Issie
The trouble began one morning over a breakfast of hot chicory, cold toast, and insufficient jam. Though if anyone had asked Lady Isobel Arris, she would have maintained that the trouble began much earlier. Namely, the day she blithely married Lord Jonathan Arris and ruined her life.
“Oh, are you a gentleman now? Forgive me, I hadn’t noticed. You know, you really ought to occupy yourself with the society papers instead. Perhaps then you might find yourself a new husband instead of fretting over the old one.”
“Finding a new husband seems a rather improbable plan, seeing as John is in Relance, last we heard, and not deceased.” That she had learned this fact from reading the Gazette rather than from John himself did nothing to improve her mood.
“Ah, but they say Relance is downright lawless since the truce. Perhaps he will irritate the wrong person and end up on the pointy end of a dagger,” said Auntie Floret, scrutinizing a rather tarnished spoon before using it to stir milk into her chicory. “It could only improve him.”
Issie glanced worriedly at her daughter, Ysette, who was thankfully not listening to these plans for her father’s demise.
She was too occupied enacting some manner of outlawry wherein the creamer was holding up the toast rack upon a napkin road with a butter knife.
At six years of age, Ysette was all curls and dimples, just like her father.
Her cherubic looks were paired with a surprising, rather bloodthirsty nature that by turns impressed and alarmed her mother.
The girl had also inherited her father’s talent for sweet-talking, though Issie was determined she would not misuse this ability as John did.
Unfortunately for all of them, John’s talents had succeeded only in getting him into trouble, not out of it again, and his propensity for gambling had left them all adrift on an ever-shrinking raft of solvency in a sea of debts.
Issie’s horses had been the first casualties.
There was a time when she owned one hundred and five.
She had watched helplessly as John sold them, one by one, to pay off his creditors, and with each of them went a piece of her soul.
Then went the carriages, the art, the furniture, her jewels, and the basic trappings of Arris House, followed by John himself, who fled his troubles in the dead of night, abandoning his family.
Not long after, she was forced to hand the skeleton of their home to new owners.
She had thought that might be the worst of it, but she had been gravely mistaken.
As they moved from one property to the next, she quickly discovered that all were forfeit.
Her father’s estate, which she had inherited when he died.
John’s grand townhouse in Neck. The villa by the sea. All of it, gone.
The only reason they were not living under a bridge with the mudlarks was a small bequest made to Issie by her mother, long before she was married.
It consisted of a little house in Neck’s now unfashionable Ruff and just enough money to run it and keep all of them largely fed and clothed, if not in the style to which they were accustomed.
As of yet, no one to whom John owed money seemed to want Blithe Cottage, and Issie dearly hoped that it stayed that way.
“Well, Isobel?”
Issie realized that her aunt was speaking to her again.
“I beg your pardon, Auntie,” she said.
“I was saying that if you are going to insist on such common reading material, you might as well tell us if there is any amusing news to be had.”
Issie scanned the wide sheet of the broadside.
“It seems that the new law criminalizing Charming among the lower classes is likely to be passed by the King’s Council,” she said, shaking her head. “As if the poor souls can help what they are. I can’t understand why we are bound and determined to move backward.”
“It’s that Relancian minx they’ve crowned queen. Before you know it, the king will have us all converting to his new bride’s draconian religious practices and we’ll be burning the Charmers in the streets. This never would have happened when your cousin was on the throne, may she sleep sound.”
Issie didn’t disagree with her aunt. She missed her cousin Cherie, who had been both an understanding confidant and a fair and benevolent queen. She had died three years ago, and while Issie knew that the king had remarried for politics rather than love, the match still seemed rather hasty.
Nevertheless, Issie was determined to keep a positive outlook. “We must reconcile ourselves to our new queen. After hundreds of years of war, Relance and Eldmere have finally found long-lasting peace. If the price of that is a bit of Relancian mysticism, I suppose we are obliged to pay it.”
“When I asked for amusement, Isobel, I did not have politics in mind. Now, tell us, are there any new reports of the Rogue Charmers?”
At this, Ysette was suddenly all ears.
“Oh yes, Mama, do tell us if there are any stories about Charming Jack and Bill the Bellows!”
Issie scanned the paper.
“Ah yes, it appears that they have struck again. Two days past, the ruffians known as Charming Jack and Bill the Bellows did rob a delegation of Relancian diplomats of their finery and gold upon the Wodewood Road. The king himself, conscious of the insult to his new bride’s countrymen, has called for the immediate capture of these so-called Rogue Charmers.
Anyone knowing of their whereabouts or identities should come forth with all due haste. ”
“They’ll never catch them!” crowed Ysette. Issie folded down the paper to study her daughter. She feared that overheard comments about her father’s character had made Ysette unduly disposed to sympathize with criminals and was uncertain what to do about it.
“They say that you can hear Bill the Bellows’s voice echo through the Wodewood before he attacks,” Ysette continued.
“They say he can stop the horses in their tracks with one word. They say Charming Jack can Charm the gold right out of your pockets!” She punctuated this with a stab of her butter knife.
“I swear that I shall ride with the Rogue Charmers when I’m grown! ”
“I think you’d best apply yourself to today’s lessons so that you are afforded better options in life than highway robbery,” said Issie, pushing her chair back.
“I’d rather be a highwayman than have to learn more Relancian verbs,” said Ysette, wrinkling her nose.
“You’ll have need of Relancian verbs if you’re going to rob their diplomats like Charming Jack and Bill the Bellows,” said Auntie Floret. “How else will you ask them for their jewels?”
“I shall tell them to stand and deliver,” cried Ysette, brandishing her butter knife even higher.
“Lessons. Now,” said Issie. “I shall be up to help you after I speak with Cook about supper.” There was no money now for a governess, and Issie had yet to determine what ought to be done to properly educate her daughter without one.
Fortunately, Ysette was very bright and required little encouragement to read.
Unfortunately, Blithe Cottage’s library was scandalously unsuitable for child readers, and Issie had her hands full ensuring that her daughter didn’t end up spending her lesson time poring over a tawdry novel, or worse.
Ysette went off without further complaint, and Issie headed down to the kitchen to see Cook and ask if it was at all conceivable to make the shopping from earlier in the week stretch a few more days.
Cook was the only staff who had come with them from Arris House, and Issie couldn’t understand why but was afraid to question it lest Cook think better of her choice.
Cook was capable of turning out a ten-course meal fit for the king himself, but she was also very adept at haggling over the best price for cabbage down at the market and strangely didn’t seem to mind the shift in circumstances that they were all experiencing together.
Before Issie reached the kitchen, she was waylaid by Meg.
They had hired her on as a maid of all work when they took up residence at Blithe Cottage, and Issie strongly suspected that her letter of reference had been a forgery.
Both her manner and her affordability brooked no other explanation, but Issie was in no position to be particular.
“There’s a fellow at the door!” Meg exclaimed breathily, skidding to a halt before Issie.
As usual, her straw-blond curls were escaping riotously from her cap, her apron was wrinkled, and her fingernails looked like she’d been digging in the dirt.
“He says I’m to take him directly to the mistress, and I says, ‘Not for all the clink in Neck! You’ll wait for her good and proper! ’ ”
“What is his name, Meg?”
“Um. Didn’t think to ask, but he looks like a right shitsack of a bumbailiff!”
“Meg!” Issie chided reflexively. Then a rope of fear coiled up around her throat. “Bumbailiff? Do you mean a debt collector?”
Meg nodded.
“Is he still outside?” Perhaps if they left him out there, he’d eventually go away…
“Nah, I remembered what you said last time, when I made those ladies wait outside while I fetched you. I put him in the fancy room.”
The ladies had been former friends of Issie’s, come to visit her and gloat over her downfall. She’d scolded Meg for leaving them on the stoop instead of showing them directly into the parlor. Shitsacks, indeed.
“All right. I’ll go down and see to him.” Bracing herself, she made for the parlor.