“And glad I am of it. But Laurent isn’t.” Elspeth turned away, her face shadowed.
Genevieve bit her lip.
She could recall with perfect clarity walking home that last day in Oxford, just a week before Christmas. It had been raining, and darkness had come early. She’d wanted to get home. Her head had felt curiously light, and she’d kept reaching up to feel the hair that had brushed against the nape of her neck. Still unused to what she’d done for Hetty, her friend in need, only a few days earlier, she hadn’t noticed the two young men emerge from an alley until they’d laughed.
She had thought them university students who had had too much to drink. She could even remember what they had said as they had loomed closer. “The doxy’s cut her hair. Nothing left to sell, mm? Come along with us, girl. We’ll pay for your time.”
She should’ve run. Should’ve done anything else other than drawn herself up and given them a tongue-lashing worthy of a governess, haranguing them for their drunkenness and impaired discernment.
They hadn’t appreciated the scolding.
She remembered that all too well. It was everything after she couldn’t recall.
There had been pain, she knew that. Blood. Fear. Darkness in the place she was held—and Elspeth. Elspeth had always been the constant, her hand to cling to in the dark. And then after, when the fools had drunk too deep from their veins and wounded too badly to heal, and hadn’t wanted to lose their playthings, Elspeth had still been there when clarity had returned after death.
Now Bacchus, Genevieve’s maker, was dead. He had been the one far more likely to hunt them down in the Ossuary and cause mischief. And he had been far more gleeful in ordering Elspeth about. He had no blood tie to her to force Elspeth’s compliance, but each had commanded those of their bloodline to obey the other crony, and they gained far more enjoyment from that than puppeteering their own progeny. Only in the last few years had Bacchus grown bored with them and turned his attention elsewhere, allowing Genevieve to start using her talents to earn coin for them.
But Laurent, Elspeth’s maker, remained—somewhere. Lurking. An unseen threat. With Genevieve’s bond broken, she also was no longer beholden to the command to obey Laurent. But Elspeth’s fetters remained.
“All right,” Genevieve conceded, taking Elspeth’s hand in her gloved one. “I’ll sell it and bring you back more thread. How much? And is there anything you’d like? They’re your earnings, you know.”
“Bought withyourearnings.”
“There is no ledger between you and me,” Genevieve insisted. “Youknowthat.”
Elspeth squeezed her hand. “I do.”
Sparrow rolled onto her back and stretched, propping her legs up on the wall. Her skirts rode up and revealed her patched and threadbare stockings. Genevieve made a mental note.Stockings for Sparrow.
Her brown hair loose around her head, Sparrow yawned, her small fangs glinting in the candle’s light. “I dreamed about roasted chestnuts. I saw a hawker selling some when I fed last evening, and then I dreamed the exact taste. Roasted chestnuts always make me think of Christmas.”
“It was a good Christmas when we had a roasted goose,” Elspeth said. Genevieve nodded her assent in silence.
In years past, Elspeth had tried to conjure a little Christmas for their bolt hole, a way to keep spirits up and mark the passing of the year, even if it was simply recollections of happier times. But Genevieve had little heart for the season—and none at all this year.Truly a bleak midwinter, she thought, remembering the scrap of poem she had read from a book propped open in a bookseller’s window the year before. Would she ever find hope for Christmas again?
Wooden heels on stone announced their visitor. “You’ll never guess,” Winnie announced, rounding the corner without preamble.
“All right.” Elspeth folded her hands in her lap.
“Well?” Winnie demanded, hands on her hips.
“You just said we’d never guess,” Sparrow pointed out in her chirping voice.
“Someone tried to kill the new master again last eve. And what does he do about it? Nothing!” Winnie threw out a frustrated hand that nearly clipped Elspeth on the head. “Honestly. I think the conspirators might have the right of it. He’s of no use at all.”
“I wouldn’t say that very loud if I were you,” Genevieve said, with a warning look at her. “All the assassins who have come for him have been summarily dispatched.”
Winnie sniffed. “How is he any better than what we had? I don’t want to live in this hovel forever,” she grumbled. “If the bully boys at the Mayfair entrances would let me use them, then I could lure a few wealthy men into a dark alley and come out with pounds in my pockets for new dresses. This is last year’s fashion!” She stared in disgust at the dress she wore.
Genevieve glanced down at her badly dyed dress that had been made to accommodate a crinoline and didn’t say anything.
“You ought to do the same,” Winnie said pointedly to Sparrow. “You could use your talent to make any man in the street empty his pockets to you.” Sparrow had begun to develop a basic persuasive talent. So far, she had only managed to coax the guards into looking the other way when she returned later than she ought.
“That would bestealing.” Sparrow’s mouth twisted and a hand snuck towards the pocket where she kept her small, brass crucifix. Even small sins smote her desperately because she could no longer go to confession. Genevieve had once gently suggested that drinking blood was not all that different than the Eucharist, and the look of horror Sparrow had given her had closed her mouth. “You don’tunderstand. You’reProtestant,” Sparrow had insisted, tears in her voice. Genevieve had conceded that she didn’t and had apologized, turning to keeping Sparrow’s mind occupied and not turning inward to brood. She modified her mental note toStockings and something else? For Sparrow.
“Your soul is to perdition, anyway.” Winnie sniffed.
“Winnifred,” Genevieve said warningly as Elspeth patted Sparrow’s shoulder.
