“A good girl never brings up weighty topics.” “A good girl is always agreeable and pleasant.”
Her mother’s rules slowly seeped poison into her dream, tainting the beautiful image she’d concocted. Camille screamed, letting her limp pillow muffle the sound. How many nights had she lain awake as a child, fantasizing about her father’s home at Camine Manor and a lovely garden in which she would take afternoon tea?
Renard’s offer had been tempting, if only for a real image of a duke’s home to occupy her mind.
She couldn’t understand him. He’d bought her an expensive gift, lured her into fictitious dreams of a future, but he hadn’t once implied her workplace was unsuitable or that he would set her up in a flat in town.
If he acted like any other gentleman and encouraged a mutual physical relationship, she’d understand his expectations. But he’d made no demands, set no expectations. He’d as much as said he’d taken no time to consider the matter. But hehadoffered himself and that which held value to him, almost as if he was asking for more without realizing.
No. She turned on her side and stared at the wall, letting the cracks and watermarks ground her back in reality, and willed her trail of thought to end. That way lay danger. Anything beyond their next rendezvous was satirical nonsense. He may glance over the logistics of what a real future between them looked like presently, but for how long?
She’d said he should take some time to think over their relationship, but the advice went both ways. Their time so far had been a whirlwind of passionate arguments and more passionate couplings. Despite the reprieve from her less-than-ideal circumstances, a wealthy and handsome duke didn’t fit into her future, no matter how her mind wandered into the realm of romance.
Marriage was out of the question, and she refused to be a kept woman like her mother, relying too much on a relationship that left her dependent and vulnerable without the freedom to walk around in society.
She curled into a ball and listened to her mother softly snoring in the other room, on a mattress of rags and torn curtains taken from the last of their possessions from the flat off Burkley Street, the house the duke had kept for his ‘dolls’ to stay in.
Camille bit the inside of her cheek to keep her next scream inside. How far they’d fallen; a year ago, they’d been living in a small but tidy home in a respectable neighborhood. Now they were lucky to share a two-room flat with the rest of the freezing vermin in St. Giles.
She watched a roach crawl across the floor and disappear through the gap under the door and shuddered. This was her life, a life mirrored by hundreds more in the surrounding buildings. People who had no way of dragging themselves from their hellish circumstances, not alone.
She was needed here.
The country, attachments, affections: they’d all have to wait. She had work to do.
Chapter Fourteen
Camille eyed Syd’sshifting gaze. “What’s the matter?”
The girl jolted from her search of the dark streets as if she’d forgotten Camille was there. “What? Nothing.” She shook her head and gave a reassuring grin, but a second later, her gaze slipped back to the alley shadows, her expression indecipherable with the sliver of moon overhead.
Camille stopped. She knew better than to ignore the nose of the ‘wolf.’ And she’d pay her week’s wages to distract herself with someone else’s drama. “Want to talk about it?”
Hearing her words repeated from the other night, Syd glanced her way, her grin flashing. “The streets feel off is all.”
Taking a moment to make her own assessment of their surroundings, Camille did have an odd sense of shifted intention in the air, a sense she should have noticed at once. Gone for less than three days and Renard’s absence was an unforgivable distraction. “What is it?”
“Don’t know.” Syd shook her head. “Probably a fight gone bad at the Sally Saloon. Anytime Lucien crawls out of his underground lair, the night walkers get jumpy and the rest make themselves scarce.”
“We should ask Lucien to venture into the streets more often. The Merrys could use a night off.”
“That’d be nice,” Syd said.
“But you don’t think that’s the reason for the quiet?”
“Probably nothing.” Syd stopped her fidgeting and shrugged. “Pops says I got a sense for trouble, but that sense rarely leads to anything.”
“Are the Merry Men still running thin?”
“With the fat purses in town, there’ve been pickpockets pinching the pockets of gentlemen when they visit one of the clubs by the harbor. Nothing unusual. Then there’re the white collars.”
Nothing like priests spouting about the pits of hell to make the sinners run for the steeples. “Think one in particular is causing a fuss?”
“Hard to tell. Some bloke’s been sniffing around, asking questions. Discreet, I’ll give him, but stuffed monkeys talk.”
Camille smiled at the pastry reference. The Jewish immigrants made a fruity dessert on par with English tarts.
There wasn’t a stone you could throw anywhere in the Houndsditch or Whitechapel rookeries without hitting at least two Jewish families who’d fled to London from East Europe, clumped together in unreasonable conditions just to make ends meet. Which also meant there was always someone watching.
