Page 12 of A Deal with the Devil

“You’re pretty!”

“Aunt P says I have the devil’s hair.”

“Aunt P is the devil,” Evie muttered.

The door led to the attic, and a narrow-crooked staircase. “Hello?” Kitty called out. “Sir Reginald? Anyone?” She winced at the wet footprints they left behind. Not very surreptitious of them.

The silence peculiar to an empty house greeted them.

As did a small, dry parlor entirely decorated with cabbages. “Gah.”

“That is…a great many cabbages.”

“What do we do now?” Evie asked. “We can’t hide out here forever. Sir Reginald might return today for all we know.”

“We’re going to hide you until I can fix this,” Kitty said, using a table runner embroidered with pink and green cabbages to sop up some of the water dripping from her hair into her face.

“Where?”

“Where no one would think to look for you.”

The safest place she knew.

And the very last place she wished to go.

The Spinster Society was located in a large, well-appointed house on the edge of Hyde Park. It shared back gardens and greenhouses with the house next door, which belonged to Lady Priya Langdon. She had purchased it for the additional greenhouses for her horticultural pursuits but opened the house to a peculiar kind of ladies’ society.

It was whispered about from one end of Mayfair to the other. The society left calling cards in ladies’ retiring rooms at balls held in the very best houses—warnings to fortune hunters, of men with all of the power and consequence but generally without any actual consequences. Men like Lord Portsmouth.

Oh, how it infuriated men like him. They could not get to Lady Priya, or her army of spinsters.

Kitty did not have the occasion to frequent many balls—even before their father’s disgrace, barons were only invited to the most peripheral of social gatherings. She did not cross paths with dukes and earls often. She knew their wives from selling them naughty books and treatises on the position of women in modern Britain. Also ancient Sparta, where women could own property and inherit fortunes.

Books on ancient Sparta were very popular.

All to say that Kitty knew about the Spinster Society through other means. Mostly because she had a friend who was a member.

A friend she had betrayed.

And Priya knew everyone’s secrets. Dukes, dowagers—even the prime minster was not immune. The king himself likely had secrets he did not even know, but for certain Priya knew them.

That was how Kitty knew Priya was perfectly aware of her transgressions.

She would not blame the woman for slamming the door in her face. As long as she did not slam it in Evie’s.

“Where are we?” Evie asked. The rain had lessened but not cleared completely. They had run all the way here through the streets of London in their nightdresses. They could not stop now. Not yet.

“Just keep going,” Kitty said, ducking onto the path that led between the houses through hedges trimmed to resemble leaping fish and alcoves of sweet-smelling lilacs. The risk of being spotted was too great to knock on the front door. Two women soaked to the bone in their nightdresses were hard to miss. And honestly, Kitty was not sure of the etiquette in this situation. They were not servants or tradesmen, but also not ladies of high rank. They were supplicants. The side door seemed safest.

Kitty would beg if she had to.

The sun peeked out from behind the clouds, shining on the road, on the carriages and the street sweepers darting out of their hiding places. On pedestrians emerging from their houses, umbrellas in hand. “Don’t stop,” Kitty urged her sister on.

“Galahad’s caught!”

“I’ve got him.” Kitty stopped to attend to the gold cage snarled in a lilac branch. “Go. Knock three times, then once more.” She’d been given the secret code before she had made the choices she had made. She would not waste the chance it gave her sister at a happy life. One that did not end broken at the bottom of Lord Portsmouth’s staircase or floating facedown in his picturesque pond.

Galahad, woken from slumber, carted through rain and thunder, jostled about and then finally dangled from a tree, did not seem terribly impressed.

Neither did the shadow of a man emerging from the nearby alcove of greenery.

“Miss Caldecott.”

Kitty froze, recognizing those dark, languid tones.

The Devil himself.

“I’ve been looking for you.”

She was doomed.