“Then what’re you doing standing here?” one man asked belligerently.
Vivian didn’t realize she had grabbed Honor’s hand until Honor squeezed back gently. “He can handle them,” she said, her voice barely more than a breath next to Vivian’s ear.
In spite of the humid night, Vivian shivered. But Honor was right. It was easy to picture Leo’s smile as he replied, “Following orders, my friend. Which I don’t recommend getting in the way of.”
A murmur went through the group; they might have been drunk, but they knew better than to ignore that sort of warning. Getting in the middle of someone else’s business was a good way to end up beaten or worse in an alley.
“Thanks for the cig,” one of them called, while a friend gave hima shove to get him moving down the street with the rest of the group. “Good luck with your night.”
As soon as the sound of their footsteps had started to fade, Honor was back at the door. Vivian thought she must be working more by feel than anything else; it was certainly too dark to see the keyhole. Vivian stayed where she was until she heard the click of the padlock’s hinge and Honor’s quietly triumphant “Open sesame.” A flicker from the streetlight caught her smile as she turned to Vivian. “Shall we?”
The door was heavy enough that they had to work together to ease it open and lower it, silently and slowly, toward the ground. Vivian tried to trick her mind into thinking of it as a game, just like sneaking out to go dancing, back when Florence had looked at her nighttime excursions with such bitter disapproval. But her heart felt like it was pounding right in her throat, making her breath come in shivering bursts that couldn’t quite pull enough oxygen into her lungs.
“After you,” Honor murmured, and they slipped inside, light on toes that were used to keeping up with the rapid tempo of a Charleston or a quickstep. There were five stairs going down on the other side, and they had to stand on them to ease the door back into place so it wouldn’t come crashing down and tell the whole world that something shady was going on.
When it was closed, it was inky black in the basement, where the only window was barely seven inches high and looked out over the dank ground of the alley. Honor pulled out a flat pocket light, and the weak, narrow beam darted around the crowded little storage room like a firefly trying to find its way back to the sky.
But there was no sound from outside. So far, so safe.
“This way,” Vivian whispered, sliding carefully past stacked bolts of fabric, crates of notions and trimmings, and two broken sewing machines in need of repair. Honor was a shadow moving behind her, nearly silent, but Vivian was all too conscious of the other woman’spresence, the faint sound of her steps, the smell of her perfume, the electric feeling when their hands happened to brush against each other in the dark. It was the first time they had ever been together outside the Nightingale. Vivian wondered if Honor was as scared as she was. She wondered if Honor was scared of anything. “The safe is upstairs.”
The narrow staircase up to the first floor crackled beneath them, a sound that would have barely registered in the daylight but at night, in the quiet, sounded as loud as a gunshot. Vivian’s breath came faster as she darted up.
Halfway up, Honor put out her light, and when they came to the top of the stairs they paused once more, listening and watching. A streetlight shone right outside the store, making it easy to see what they were doing. But it also meant that anyone who happened to glance through the window would be able to spot two people moving around inside a store that was clearly closed, even if they wouldn’t quite be able to tell who those people were.
They couldn’t see Leo; he was standing a few storefronts down, so that he wouldn’t call attention to which shop they were in. Vivian wished she could see him, just for a moment. But they needed to get in and out quickly.
The safe was in a cabinet under the counter; Vivian pulled out the stacks of fabric samples that hid it from view. Once she was bent down, the counter hid her from the view of the front window, and she felt her shoulders unknot just the barest amount. Standing back up was going to be all kinds of unappealing.
Honor crouched down beside her, pulling out her light once more to illuminate the safe’s lock. Vivian could hear the unhappy hiss of a sharply drawn breath. “I can’t pick a combination lock, pet. And I don’t know a damn thing about cracking them.”
For the first time that night, Vivian felt confident about something. She put her mouth close to Honor’s ear and whispered, “You don’t have to.” She thought Honor might have shivered, and she wonderedif it was from nerves or something else. “Miss Ethel isn’t exactly what you’d call trusting. But she has a real lack of imagination. Since she can’t do two things at once without losing her place in both, it never occurs to her that any of her busy seamstresses might be watching when she has to open the safe.”
Honor turned so they were looking in each other’s eyes, their faces mere inches apart, closer even than when they were dancing. Vivian could practically feel the curve of Honor’s lips as she smiled. “But you haven’t worked as a seamstress in months,” she murmured. “How do you know she hasn’t changed the combination?”
“Like I said,” Vivian replied, unable to help smiling in response, in spite of her nerves. “Lack of imagination.” She turned back to the dial. “Shine the light this way?”
The last time she had seen Miss Ethel open the safe, the combination had been the address of the shop. And when she spun the dial and felt the click of the latch giving way, she let herself believe that maybe, just maybe, they would get away with this.
The safe contained two modest stacks of cash, the money that Miss Ethel put in the register each morning. Vivian pushed it aside without a moment of hesitation. She might despise the shop owner, but she had no intention of robbing the woman beyond what she had to do to keep Florence safe.
Behind the money, the light caught an edge of folded fabric, striking blue and golden sparks from the gems sewn into it. Taking a deep breath, Vivian pulled it out slowly. The silk of the dress slithered through her fingers, unfolding like a woman stretching after a nap. She and Honor both stared at it for a moment.
Honor let out a low whistle that was mostly air. “That is a pretty thing and no mistake. Your sister is an artist.”
Vivian stared at it. Drinking and dancing was one thing, but stealing was a different kind of breaking the law. Was she really going to go through with it?
They were the only ones who had received a letter asking for something to be stolen. As far as she knew, every other victim had owned their valuables.
Had the thief gotten greedy? Had their plan always been to eventually persuade other people not just to hand over their own things, but to do someone else’s dirty work in exchange for safety? Or was there something else going on?
“You said it’s not finished, right?” Honor’s voice broke through Vivian’s thoughts. She had pulled two small, lidded tins out of the safe and was peering inside them one by one. Glancing over her shoulder, Vivian could see that they held the remaining topaz and aquamarine stones. There weren’t many of them left, but there were enough to be valuable. “Are you going to take these too?”
Vivian hesitated. “The letter just said the dress,” she whispered. “Miss Ethel’s going to be in a jam either way, but if she has these to give back, it might go a little further toward proving she’s not the one who did the stealing.”
She could feel Honor eyeing her with surprise. “Do you really care what happens to her, one way or another?”
“I’m not doing this to hurt her,” Vivian hissed, stung. “Besides, if she ends up in jail for theft, her store closes, and then all the girls who work for her are out of a job. I don’t want to do that to them.”
