Chapter One #2
“Many people would choose tears.”
“Tears require privacy, and at present I have a stranger, a damp wall, and an indifferent animal as witnesses.”
The smallest breath escaped him, almost a laugh and not quite one. He looked displeased with himself for having allowed it.
Petalia noticed, despite herself. “You need not fear, sir. I shall not report that you nearly found something amusing.”
“You are impertinent.”
“Only when cornered.”
“You are not cornered.”
“No, but I am robbed in a passage, which seems near enough for conversation.”
She drew a breath and straightened her damp sleeve.
“In any case, I have already imposed upon enough strangers for one morning. I am sorry for the inconvenience.”
He stared at her.
“Inconvenience?”
She glanced about the passage. “Perhaps that is not the precise word.”
He turned partly away, then stopped again, conducting some private debate that did not seem to be going in his favour. At last, he reached inside his coat and withdrew a small silver card case.
Petalia watched the motion with growing suspicion. “Sir, if you are about to recommend that I apply to a charity, I must warn you that I am not in a charitable temper.”
“I was not.”
“A pawnbroker, then?”
“No.”
“A constable?”
“Do you wish to report the theft?”
“I wish to retrieve the reticule, scold the thief, recover my hairpin, keep my lodgings, and arrive at an interview looking like a woman of excellent judgment. If the constable can arrange all that, I shall marry him at once.”
He removed a card and looked at it as if it had betrayed him by existing. “There is a lady of my acquaintance who may be in need of someone suitable for her household.”
“May be?”
“Is.”
“You say that with reluctance.”
“I do most things with reluctance. It saves disappointment.”
Despite everything, Petalia’s mouth nearly curved. “And this lady receives applicants without notice?”
“She receives more than is good for her, and she asks too many questions once she has done so. You may call any morning this week, between ten and noon.”
“On what grounds?”
“On the grounds that you have need of employment and she has need of capable women.”
“You do not know that I am capable.”
“You have been robbed and soaked through, and you are still standing upright, speaking in complete sentences, and declining to faint. It is more evidence than many candidates provide.”
The compliment, if it was one, was so dryly delivered that Petalia did not immediately know how to receive it. He took a pencil from the same case and wrote an address on the back of the card.
“Mayfair,” she said when he gave it to her. “That is a considerable address to hand to a woman you have just met in a passage.”
“Do not misuse it.”
“I had been planning to embroider it on a banner and march through the square.”
His brows drew together.
“That was a jest,” she said. “A poor one, perhaps, though in my defence, I am grieving eleven shillings and a boot.”
“Call between ten and noon,” he repeated. “Ask for Lady Maria Fenwick. She will decide whether you are of use.”
“And what shall I say when she asks how I came by her address?”
“Say you heard of a possible situation through an acquaintance.”
Petalia looked at him directly. “I have no acquaintances in London.”
“Then say through a gentleman who preferred not to be named.”
“That sounds worse.”
“Say through a gentleman who had more caution than vanity.”
“That sounds unlikely.”
Again, that almost-smile threatened and vanished. “Say what you please, Miss—”
He stopped because she had not given her name.
“Winthrop,” she said after a moment. “Miss Petalia Winthrop.”
“Miss Winthrop,” he said, and the name in his low voice seemed to settle between them with more significance than a name ought to have carried. “Do not present me as a recommender. I am not recommending you.”
“You are sending me to a lady who may give me employment.”
“I am giving you an address.”
“A distinction a lawyer might enjoy.”
“It is a necessary distinction.”
“Because you do not know me?”
“Because I recommend no one.”
“That sounds less like a principle than a wound.”
His eyes hardened.
Petalia regretted the words at once, though they had slipped out quietly.
She had always had the unfortunate habit of hearing the thing beneath the thing and answering that instead.
It was a useful talent with children, a dangerous one with gentlemen, and an impossible one with men who wore their distance like armour.
She lowered her gaze to the card. “Forgive me. That was impertinent, and not in the charming way I sometimes hope to manage.”
“You have no reason to consider whether I am wounded.”
“No. I have only reason to thank you.”
“Then do that, if you must, and go home before the weather worsens.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said, with more seriousness than she had intended. “For catching me, and for the address. I do not know whether any of it will lead to anything, but I am grateful.”
He inclined his head, not quite a bow and not quite a dismissal. “Between ten and noon, when you are able.”
“And if Lady Maria refuses to see me?”
“She will see you.”
“You sound certain.”
“My aunt sees everyone. It is one of her less defensible habits.”
“Your aunt,” Petalia repeated, unable to help herself.
He looked as if he regretted the word immediately.
“Good day, Miss Winthrop.”
“Good day, sir.”
He turned and left the passage without giving his name.
Petalia watched him go, the card held carefully between both gloved hands.
Only after he had vanished into the movement of the street did she turn it over to inspect the front.
The printed name told her little; the handwritten address on the back mattered more.
There had been no warmth in him, not in any ordinary sense.
Yet he had stopped. He had returned. He had given her something that might become a chance.
Petalia had lived long enough in other people’s houses to know that kindness did not always arrive smiling.
Sometimes it arrived scowling, wrapped in a scarf, and insisting it was nothing of the sort.
She tucked the card into the inner pocket of her cloak, a place she should have used for the hairpin that morning. The thought hurt enough that she pressed her lips together and began the walk back to Bloomsbury before tears could become practical.
***
The rain strengthened by the time she reached Mrs Pemberley’s lodging house. The hallway smelled of boiled cabbage, damp wool, and old polish. Petalia was halfway up the stairs when Mrs Pemberley appeared on the landing with a candle in one hand and arithmetic in her expression.
“Miss Winthrop.”
Petalia stopped. “Mrs Pemberley.”
The landlady’s eyes travelled from Petalia’s wet hem to her ruined boot. “You have had an accident.”
“Several, if one is being precise.”
“I hope none of them has interfered with our arrangement for Saturday.”
Petalia gripped the bannister. She had intended to delay the admission, to prepare it into something less humiliating, but the morning had left her too tired for ornament.
“My reticule was stolen.”
Mrs Pemberley’s face changed, though not enough to conceal the calculation behind it. “Stolen?”
“In the market. It held the rent money I had meant to bring you, as well as my letter of character.”
“That is a very unfortunate thing.”
“It is.”
“But you understand, Miss Winthrop, that I cannot conduct a lodging house on the strength of unfortunate things.”
“I do understand. I am not asking you to forgive the rent. I am asking you to believe I shall do everything possible to pay it.”
Mrs Pemberley shifted the candle to her other hand. “Everything possible is a broad phrase.”
“It is the only one I have at present.”
“Saturday, then.”
“Saturday,” Petalia said, though the word felt like a sentence being passed.
Mrs Pemberley softened only a little. “You had better change those stockings before you take ill. Illness is expensive.”
“I shall avoid it on principle.”
The landlady sniffed, which might have been disapproval or sympathy made cautious by business. “See that you do.”
Petalia climbed the remaining stairs to her small room. She shut the door, leant against it, and drew the card from her pocket.
Lady Maria Fenwick. Mayfair. Between ten and noon.
She set the card on the washstand, then moved it to the little table by the bed, then finally placed it beneath her pillow, not because that made any sense, but because it felt safer there.
She removed her wet boots with difficulty, wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, and sat on the edge of the bed in the dim room.
Soon she would go to Mayfair. She would present herself without the original letter, without her mother’s hairpin, and without any certainty that Lady Maria Fenwick would have use for a governess who had arrived in London with eleven shillings and lost them all by breakfast.
Still, she had a card. She had a name. She had an hour at which to appear.
For one day, that would have to be enough.