Chapter Three #2
She looked for a mirror, a glass, a lamp, anything that might show a reflection behind her shoulder. There was nothing but crowds and crowds of people, mingling, laughing, flirting. Enjoying themselves, while her world suddenly narrowed to the point of a pin, sharp and merciless.
Her assailant chuckled, not a kind sound. “I am not the only one wearing a mask, my lady.”
She tensed her shoulders and raised her fingertips to the half-mask tied to her face with a ribbon.
The black silk obscured the top half of her face, traced with a subtle design of white embroidery.
Ostrich feathers in white and black curled over her upswept hair.
She had thought the effect fetching when she examined herself in Emmeline’s mirror.
“I do not merit that the address of lady,” Louisa said quietly.
“You once did.”
“Never,” she lied. “You mistake me for someone else. I am a weaver’s daughter.”
His low chuckle made her shiver again, and her terror was, to her surprise, not entirely unpleasant. Her stomach knotted like a tangled skein of embroidery silks. It was as if she wanted to fight.
“You were born of the house of d’Estreaux, and you married into the house of Grenay,” the thief said. “How many women would willingly give up the life of a comtesse?”
“Any woman who found her situation unbearable, I would imagine.”
“But imagine what the Grenay family would feel if they knew how you managed your escape.”
Louisa closed her eyes and clenched her fingers against her waist. How did he know this? How had he found out about her?
“What can you possibly want from me?” she whispered. “I have no more money to give you.”
Silence passed, and she wondered if he had moved on, wearying of this cat-and-mouse game.
“But perhaps your family does,” he speculated.
Who could he mean? “The d’Estreaux would pay you to keep me away,” she said, betraying herself. The pain caught at her, still sharp after all these years.
She had never thought to ask them for succor when she fled the chateau that was her prison, cinders in her hair, ash on her fingertips and in her mouth.
Her parents had never heeded Louisa’s warnings about her husband, her aunts were helpless to provide aid, and her sisters faced the same forced doom that had swallowed Louisa.
The d’Estreaux would denounce her as a traitor.
“Or perhaps the Grenays would pay for information on your whereabouts,” he went on.
The Grenays would gladly pay to see her hang. So might her husband’s cronies, whose hopes she had left a smoking ruin, reeking of horse dung and tar.
“What would it gain you to expose me?” she challenged, curling her trembling hands into fists.
He let a silence unfold again, and Louisa’s ears ached as she strained for an answer.
The music of the hired quartet spilled from one corner of the room, a lively quadrille, and dancers rushed to form their lines.
Louisa’s heart twisted in her chest. The gaiety and wealth of the room, the overabundance of everything, felt like a mockery when she teetered on the edge of losing all.
“What would I gain?” He repeated her question. “Not much, to be sure. But the question I think that concerns us both is, what do you stand to lose?”
She closed her eyes, hoping her mask hid her expression of pain. She could not let him see her despair.
“The reputation of your charming little charity would go first, of course,” he mused, laying out the lines of thought she did not want to follow.
“The Sisters of Benevolence have always preserved the highest moral standards. I understand they’re well known for it.
No selling of children, no trading in girls, no shady apprenticeships, and no back door callers for the women under the roof.
But of course, all that would come into question once the character of the current headmistress is known. ”
Louisa held back a moan. She didn’t want to face his next words—didn’t want to imagine them—but he forced her like a stubborn cow into a chute.
“The patrons would stop their funding. I can’t imagine they would hear your claims or excuses.
They couldn’t afford to be seen supporting a charity headed by someone infamous.
Very few of those who have gone through your doors would want to keep the association, afraid they would be tainted.
Fewer and fewer people would trust the Hospital to supply honest workers.
Fewer would come for aid. Your doors would close. ”
The doors could close for lack of funding, or for lack of workers, but the need would never be erased. There would always be orphans born of illness and accident. There would always be women who lost their protectors, or who found, as Louisa did, the men in their lives were no protectors at all.
And where would they go, the widows, the orphans, the desperate wives, if the Hospital were not there to support them?
All those lines of girls and women she had observed at dinner, all the sleeping heads she had imagined at their cots—where would they find shelter if the Hospital came to a ruinous end?