Chapter Twelve
Delilah hummed contentedly as she installed Tristan’s just-mended shirts into their clothes press, then she turned to trip
lightly back down the stairs.
The boardinghouse seemed unusually quiet today. She knew its ambient sounds so well—the murmurs of people coming and going,
the precise pitches at which certain stairs creaked beneath the weight of guests, the distant clank and clunk of Helga and
her staff doing magical things with pots and pans and rolling pins in the kitchen. And then there was the occasional crash
of a tea tray, because Dot’s inner thoughts and outer actions did not align as frequently as Delilah and Angelique would prefer.
It was, in fact, becoming increasingly clear that the inside of Dot’s head was a bit like an itinerant carnival, brimming
with distracting wonders and perils that led to dropping tea trays.
But Dot hadn’t dropped a tea tray in weeks. Just as Mr. Delacorte hadn’t uttered an epithet in the sitting room in weeks.
Both milestones made Delilah feel proud and wistful. Perhaps the Grand Palace on the Thames was refining both of them, as Mr. Delacorte continually maintained. Perhaps her own gentle and genteel influence had made some little bit of difference. She’d once been a countess, after all.
Though she wished Dot would remember to change the flowers in the reception room. They were now quite, quite dead.
On the third floor, she stopped abruptly. The candle in the third sconce had mysteriously winked out again.
It was always that candle. Yet they’d never been able to detect a draft near it.
Perhaps Dot’s fervent belief in ghosts had finally attracted one.
When Delilah was alone it was easy to imagine they might have a ghost or two. After all, centuries worth of drama, skullduggery,
hardship, and no doubt romance had played out between the walls of this building long before she’d inherited from her perfidious
late husband. Its past lived on in the form of the word “rogue” still faintly visible on the sign hanging outside. She had
come to love this building so much she could easily imagine wanting to spend eternity here.
Suddenly she noticed the wallpaper curling a bit away from the baseboard near the sconce. Perhaps errant moisture was dousing
the candle flame? Perhaps there was indeed a rogue draft not even the clever Mr. Pike had been able to vanquish?
She bent over to inspect the wallpaper.
Which is when two fingers clamped onto the flesh of her bottom and squeezed.
“SHITE!” she shrieked and whirled about.
To find Daniel Peck staring up at her.
His eyes were twice their usual saucer size in absolute astonishment.
His little hands were clamped over his mouth.
Her heart was thundering. She covered it with her hand and pulled in a breath.
Delilah was stunned. She had never so much as muttered that word aloud in her life—not as a verb, noun, or adjective. Ever.
She’d been a countess, for heaven’s sake, and before that the daughter of a baron, scrupulously raised to be as perfect as possible. It simply
did not ever spring to her lips.
“All right. I ought not have said that word, Daniel,” she said carefully. “But you pinched my bottom. You startled me. That
wasn’t nice at all. You mustn’t ever do that to people.”
“It’s a bad word?” His face was brilliant with thrilled realization. “You said a bad word!”
Oh, dear God. She could foresee where this was going, and she knew there was nothing she could do to stop it.
“Daniel, sweetheart. Where is your mother? Your nurse?” Delilah craned her head desperately down the stairs.
He turned around.
“Shite!” he incanted merrily under his breath, as he hopped down the stairs. “Shite shite shite shite shite.”
One “shite” per stair.
That evening, someone else at the Grand Palace on the Thames uttered an astonishing word.
“Check,” Dot said quietly.
All the guests were in for the night, and every single head swiveled toward Dot and Mr. Delacorte in surprise.
If Dot had indeed checked Mr. Delacorte’s king, it would be quite a milestone.
More specifically: It would be a miracle.
“Check, I think,” she amended. “Am I right, Mr. Delacorte? Is it a check?”
Mr. Delacorte peered at the chessboard.
“I’ll be da—” He darted a look at the Epithet Jar.
Dot’s bishop had been lurking behind the knight she’d just moved. Voila! It was now checking the king.
Delacorte was cautiously pleased with his pupil.
He gently moved his knight to block her check. “Well done, Dot.”
“All the credit goes to Sir Percy,” Dot said humbly. “He did it on behalf of the queen. He is in love with her.”
“Who is Sir . . .” Mr. Delacorte stopped. He did not want to encourage this.
Dot pointed to the knight she’d just moved.
Behind Dot and Mr. Delacorte, Ginny had been dealt into a game of whist with Mrs. Durand and Mrs. Hardy. Given that the trail
for the vase seemed to have gone cold, she felt a little guilty about thoroughly enjoying the evening’s dinner—a stew with
lots of things in it, all of them delicious—then going on to recreate with a game of cards. Though she supposed even people
on the way to the gallows enjoyed a last meal.
A pistol had been aimed at her today, besides. She needed to replenish the strength that a few moments of potent terror had
leached away. She could not sustain hope if she was starving. And rules were rules.
And whenever she was alone in her room, fear began to crowd her once again.
Her other option for financial salvation (albeit by way of a salacious offer) had taken a little table along the wall. He
was once again in her line of vision.
He’d brought a few half sheets of foolscap and a pot of ink and a quill into the room with him.
She noted with undue fascination how he gripped his quill tightly and wrote at a deliberate, careful pace, his brow furrowed
in concentration.
Have you ever eaten a rat? When she imagined the frightened, starving boy he’d once been, her breath went short. How and when had he learned to read
and write? How had he acquired an entire building? Not to mention employees and a fortune?
His very survival struck her as a miracle worthy of a myth. He might as well be a demigod.
He looked up abruptly, intercepting her gaze just as she was thinking this.
You never take them off me, he’d said about her eyes after they’d both departed the Earl of Sydenham’s house.
He’d known she’d be looking.
But then, he’d grown up needing to notice everything.
She flushed and dropped her eyes to her hand of cards.
He’d made it very clear how much he noticed about her.
The ways in which he made it plain that he desired her were somehow both elegantly subtle and wholly shocking.
It was in the amused smolder in his eyes when he fixed her in his gaze.
In the way his eyes lingered on her mouth.
It was in the contrast between his polite restraint and solicitousness and the way he toyed with the elasticity of propriety.
He was frank, rather than insinuating. All of it was hopelessly compelling.
None of it bore any resemblance to Francis’s shy, glowing, respectful admiration.
After their misadventure in the park this afternoon, Marchand had sent her back in a hack by herself to the Grand Palace on
the Thames.
“I’m off to Lucifer’s Fall, because I have a meeting with Mr. Ogden to negotiate the price for new linens for the tables on
the gaming floor,” he’d told her, as he helped her board the hack. When he’d offered his hand to help her up into the carriage,
she’d taken it without thinking. “No rest for the wicked.”
He’d smiled at her expression.
“It’s the mundane things that keep the industry of debauchery profitable, Miss Woodville,” he told her, ironically.
It was only when he’d stopped speaking that she noticed she was still gripping his hand as if he were the very thing tethering
her to earth.
And he was allowing her to do it.
Little by little, in increments, she’d begun to feel safer with him than without him.That realization had made her tug her
hand away as if she’d been burnt.
Expressionlessly, he’d nodded, touched his hat, then closed the hack door.
She flexed her hand absently now, reliving the way it had felt to touch him. Then she flattened it deliberately on the table,
as if to punish herself for thinking about him.
Suddenly a familiar tension rippled about the room. Daniel Peck’s arrival was nigh. This time he’d brought an entourage.
Mrs. Peck was leading Daniel by the hand. And trailing them was his nurse, who was carrying something.
Or, rather, a little someone.
The baby!
“Mr. Marchand?” Mrs. Peck said almost shyly.
Mr. Marchand glanced up, surprised. “Good evening, Mrs. Peck.”
“Daniel wanted to show his baby brother to you.”
To Ginny’s shock, Mr. Marchand suddenly looked as hunted as a boy cornered in an alley.
He visibly pulled in a long breath, then rose to his feet almost gingerly.
The nurse carefully settled the bundled-up baby in his outstretched arms.
Everyone else had also stood up when Mrs. Peck entered. And now they craned their heads to peer at the baby, who had a shock
of black hair and merry brown eyes.
The baby gazed at Marchand as if he was a marvel, which was the way most people seemed to gaze at Marchand. Ginny found it
interesting to witness that it apparently began at birth.
“How do you do, new little sir,” Marchand said gravely to the baby.
The baby enthusiastically waved his fists and made muffled little duckling sounds.
Ginny’s throat knotted. How safe that baby must feel right now. Her skin hummed, remembering how Marchand’s arm felt curved
protectively, possessively, around her, as he led her away from the carnage of crockery and cutthroats.
Who had held Mr. Marchand when he was a baby, or a child?
How could a man be both safety and danger?
Mr. Marchand was communing silently with the baby, to whom he’d offered his finger to grip.
“I see you’ve held babies before, Mr. Marchand,” Mrs. Peck said.