It wouldn’t have mattered.
He could, of course, say or do anything he liked to her. She was his wife. His property in the eyes of the law.
She gave up and turned away from him, aiming her face toward the window, her eyes half closed, and said nothing more until the carriage came to a halt.
“Maybe a little sherry would help,” Angelique suggested, tentatively.
The proprietresses of the boardinghouse by the docks known as The Grand Palace on the Thames had just settled in with a basket of mending in their little room at the top of the stairs to discuss an odd little problem: For the past week, the after-dinner discourse in their sitting room had been less spirited than... moribund.
And they both felt a little responsible.
Delilah laughed. “Are you suggesting we ought to get our guests foxed?”
But they both knew Angelique was only partly jesting.
The rules of The Grand Palace on the Thames required all guests to gather at least four nights out of the week, which they believed helped foster what they liked to think of as the boardinghouse’s warm, familial atmosphere. The room had been the scene of impromptu dancing; sultry innuendo; feelings both hurt and soothed; passionate debate about apple tarts, ghosts, the nature of love and death and phallic flora; and once, enthusiastic sex (at night, however, after everyone else had gone to sleep). Bawdy songs had been composed on the spot there. Mr. Delacorte had made many trips to the Epithet Jar, which presided over everything, and maintained civility. Anything could happen in that room.
But currently, almost nothing was happening in that room.
It had to do with their current mix of guests.
The very young Corporal Simon Dawson and his new bride, Cora, had been in residence for fourdays of the fortnight they intended to stay, and though they had obediently reported to the sitting room after dinner, they had thus far seemed impervious to every attempt to draw them into conversation. It didn’t help that Corporal Dawson had a tendency to go mute from awe when the legendary smuggler-catcher Captain Tristan Hardy, Delilah’s husband, was in the room, which amused Captain Hardy and didn’t bother him a bit. Cora had freckles and Simon had a cowlick and both had big brown eyes and somberly deferential manners, all of which made everyone else present feel ancient. Corporal Dawson was sweetly solicitous of his shy little wife. They were, in a word, adorable; it was like hosting a pair of baby field mice. The Epithet Jar was in no danger of seeing a contribution from either of them.
And then there was Mrs. Prudence Cuthbert, who had come to London from Norfolk to visit her childhood friend, Mrs. Pariseau, a longtime resident of The Grand Palace on the Thames. Mrs. Cuthbert was polite but nervous, and though she and Mrs. Pariseau were both widows in their middle years, she seemed older, perhaps because her lips were so often compressed in a disapproving line. She had confided to Mrs. Pariseau that Mr. Delacorte reminded her of a dog she’d once owned who found it amusing to insert his snout into strangers’ behinds, and then stand back and wag his tail. While this was a fair description of Mr. Delacorte, Mrs. Pariseau had later said, somewhat apologetically, to Delilah and Angelique, “Ididn’t realize Prudence had grown up to be soprim.”
Two nights ago, Mrs. Pariseau’s attempt to lead a discussion of Greek myths had veered into chaos when Mr. Delacorte shared that he’d thought “Testicles” was a Greek philosopher the first time he’d seen the word in print. (“Testicleez, like Hercules,” he’d explained to his stunned audience.)
Mrs. Cuthbert now went warily stiff every time Mr. Delacorte opened his mouth, and Angelique and Delilah had taken to keeping smelling salts in the sitting room.
Mrs. Pariseau was patently not prim. She was thoroughly enjoying her relatively monied widowhood, and while she had no desire to ever marry again, she adored handsome men as much as arcane discussion. There wasn’t a single topic of conversation too controversial for her to enthusiastically embrace, just as there wasn’t a single topic of conversation Mr. Delacorte couldn’t make more awkward. Angelique and Delilah cherished both of them, and would be quite pleased if they stayed forever.
But both of them now seemed to be languishing.
For the past several days, Mrs. Pariseau had read aloud fromThe Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, and everyone else had merely... listened politely. Even Mr. Delacorte, who had sat near the chessboard, his chin propped on his fist almost disconsolately.
Delilah and Angelique had never thought a daywould come when they would be uneasy about “politely.” They had begun to feel as though they were failing in their mission to make The Grand Palace on the Thames a warm, familial place. The alchemy of guests was what had created the magic in the room thus far.
“We could always dose their tea with something from Mr. Delacorte’s case,” Delilah mused.
Angelique laughed.
Mr. Delacorte imported remedies from the Orient, “ground up herbs and bits and bobs of animal horns and whatnot,” as he described them, and sold them to apothecaries and surgeons up and down the coast. Some of them cured fevers and healed wounds and helped slow bleeding and eased pains and headaches, some caused hallucinations or wild dreams, some did all of those things, and some did nothing at all.
“Oh, it feels a bit like tempting fate to say, but I almost wish a more exciting guest would arrive,” Angelique admitted. “Perhaps our sitting room recipe is missing just one crucial person to make it come alive again.”
Just then a familiar thundering on the stairs made them leap to their feet.
Dot appeared in the doorway, and her flushed, triumphant expression could only mean one thing: she’d triumphed over Mr. Pike, their new footman, in a race to answer the front door.
Answering the door was Dot’s favorite thing to do, but Mr. Pike had gotten a taste of it and, unfortunately, decided Dot was right: it wasdelightful, like opening a gift every time, and he wanted to do more of it. Delilah and Angelique had mostly left the two of them to sort it out between them, as an experiment and by way of avoiding crushing Dot’s heart by telling her they wanted their strapping footman to do it all the time. Dot had once accidentally trod on Mr. Pike’s foot in a race for the door, which made Mr. Pike darkly mutter “bollocks.” This they knew because Dot had tattled on him. They were, after a fashion, each other’s nemesis. And like all nemeses since the dawn of time, they were fascinated by each other.
Dot needed three gulps of air before she could deliver her news, which she did in a rush, as if she wanted to prevent Pike from beating her to that, too.
“We’ve a man downstairs who would like a suite!”
“What sort of man? One of means, it would seem, if he wants a suite, instead of just a room.” Delilah began to untie her apron.
Dot’s expression fleetingly clouded, as she apparently pondered this question, then cleared, as though she’d swiftly resolved some troubling internal debate.
