Chapter 1 #2
Edward sighed. “What in the devil’s name has got into you, Tabby? As a lad, you were the cleverest little shit. Tobias would never get entangled in something like this!”
“Well, I’d go back to being him, but I haven’t got his clothes!”
“You traded them away. For what? What would possess you—?”
“I was trying to keep up my end of the bargain!”
“What bargain?” he cried, kicking aside something that crunched under his boot.
“I told you: I’ll become your equal, and then we can be friends, even if your wife decides she hates me,” said Tabby as if everything she said was reasonable.
After his brother died last year, Edward went from scoundrel second son to scoundrel heir-to-the-marquessate — without the allowance typically associated with such a rise in consequence.
“For the last time, I don’t have a wife!” he roared into the London night.
“Nor will you if you go about yelling like that, young man!” shouted a voice from a nearby window before it closed with a bang.
“Sorry,” he called up, continuing on their way.
“I know how to be a lad, but I don’t know nothing about being a girl.”
“I could have told you that,” muttered Edward.
“You don’t have to be so mean about it,” she said.
“I don’t think you understand who those men were.”
“Toffs? Lords? A few cits?”
“Toffs, lords, and cits who would hurt you.”
“I suppose that’s part of getting rogered the first time, isn’t it?” she asked.
“No, but these men…they’d draw it out. They’d make it worse.”
“First time never feels nice from what I hear.”
“Who said that?”
“Just what people say.”
“I need to put you down for a moment,” he said, spotting church steps where she could stand without ending up covered in muck.
As soon as he had Tabby upright, Edward hurried away, and voided the contents of his stomach into a bush.
“You been drinking tonight, Dick Stone?” she asked.
He took a swig from his — formerly her — silver water flask and nodded no.
“Your head bothering you?”
“Not tonight.”
“Then what’s got your whirligigs twisted?”
Edward held out his arms as if defeated, and Tabby hopped into them from the top church step.
“Long day. I had a lot to do before your auction.”
“And you’re not even the one who had to buy hair,” she said blithely.
As she recounted her trials and tribulations, Edward walked with uncharacteristic grimness, marching ever closer to Mrs. Chaffinch’s boarding house and the inevitable implosion of his orderly life.
When he opened the door to his lodgings, there was the landlady, towering with disapproval. She’d known Tabby was a young woman before Edward did and had sent them both glares, but carrying a lass in a nightdress into a respectable boarding house simply wasn’t done.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Chaffinch,” he said, chastened without her saying a word. “I’ll make other arrangements tomorrow.”
Her mouth pinched, and she closed the door to her own sitting room soundly when he walked past.
“I suppose this means I can’t wail when you stick your piece in me,” said Tabby under her breath.
Edward couldn’t bring himself to respond to her joke, even to feign a smile. He reached the door of his room at the top of the stairs and pushed in.
He deposited Tabby on his bed and set about removing his jacket and lighting a few tallow candles.
“Do you really want to be a courtesan? A woman who…sells her favors?”
Tabby giggled. It was the first overtly girlish thing he’d heard her do in the entirety of their acquaintance. How strange to look up and discover that everything had changed.
“I don’t want to do any work, not if I can help it,” she said.
“But if I must, bending over for toffs and the like doesn’t seem to be the worst way to make king’s pictures.
It’s the only way to make real coin as a girl other than wet nursing, and I don’t have the dairy hills for that.
Besides, you’re not doing so bad as a stud. And I said I’d be your equal.”
Edward wanted to rip his hair out. Had she been living as a lad so long that she forgot life was very different for men and women? No, that couldn’t be the case, or she’d have abandoned her pragmatic breeches some time ago.
“That’s not how it works,” he said.
“That’s the way it has to work, Dick Stone, because that’s my plan for how we can be friends even when things change. When you’re the marquess.”
Edward’s rise in status and a physician’s revelation regarding the contents of Tabby’s breeches had sent her into something of a panic, convinced that Edward was but one arranged marriage away from slamming the door on their friendship.
He needed to set her mind at ease so she’d never do something this chuckleheaded again.
“Nothing is going to change,” he said.
“Of course you say that. But one day, you’ll have—”
Not this again, he thought.
“I sold Tencendor,” he said.
Tabby turned to him, betrayal and hurt stamped on her face for the first time that night. Not even being struck by the auctioneer made her eyes go wide like that. “Why…”
“I required funds,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“But Tencendor is your horse,” she said as if he were a small child saying something unreasonable. “He is your only friend in this world; you told me so yourself. He eats better than we do.”
The boulder where his heart should be sent him sinking into the chair before his desk. “Not my only friend,” he said.
“But…but you didn’t need to sell him!” she wailed.
“How was I to know that?” he shouted back. “All I knew was that you were going to offer yourself to some of the worst men in England. They don’t accept credit at virginity auctions! Certainly not from scapegraces working as studs!”
Tabby rose from the bed as if possessed. “Get him back,” she said lowly, staggering towards him. “Go now.”
“It’s the middle of the night,” said Edward miserably.
“Bang at the gate, wake the horse traders up!”
“They claimed to have a standing order from a buyer,” he said.
“It was how I got the banknotes so quickly.” Edward dropped his head to the table to hide how miserable he was.
His beloved horse, the stallion he’d selected personally and taken to war, was no longer in the stable Edward maintained for him.
He’d had to sell Tencendor a few years before, when funds were so tight he’d barely been able to feed himself, but since recovering his boy in 1817, the skittish warhorse had wanted for nothing. Now Edward had nothing.
And Tencendor was in unknown hands.
“Get him back!” shouted Tabby, pulling at Edward’s waistcoat like a child begging for coin or bread. Her own humiliation and lost hopes hadn’t upset her, but she was truly crying now, great gulping sobs that filled his whole ribcage with pain.
“I’ll try,” he said, his voice breaking on try. If a buyer had a standing order with a horse trader for Tencendor, would they be willing to sell him back to Edward? The possibilities for villainy and the potential cost made his head ache.
“You’re going to get him back,” said Tabby, swinging from bereft to resolute. “I’ll help you. I promise.”
He patted her hand. “That’s a good lad.”
And then Edward recalled Tobias was no more, and felt another wave of sadness at what had been lost. Tabby didn’t even have her breeches and boots anymore; the urchin kid he knew was truly gone.
Nothing for it but to keep marching, he supposed.
“And I’ll help you with your project,” he said, attempting to match her strident tone.
“My project?”
“Your…harlotry,” he said, struggling to find a word for what she was aiming to do.
“Well, I could walk outside and be a harlot right now,” she said with equanimity.
“Your…courtesan business,” he said. “I’ll help you become a prized companion to gentlemen.” Better to train her for something more elevated than threepenny uprights and protect her from the worst of it.
He surveyed his friend, cataloging the wardrobe, wigs, and training in everything from French to music that she’d need to command respect, wealth, and protection. Edward sighed and reasoned that he could start dealing with it tomorrow. He was too tired to contemplate moving from this chair tonight.
Edward closed his eyes for a moment, and when he woke in the middle of the night, someone had extinguished the candles and Tabby lay across the rug. He nearly tripped over her when going down to the privy.
After returning, he scooped his friend up and put her on the bed. She didn’t wake entirely, just jolted, placed her hand on his face, and said, “Dick Stone,” before falling asleep again.
“Hush now,” he said, resuming his seat at the desk. “We’ll start tomorrow.”