Between Her and the Wolves

Chapter One

“Are we there yet, Mama?” Sophy asked, for the third time since they had crossed the river.

“Not yet, dearest,” Victoria murmured.

“Are we nearly there?”

“We are nearer than we were, which is the most anyone can honestly promise in this street.” She drew the carriage rug back over the child’s knees where it had slipped.

“That is not a real answer,” Sophy said, unconvinced.

“It is the only honest one,” Victoria answered. “Shall I lie to you instead, and say two minutes?”

“Please do.”

“Two minutes, then, and not a second longer.” She watched her daughter narrow both eyes at the promise, plainly unconvinced.

“Ruth wishes to know whether there will be cake,” Sophy reported, pressing the doll’s wax face to the glass.

“Ruth is very forward for a young lady who has never once paid for a carriage,” Victoria said drily.

“She says it is your carriage, so it does not signify,” the child returned.

“Then Ruth and I are to have words about the household accounts.”

Sophy laughed, and the sound reached the cold place under Victoria’s ribs and warmed it half an inch, which was more than the whole of London had managed in a year.

“Why must we go at all?” the child asked.

“Because Cousin Amelia has written me three letters,” Victoria replied, “each sadder than the last, and I have not the heart to make her write a fourth.”

“What did they say?” Sophy asked.

“That I have been hiding in the country. That if I hide long enough, people will forget me.”

Sophy wore the frown she kept for remarks she suspected of being partly serious. “Would that be so very bad?”

It would not, Victoria thought, though she could not say so to a child of five. What she mourned, on the rare nights she let herself mourn anything, was her younger self; the woman she had been before Gerald, before she had learnt to count the exits from every room.

“It would not be bad at all,” she said. “But Amelia does not agree, and one is polite to one’s hostess even when one would rather be anywhere on earth besides.”

“Even at a ball?” Sophy asked.

“Especially at a ball. A ball is where politeness is most required and least deserved.”

“Papa liked balls,” Sophy said promptly.

Victoria went still for the space of a breath, then made herself easy again before the child could mark it. “Your papa liked being admired,” she said. “A ball is a very good place for that.”

“Do you like being admired, Mama?” Sophy asked.

“No. I like being left alone, which no one admires at all.”

“I admire it,” Sophy offered.

“Then you are the only critic whose good opinion I value.”

“Shall we go home after?” Sophy asked. “To the real home, with the pond?”

“The moment Amelia will let us,” Victoria said. “A week, perhaps two.”

“I like the country better.”

“So do I,” Victoria returned. “In the country, no one writes me letters telling me who I ought to be.”

The coach lurched forward six feet and stopped, and the jolt threw the doll clean out of Sophy’s grip, sideways through the half-open window and down into the dark of the road.

“Ruth!” The cry was instant. “Mama, she fell, she is in the road, she will be crushed.”

“She will not be crushed,” Victoria said quietly, catching the child back from the window. “Sit still, love.”

“She is under the wheels,” Sophy wailed.

Victoria had her hand on the latch when a figure stepped between the two stalled carriages ahead and bent, without hurry, to the gutter. He came up with the doll and brought it to the window, inclining his head not to Victoria but to the child.

“I believe this belongs to you,” he said.

Sophy went shy at once and pressed back into the corner of the seat.

“She is quite safe,” the gentleman went on, in the unhurried voice of a man with long practice at not frightening small persons.

“A little muddied about the hem. But mud improves most things by giving them a history. She has had an adventure, and you may hear the whole of it later, when she is calmer.”

A hand crept out of the shadow of the seat, and he surrendered the doll into it with a bow as grave as if he were handing a duchess down from her carriage.

“Thank you,” Sophy whispered.

“You are entirely welcome,” he said gravely. Then, “What is her name?”

“Ruth. Her name is Ruth,” the child said solemnly.

“Then Ruth and I are properly acquainted at last, which is more than I can claim of half this street.”

Only then did Victoria mark the state of his gloves, one of them ruined to the wrist where he had gone into the gutter, and no word of it from him.

“You have sacrificed a pair of gloves for a stranger’s doll, my lord,” she said.

He paused, and a flicker crossed the corner of his mouth that was not quite a smile. “A poor bargain,” he said. “The doll appears to have more gratitude than most of my acquaintance.”

“That is a low estimation of your acquaintance,” Victoria replied.

“It is an accurate one, which is worse.” His glance went once more to the child, who had tucked the doll beneath her chin. “Good evening to you both.”

He was gone into the crowd before Victoria could find the reply she wanted, which annoyed her more than it should have.

“Mama, that man bowed to Ruth,” Sophy said, twisting round in the seat to look after him.

“So he did.”

“Nobody bows to Ruth.”

“No,” Victoria agreed, watching the place where the crowd had closed behind him. “Nobody does.”

***

Amelia Ashcombe’s house blazed at every window, and the line of carriages emptying onto the steps told Victoria that her cousin had underestimated the crush in exactly the way she underestimated most things.

“You came.” Amelia met her in the crowded hall with both hands out. “I was certain you would turn back at Hounslow and send me some elegant excuse about Sophy’s cough.”

“Sophy has no cough,” Victoria said.

“Then you would have found her one on the road.” Amelia drew back and looked her over, and her face tried for approval and failed. “You have worn grey to a ball.”

“I have,” Victoria said evenly.

“You are permitted colour, you know,” Amelia pressed. “You are very nearly required it.”

“I am permitted a great many things I do not want.” Victoria smoothed a crease from her glove that was not there.

“People will look at you in that and think you have come from a funeral,” Amelia said, dropping her voice. “Then they will remember whose, and then we shall spend the entire evening carefully not speaking of Gerald, which is the one subject I most wished to spare you.”

“They will speak of Gerald whatever I wear,” Victoria said. “In grey, they may pity me. In blue, they would only wonder what I was after. I prefer the pity. It asks less of me.”

“You cannot mean that,” Amelia protested.

“I have never meant anything more sincerely in my life.”

“You used to love a ball,” Amelia said anxiously. “You danced every set. I remember it.”

“That was a different woman. She married well and learnt better.”

“You might love them again,” Amelia insisted. “You are but eight and twenty. It is not a sentence.”

“It is not the balls I mind. It is the people who remember Gerald fondly, and expect me to hold still while they do it.”

Amelia’s mouth softened, and she seemed on the point of a remark they would both regret. She reached for the child instead. “And where is this one to be put? You cannot have brought her down among the dancers.”

“She is to sit upstairs with your Mrs Foss,” Victoria said, “and I am to look in on her, and if a single soul tells me she is a nuisance I shall take her home and count the evening a triumph.”

“Nobody will tell you she is a nuisance.”

“There is always one who does,” Victoria murmured. “It is the one thing at a ball a person may rely upon.”

“Then I shall stand between you and that one all evening,” Amelia declared.

“You will be dancing all evening. You always are.”

“I can dance and defend at the same time. It is very nearly my only accomplishment.”

The thing Victoria had dreaded without troubling to name it came out of the cloakroom doorway in dove-grey silk and pearls, straight as a fire iron.

“Victoria.” Lady Agatha stopped a pace off, and her gaze went past Victoria entirely, down to the child at her side. “And here is Sophronia. How thin you have both grown. And how grey you are, my dear, are you unwell, or is it grief still? A year and more, and you cannot let the poor man rest.”

“I am perfectly well, Lady Agatha,” Victoria said evenly. “You are kind to ask.”

Lady Agatha did not answer her. She studied Sophy the way a buyer studies a horse whose papers she suspects, and Sophy pressed closer to her mother’s skirts.

“How like her father about the mouth,” the old woman said coolly, her eyes never leaving the child. “Though I confess I see little of him elsewhere. Say good evening, child.”

“Good evening,” Sophy whispered.

“She might curtsy.”

“She might,” Victoria said, “when she is introduced to a person she knows.”

“She has spirit,” Roland, now Sir Roland Hemsworth, observed from behind his mother. “Gerald’s girl would. A pity spirit is so much harder to place well than obedience.”

“She is not a housemaid to be placed, Roland,” Victoria said evenly.

Beside her, Amelia had gone pale.

“I did not invite them,” she whispered. “I swear it to you, I did not.”

“They do not require inviting,” Victoria said drily. “They require only an occasion, and you were kind enough to provide one.”

Roland smiled at that as though it were a point scored in a game only he was enjoying. Victoria set her hand flat against Sophy’s back and steered her towards the stairs before the inspection could go any further.

Victoria carried her up herself. The housekeeper produced iced cakes, and Sophy arranged the doll against the sofa arm where it might best watch the room.

“You will not go far, Mama?” she asked.

“Only down the stairs. Send Mrs Foss if you want me, and I shall come straight up, and we shall go home.”

“Even if the ball is not finished?” Sophy asked.

“Especially then. I am rather hoping for the excuse.”

“And you will come the very moment I send?”