, I’ll write to her.”

  “Thank you.” Adam took her hand again. “You’re an angel.” He bowed and kissed her fingertips.

  Mary uttered an unladylike snort. “Hardly.”

  Adam grinned at her. Their affair was over—Mary no longer a widow but once again a wife—but the fondness remained. “Would you care to dance?”

  “Far too fatiguing!” Mary hid a yawn behind her fan.

  Adam laughed and took his leave of her. He retreated to an embrasure, where he leaned against the wall and sipped champagne and thought about what precisely he would say to Arabella Knightley. How dared she have the effrontery to discuss marriage with Grace—

  There she was.

  He experienced a moment of déjà vu, brief and dizzying. He’d stood like this once before: leaning against a wall, a glass dangling from his fingers, and watched as a young lady with sable-dark hair and an elegant face and eyes that looked almost black entered a ballroom. He’d been seven years younger, half-foxed—and he’d stared at her and thought I want her.