Chapter 9
“You said what?!” Ember Donnelly exclaimed, almost dropping her teacup.
Hannah paused, her toast half-buttered as morning light streamed in through the windows of the Cresson-Donnelly flat. “Well, it is true. I was always very talented at scaling trees and buildings and so on. I’m notorious for it in my family.”
“Sweet divine,” Ember breathed. “Joe, are you—Joe?”
Both women looked around to find the seat that Mr. Cresson had been in empty, and the man himself already standing and fumbling around for his briefcase, red to the tips of his ears as he bustled toward the front door.
“Well, now you’ve done it,” Ember said, turning back to Hannah with a glare. “He’s never coming back now. He’s gone. I’m a widow. You’ve widowed me.”
“But I didn’t…” Hannah trailed off, huffing and dropping her toast. “He barely even reacted! And you were supposed to teach me how to snare him, anyhow.”
“I never said snare,” Ember corrected, clearly still aghast, her hazel eyes as wide as saucers. “I never said that. And you clearly need not a single blessed lesson in the ways of torturing a man with seduction, Hannah Lazarus. You are a bloody fecking savant.”
“I am no such thing!” Hannah protested, a little more breathy than she’d intended. Then, a second later, “Am I really?”
Ember set the tea down and pulled her hands over the springy curls of her loose hair, shaking her head in awe. “What else did you say to him?”
“I don’t rightly recall,” Hannah said, frowning. “Just the usual pleasantries. I told him I was very grateful and that I’d do anything to express my gratitude. And I told him his name was beautiful. Much nicer than Iscariot.”
“Iscari… What?!” Ember screeched. “How long was this bloody walk?!”
“About a quarter hour?” Hannah answered, but the other woman was already blowing breath out of her puffed-up cheeks, as though she hadn’t wanted an answer anyway. “I thought he would stay and we could chat while I worked last night.”
“Hannah, I assure you that he was entirely convinced that if he even put a single toe into the same room as you last night, you would have found out exactly how much of your body fit on that desk,” Ember shot back. “And how much of his.”
Hannah opened her mouth to protest but was silenced by a brief, flashing image of sharing that wide, wooden desk in such a fashion.
Would he fit? Even if he lay atop her?
She wasn’t quite sure. Perhaps if they were diagonal…
“Hannah!” Ember shouted, snapping her fingers in Hannah’s direction. “Stop that!”
“Stop what!” Hannah whined, her eyes being forced back into focus. “I’m not doing anything!”
“Stop forcing me to see it too. God forbid Joe comes home again and finds it painted onto our dining room wall. Christ, but you are incorrigible.”
“I am a delight!” Hannah snapped back, and crammed the rest of the toast in her mouth while Ember stared at her like she’d sprouted horns.
“Listen,” Ember said after a moment, a sip of her tea, and another moment.
“At this point, I think it’s just a matter of how much he can take before he either collapses into a pile of well-dressed marbles, never to reassemble again, or he proposes.
There might be some other steps that occur between those outcomes and today, but the way I see it, they’re the only ultimate possibilities. ”
Hannah kept chewing because she had no other choice. She chewed for entirely too long, then forced it all down with the assistance of a glass of fruit juice. Then she grimaced.
“It’s been weeks, and I’ve still barely gotten him to have a conversation with me,” she pointed out. “I’ve got a year, not an eon.”
Ember flattened her mouth and tilted her head. “He might not be writing sonnets, love, but he’s mobilized a small village, bought a tenement square, and taken custody of a hundred and fifty displaced needy. That’s not nothing.”
“Yes, well,” Hannah said, waving her hand. “I would’ve done all of that if he hadn’t. I do appreciate it more than I can say, but it wasn’t necessarily for me.”
“Oh, it wasn’t?” Ember mocked. “It wasn’t for you? Was it for the little ants and beetles and termites that whisper to him in the wee hours, angel? Was it for them instead?”
Hannah sighed and rolled her eyes, but Ember continued on in this way for the remainder of the morning, through dressing, and their entire journey to the Flaming Fox.
“Was it for the owls and the pigeons and the screeching bloody mourning doves, Hannah? Was it for them? Did they ask him ever so sweetly from his windowsill one morning?” she continued while Hannah pressed her hands to her ears.
“Perhaps it was for the joy of ruining all his fine tailoring,” she was saying as they entered the door. “I know he was thrilled to lose his green brocade jacket on that first day. It was likely the highlight of the visit, tossing that piece of textile renaissance to some unknown corner of London.”
Hannah must have made a face then, because it actually did interrupt the tirade.
Ember came to a stop. A full, halting stop that would have screeched if she’d had wheels instead of feet.
“Hannah blessed Lazarus, you stole that coat, didn’t you?” Ember breathed, sounding deeply impressed. “You took it.”
“Ember, please,” Hannah pleaded, turning with her hands clasped in front of her.
Ember held her own hands up, taking a step back, like she was cowed and maybe even a little afraid. “By all the saints and their mothers too, girl. I will never underestimate you again.”
Hannah could only stare at her, wide-eyed and blank, her hands clasped so firmly together in the folds of her skirt that they started to ache.
“What did you do with it?” Ember breathed, clearly a little afraid to ask but desperate to know the answer.
“Why don’t you come read the letters I wrote last night?!” Hannah suggested very loudly, making the other woman startle and then grin, her teeth flashing like sharp points in the morning light. “I … ahem. Please.”
Ember followed her into the office and helped her with throwing the curtains open. She did not comment upon the breadth of the glossy wooden desk, even though both of them paused to consider it for a little longer than they would have on any other occasion.
It looked very sturdy indeed.
“This one is for Lord Penrose,” Hannah said, tapping the first letter in a row that she’d left under drying powder. “This one is for Lord Bentley.”
“Oh, you didn’t have to write all that to Freddy,” Ember said with a frown. “I could’ve just sent him a demand on a bit of old wood and he’d have been happy to comply.”
“And this one,” Hannah said, raising her brows and lifting the third letter, “is to Mr. Woodville.”
That name made Ember pause, her expression registering surprise. “Woodville? That codger who tried to buy you?”
“The very same,” said Hannah, waving the paper until Ember took it.
“I made a great show of mentioning his clear devotion to playing benefactor to the less fortunate and his attempts to patronize a worthy cause some years ago when our paths once crossed. I then presented this new cause, much better suited to his coin.”
Ember scoffed. “Cheeky, but you can’t really think—”
“I’m going to address it to his wife,” Hannah finished, smirking. “His brand-new, very charitable, extremely powerful wife. She will likely have many questions for her dear groom should he hesitate even an instant to comply.”
Ember smiled slowly, letting it spread over her face as her eyes scanned the words on the page.
When she glanced up over the top of the paper at Hannah, there was a sparkle in them.
“You know,” she said, “the others all think you’re a pretty little flower, shy and polite.
Any time I ever even suggest you’ve got a strain of diabolism in you, I get tutted to Hades. ”
“What others?” Hannah asked, crossing her arms. “Mrs. Cain?”
“Dot, Millie, bloody Freddy,” Ember said. “Even Joe has always looked at me sideways for suggesting it, though I imagine he won’t anymore after this morning.”
Hannah looked away, shaking her head with a little titter. “I am shy and polite sometimes.”
“Don’t reduce yourself,” Ember said, setting the letter carefully back into its place in the row. “You are brilliant and hungry and an unholy mess, and it is beautiful. There’s no sense being anything else.”
“Sometimes it’s necessary to … well, to modulate one’s self for the benefit of a particular situation, isn’t there?” Hannah asked, turning her eyes back to Ember. “I am not being entirely candid in that letter to Mr. Woodville, for example.”
“I’d say you are, actually,” Ember replied, pulling out one of the cushioned little chairs on the subordinate side of the desk and sinking into it.
“But only to his eyes. A clever woman can manage that, to speak politely to a room but sharply to the one person in it that her message is aimed toward. If you’re ever in a room where you have to pretend for every single person in it, it’s not a room worth staying in. ”
“Not everyone gets to choose which rooms they’re stuck attending,” Hannah pointed out. “But I like this one very well, for what it is worth.”
Ember gave a dry little chuckle. “Sometimes the worst rooms end up being beneficial in the end. Look how you’re turning around that travesty at Blackcove.”
“That wasn’t a travesty,” said Hannah. “Blackcove was a gift. Mine and yours too, I think.”
Ember considered it, tilting her head to the side. And then she nodded in agreement. “That’s exactly right,” she said. “I got my man and you found yours, all amongst the Penroses and the piskeys and the periwinkles. Isn’t that funny?”
“My man,” Hannah repeated softly, letting her chest clench and flutter at the sound of it. “Do you really think so?”
Ember did not humor the question with an answer.
“I have to go bother Dot today about the gossip sheets,” she said instead.
“I think we have more than enough now to be properly scathing. Millie is working on something too, but her work is always longer and more involved, and I know she’s busy with the baby and the in-laws besides, so we shouldn’t rely too heavily on her output. ”
“Oh, Millie’s family!” Hannah gasped, bringing a hand to her mouth. “I completely forgot! I was supposed to go to dinner and show around her young relative. Oh, do you think she’s cross with me?”
“Millie?” Ember asked with a laugh. “No. But it couldn’t hurt to stop by and extend the offer again. Maybe we can recruit the girl to our cause if she’s the charitable sort, so long as Abe doesn’t mind.”
“Why would he mind?” Hannah asked.
Because between the brothels and gambling dens and broken bones, sometimes it really was easy to forget just how scandalous her life had so quickly become.
It wasn’t until afternoon, when she stood and stretched and prepared to join Ember for their journey to Bloomsbury, that her eye caught on the flash of glass and water in the corner of the little office. A vase.
There, in the far corner, on a file cabinet, someone had left a vase of flowers.
Trimmed and arranged into an artful spray was a bouquet of calla lilies.