Chapter Three
K itty was on the wet, miserable rooftop because her sister was on the wet, miserable rooftop.
It was as simple as that.
Not that Devil would understand that, were she to imagine him watching her from the lilac bushes across the street. Which she would not. Because she was not that fanciful. Or insane.
In any case, she had bigger things to worry about. Like not plummeting to her death. All while steadying her sister with the bad knee and the birdcage full of annoyed hedgehog.
With any luck, were Kitty to roll right off the shingles, she would land on Lord Portsmouth and break his neck. Obviously, she would prefer other means of stopping him, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. And she was trying to be a better person. Despite recent evidence to the contrary.
Evie was quite right—running away was suddenly a perfectly reasonable option. Although crawling away was perhaps a better description. Inching, even.
The rain fell like silver needles, and then blew sideways so as to inflict maximum turmoil. It dripped from her eyelashes and soaked into her nightdress. She hadn’t had time to change into something more suitable, had not even had time to find anything more than a shawl Evie had tried to knit before realizing she could not knit. It resembled nothing so much as a confused fishing net in red yarn. Not subtle and not particularly helpful. Two terms to perfectly describe her morning, really.
The last month.
Year.
Never mind. That was a problem to be dealt with under considerably drier circumstances. With a pot of tea. Or a bottle of whiskey. An entire strawberry cake.
The wind gusted most disobligingly.
Evie’s slippers skidded on the wet shingles. Kitty made a grab for her and they teetered, dangerously close to the edge. She could have sworn someone shouted something unflattering about mad girls from across the street, but it was likely a coachman cursing his own now-wet state. There was no earthly reason for anyone to look up or even be able to see them through the sheets of rain. “Slowly,” Kitty gritted from between clenched teeth. “Slowly.”
“On the bright side, if I tumble to my death, I won’t have to marry Portsmouth.”
“You’re not going to fall,” Kitty said. “But if you should, make sure to use him as a landing spot.”
“I should have brought my cane. I could have skewered him on impact.”
Kitty snorted. “I will hire someone to paint it as a portrait. We can hang it in the foyer.”
“We can’t afford portraits anymore.”
“Oh, right.”
“ I could paint him.”
“You are an atrocious painter. He’ll look like he’s part badger. Or like he’s melting.”
“All the better.”
“True.”
If you couldn’t jest with your sister on a rooftop with lightning flashing disconcertingly close to your heads, what was even the point in having a sister?
“Perhaps I should maim myself a little,” Evie said in a tone that was too considering and too even for Kitty’s peace of mind. “If I had a scar or a crooked nose, he would not find me beautiful anymore.”
“You’d still be the most beautiful girl in England. It’s disgusting, really.”
“Not to Portsmouth. He’s not the type.”
Because she was quite correct, Kitty only said, “Let’s save that for a last resort, shall we?”
“We can’t stay up here all day.” Evie had to shout over the sudden burst of wind.
“I have a plan!” Kitty shouted back.
“That’s what I’m afraid of!”
There was very little time left for talking or jesting after that. It took considerable concentration to cross the rooftop, the chill numbing her fingertips. The roof of the adjoining house was in much better repair and considerably less steep. Which was a comfort, as Kitty had made the mistake of looking down.
“Everything is so much less daunting from up here,” Evie said. “More like a dollhouse city.”
Kitty jerked back from the edge, feeling slightly queasy. She had not given nearly enough consideration to the matter of getting back down to the ground.
The glorious, stable ground.
Currently, very, very far away.
“Are you well?” Evie shouted. “You’ve gone funny.”
Kitty tried to smile—to mixed results, if Evie’s reaction was any indication. Her sister visibly recoiled.
“I don’t know what you are doing to your face,” Evie said. “But I demand you stop it immediately.” She held the hedgehog in his golden wire palace out of reach. “And don’t cast up your accounts on poor Galahad.”
“Let’s just get down.” Kitty’s teeth chattered even though it was not quite that cold.
“Two more houses,” Evie said encouragingly. “Sir Reginald spent all that money on new balconies and trellises, remember? It’s quite sturdy.”
Kitty would have preferred a ladder. Or an actual staircase.
“You’re a very interesting color,” Evie pointed out conversationally. “A bit green, a bit chartreuse.”
“Not at all fashionable of me.”
“You’d be thrown out of Almack’s.”
For so many reasons. Even if one of the patronesses routinely and with near-religious fanaticism came to her shop to purchase the very books she looked down her nose at Kitty for selling.
Thunder rumbled, and Kitty felt it under her feet. Lightning flashed. It was getting dangerous, and not just because the way down was several stories of wet trellis and hopping from balcony to balcony. The next ripple of thunder came with a flash of lightning Kitty swore she felt in her teeth. She jumped with a loud, strangled yelp.
And promptly lost her footing.
Evie was too far away and her hands were full of hedgehog.
Kitty sprawled and slid down the roof, too slippery to stop herself, too rough not to hurt all the way down. She caught herself on the edge by wedging her heel into the eavestrough. Rain pelted her, running in her eyes and her mouth as her pulse bolted like a spooked horse.
“Kitty!” Evie reached her, grabbing her arm. She was suddenly pale, teeth chattering. “Don’t you dare die and leave me alone.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Kitty croaked. Her knees felt like stewed celery. “Isn’t Sir Reginald away? Something about the seaside?”
Evie nodded. “He invited me to go with him.”
Kitty was momentarily distracted. “He’s eighty-three years old.”
“I don’t think he meant it to be indecorous.”
“Hmm. Either way, he likes you. I’m sure he won’t mind if we go through his house. He’s always wanting to show you his new décor.”
“I’m not sure this is what he had in mind.”
Kitty was too busy twisting to point to the window behind them that was relatively easy to access. Evie helped her to her feet, which were still not quite as steady as she would have liked. “It’s unlocked,” she announced. She wondered if weeping with relief was going a bit too far. Maybe her aunt was right. She was dramatic.
“Housebreaking is a hanging offense,” Evie said, reclaiming Galahad’s cage from where she had wedged it in order to reach her sister.
“Not for someone as pretty as you,” Kitty said. “Me they will hang with all alacrity.”
“You’re pretty!”
“Aunt P says I have the devil’s hair.”
“Aunt P is the devil,” Evie muttered.
The door led to the attic, and a narrow-crooked staircase. “Hello?” Kitty called out. “Sir Reginald? Anyone?” She winced at the wet footprints they left behind. Not very surreptitious of them.
The silence peculiar to an empty house greeted them.
As did a small, dry parlor entirely decorated with cabbages. “Gah.”
“That is…a great many cabbages.”
“What do we do now?” Evie asked. “We can’t hide out here forever. Sir Reginald might return today for all we know.”
“We’re going to hide you until I can fix this,” Kitty said, using a table runner embroidered with pink and green cabbages to sop up some of the water dripping from her hair into her face.
“Where?”
“Where no one would think to look for you.”
The safest place she knew.
And the very last place she wished to go.
The Spinster Society was located in a large, well-appointed house on the edge of Hyde Park. It shared back gardens and greenhouses with the house next door, which belonged to Lady Priya Langdon. She had purchased it for the additional greenhouses for her horticultural pursuits but opened the house to a peculiar kind of ladies’ society.
It was whispered about from one end of Mayfair to the other. The society left calling cards in ladies’ retiring rooms at balls held in the very best houses—warnings to fortune hunters, of men with all of the power and consequence but generally without any actual consequences. Men like Lord Portsmouth.
Oh, how it infuriated men like him. They could not get to Lady Priya, or her army of spinsters.
Kitty did not have the occasion to frequent many balls—even before their father’s disgrace, barons were only invited to the most peripheral of social gatherings. She did not cross paths with dukes and earls often. She knew their wives from selling them naughty books and treatises on the position of women in modern Britain. Also ancient Sparta, where women could own property and inherit fortunes.
Books on ancient Sparta were very popular.
All to say that Kitty knew about the Spinster Society through other means. Mostly because she had a friend who was a member.
A friend she had betrayed.
And Priya knew everyone’s secrets. Dukes, dowagers—even the prime minster was not immune. The king himself likely had secrets he did not even know, but for certain Priya knew them.
That was how Kitty knew Priya was perfectly aware of her transgressions.
She would not blame the woman for slamming the door in her face. As long as she did not slam it in Evie’s.
“Where are we?” Evie asked. The rain had lessened but not cleared completely. They had run all the way here through the streets of London in their nightdresses. They could not stop now. Not yet.
“Just keep going,” Kitty said, ducking onto the path that led between the houses through hedges trimmed to resemble leaping fish and alcoves of sweet-smelling lilacs. The risk of being spotted was too great to knock on the front door. Two women soaked to the bone in their nightdresses were hard to miss. And honestly, Kitty was not sure of the etiquette in this situation. They were not servants or tradesmen, but also not ladies of high rank. They were supplicants. The side door seemed safest.
Kitty would beg if she had to.
The sun peeked out from behind the clouds, shining on the road, on the carriages and the street sweepers darting out of their hiding places. On pedestrians emerging from their houses, umbrellas in hand. “Don’t stop,” Kitty urged her sister on.
“Galahad’s caught!”
“I’ve got him.” Kitty stopped to attend to the gold cage snarled in a lilac branch. “ Go . Knock three times, then once more.” She’d been given the secret code before she had made the choices she had made. She would not waste the chance it gave her sister at a happy life. One that did not end broken at the bottom of Lord Portsmouth’s staircase or floating facedown in his picturesque pond.
Galahad, woken from slumber, carted through rain and thunder, jostled about and then finally dangled from a tree, did not seem terribly impressed.
Neither did the shadow of a man emerging from the nearby alcove of greenery.
“Miss Caldecott.”
Kitty froze, recognizing those dark, languid tones.
The Devil himself.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
She was doomed.