“How did you come to be here, in this pub, tonight, Mrs. Breedlove?”
Angelique sighed. “Oddly, it was where I met Derring. That’s the briefest answer.”
“You met Derring here? But how did...”
“I should like to briefly outline the events that led to our meeting. I will omit unnecessary details for the sake of brevity.”
Delilah nodded. “Very well. Carry on.”
“My mother died when I was young. My brother died in the war. My father was a surgeon and believed in educating girls, so I had excellent tutors. I can speak and write in several languages,” she said with a flash of faintly defensive pride. “But then my father fell gravely ill and to support us I became a governess for a wealthy family who had two young daughters.”
“Ah!” Delilah inadvertently said aloud. She could easily imagine Angelique as a governess. Bossy and certain of herself.
“The father of this family... took a fancy to me.” She cleared her throat. “He was handsome and persistent. I was flattered and naive and a little frightened. And then I was quite ruined. Dismissed from my position and turned out by the lady of the house just after my father died.”
She relayed this as steadily as a governess conducting a grammar lesson, but her hand had closed around her sherry glass as if it were the one thing anchoring her to the earth. Her knuckles were as white as little skulls. She didn’t wait for a response, and Delilah didn’t say a word. The muscles of her stomach had contracted.
“Without references, I could no longer work as a governess. None of my relatives—I’ve an uncle in Scotland, and an aunt and some cousins in Devonshire—were willing to take me in after that debacle. Eventually I found work in a tailor’s shop down the road from this pub. My needlework is fine and I’m unafraid of hard work.” Her chin went up a little. “Customers hailed from all walks of life and I found the variety refreshing, oddly. A young lord, very handsome, visited the shop often. He persuaded me he was in love with me and convinced me to go away with him to Scotland. I thought we were headed for Gretna Green.”
Suddenly she stopped as though she’d encountered an iceberg and wasn’t quite certain how to navigate around it.
She looked down at the table a moment, as though her composure could be found there.
Delilah’s stomach contracted in fear of what was to come.
Angelique lifted her head. “In Scotland, in a room above an inn, he explained that, since I seemed so worldly, he thought I understood that I wasn’t the sort of girl he could ever marry. He thought I’d understood we were just having a bit of fun. Though of course at no point had he ever said such a thing. He was, in fact, about to become engaged to an appropriate young woman. He hoped I would wish him well.”
It was on that last word that her nearly rote recitation finally cracked.
For a second, Delilah couldn’t breathe.
The whole of Angelique’s history churned in the pit of Delilah’s stomach. This.Thisis what men did. They did things that led to two women being penniless, frightened, and alone in a tiny pub by the docks, cast there like much-churned earth flying in the wake of a plow. Just that consequential.
She knew not all men were monsters. But they could chart whatever course they pleased. They didn’t have to care about consequences if it didn’t suit them.
She hadn’t words. She honored Angelique’s story with silence.
And even as she ached with furious sympathy, some all-too-human part of her envied the sheer sweep of Angelique’s life—the illicit attractions, the thrill of hope, the budding of love, though Angelique hadn’t said as much. Whereas Delilah had been transferred from her father’s household to her husband’s like crated porcelain.
Behind the bar, Frances had, of all things, retrieved a book and was reading it. Dot and the man by the fire snored in counterpoint.
“Is this particular lord still alive?” Delilah asked finally.
“Yes.”
“Thatisa pity.”
Angelique’s eyes flared in surprise. And then a smile began at one corner of her mouth and spread slowly to the other.
Then she sighed. “And here we are. After that debacle, I stopped in to the tailor shop to see if they would have me back, and of course they wouldn’t, as I’d run out on them quite unceremoniously. So I came in here to visit Frances and have a meat pie and a good cry. Which was when Derring walked in, looking like what he was, an earl in his later years. Full of his own importance but not insufferably so. He inquired as to why I was weeping. I don’t weep anymore, mind you.”
Delilah imagined it: Dear Dull Derring, an aging wolf chancing upon a wounded doe.
She suppressed a shudder. She didn’t need to know more details.
“The one building Derring owns outright is the building next to this pub—Number 11 Lovell Street. Tavistock surmised he won it in a card game. Apparently it’s mine now. Perhaps that was why he was here, in this pub, the day you met him.”
“Interesting. He never said a word about the building. Congratulations on... having a possession.”
