Fortune Favors the Wicked (16 page)

She brushed him with the back of her hand, which was, he thought, the gestural equivalent of a smile.

“Miss Perry!” Barrett was the first to notice her. “Is everything all right?”

“Everything's fine,” Benedict assured her. “I told Miss Perry what a fine time I had visiting you all in the kitchen, and she wanted to see if she could wheedle a few biscuits from you.”

“No, indeed,” Charlotte said, the edge of a laugh in her voice. “Mr. Frost is teasing you all. The truth is far more sober.” She paused. “I was actually hoping for a slab of bread.”

Cook clucked. “Meals put back to all hours, first for the vicar to pay his calls, then the missus, lost in her work! I don't wonder you're hungry, Miss Perry. Colleen, fetch the butter.”

“But it's . . .”

“Right, right.” Cook cut her off. “Jam, then.”

A pot clunked onto the wide worktable, and Colleen brought over a breadboard and knife. “Sit with us,” said Benedict. “Have a slice. It smells good enough to make a sailor give up his rum ration.”

“Oh, I can't,” said the maid in her soft brogue. “You can't imagine what I've done to the butter, and I've got to try to fix it.”

She crossed the kitchen again, footsteps echoing more quietly.

“What did she do to the butter?” he whispered to Charlotte.

“I really
can't
imagine,” she said just as quietly. “But it's gone a sort of orange color.”

“All settled?” Barrett paused in her click-click movements about the kitchen. “I'll take some of that bread for the reverend's tea, now.”

When she left the kitchen, Benedict smiled. “Accent thick as a Yorkshire pudding, isn't it?”

“That's how I always thought of it, too.” Charlotte scraped a knife across the top of the jam pot. “We see her the same way. Or . . . that is . . .”

“It's all right. I know what you mean.” He placed his hands atop the smooth-worn wood of the worktable. “In my dreams sometimes I can see. Then when I open my eyes, ready for morning light, and there is nothing but blank, I wish I had not awoken. I wish it had never happened, that my life had never taken such a turn.”

She took one of his hands—then flipped it over and placed a slice of warm bread on his palm. “What do you do, then?”

“I get up and try to make my life take another turn. The alternative is passing time; wasting it. Waiting for death.” He lifted the bread to his lips. “That seems a terrible waste of such a handsome man who has learned so much.”

“Indeed it does,” she agreed. “And so modest! A true paragon.”

He took a huge bite. Hot, fresh bread, dense and satisfying, slathered with plum jam that was both tart and sweet at once.

“If I hadn't lost my sight,” he said after he swallowed that blessed bite, “I wouldn't be here in this kitchen, eating this bread. So some turns are quite nice.”

“Would you have kept your commission if you had never fallen ill?”

“
What if
is a poor exchange for certainty.” He smiled. “Which doesn't keep me from wondering. I think I'd have liked to keep sailing—but it's possible I would have been purged in peacetime, unable to sell my commission. Without a pension or half pay.”

Her hands were moving over the table, tiny vibrations as though she were rolling crumbs about. “Would you have wanted to marry?”

What if
.
What if
. “What I've wanted has never changed. But I can't marry or I lose my post as a Naval Knight—and if I lose that, I lose my half pay, too.”

“They really have you tied up in a box,” she mused.

“They really do,” he said. “But I'm used to it. What is a ship but a box that floats around?”

“What is a mansion in Mayfair but a large and elegant box?”

He had not thought of that, but—as he took another huge bite of bread—he decided it made sense. Any place could be a cage. And maybe, with the right person, any place could be a home.

He had blamed all of England for the trapped gloom he felt upon returning—but really, it wasn't England's fault. It was the bookshop that should have been a home, but was nothing but a cage for him. A place where love was conditional and disappointment eternal. Benedict, the wayward son, who could read if he just tried harder. If he loved them enough to try harder.

Outside of the bookshop, though, there were ports and streets and parks. London stretched outside of it, great and unknown. He didn't have to sail the world to find somewhere new to lay his head.

He'd been too used to leaving. Leaving his family, his country. Once he became blind, he allowed the Naval Knights to support him, but he left them, too. They asked him to live in another cage, this one in Windsor Castle.

But they granted him a leave of absence to travel. They didn't make him stay, day in and day out.

At the moment, he was where he wanted to be, and he could think of no better company. And the only
what if
on his mind was: “What if I accompany you tomorrow when you call on Edward Selwyn?”

* * *

The first post of the day came early to Frost's Bookshop, Paternoster Row. Cousin Mary tried to put down baby Johnny to fetch it, but he cried. Just as he had cried all night, sobs bleeding through the thin walls and waking Georgette along with his parents.

“Teething, poor mite.” Cousin Mary looked exhausted, her dark hair straggling from its pins. “Georgette, go pay the postman, and keep note of what it cost.”

Georgette would have met the night-soil man if it meant escaping the wailing baby for a few minutes. She darted downstairs, grabbed a few coins from the till, and paid the amounts due. Some post was local: a catalog about an auction of the Earl of Wendover's library; Cousin Harry would like that. A few books bound up in brown paper.

And a letter for Georgette, her name written ruler-straight. The lines were flattened at the bottom, the
t
's left uncrossed. She knew this hand, reshaped by the noctograph on which the missive had been written.

“Benedict. Finally.” She hadn't received so much as a word from her brother since he'd been traveling in France.

After relocking the bookshop door, she slipped the letter into her pocket and mounted the stairs. “New books and a catalog, Cousin Mary. Where would you like them?”

“Me open it!” The two-year-old, Eliza, loved to tear open parcels.

Mary tucked another lank lock of hair behind her ear, bouncing the crying Johnny on her hip. “I don't know. I haven't time to look at them before the shop opens in half an hour.”

“I'll set the catalog on the table for Cousin Harry.” To do so, Georgette had to clear the remains of breakfast. Likely the housemaid was changing a nappy, or washing one, or performing some chore to do with some substance that had come out of some small person's body.

The main living room above stairs was small and cramped, as full of books as the shop below. Adding to the clutter were the unmistakable signs of a house full of children: wet nappies drying before a fire, a few well-loved toys, some chewed-on books. Mary and Harry Fundament had four children aged four years and under. Privately, Georgette was not surprised Cousin Harry spent so much time traveling away from London to buy books from country house libraries. The place of neglectful peace in which Georgette had been raised was now full of sobs and chatter.

But the bookshop, at least, was thriving. Benedict had sold the shop to their cousins for a fair price, and for a few more weeks, Georgette would help them to run the business. And during that time, she had a place to live, and—well, that was how the world worked. It wasn't as though an unmarried woman could be trusted to run a bookshop herself. Georgette knew that. And her cousins needed Georgette's bedchamber more than they needed her help, which would soon be done by a day clerk for a few pounds a year.

Georgette set the parcels down before little Eliza, a red-cheeked cherub with curling dark hair. “Mind the bindings, all right? Gentle on the books.”

“'Liza gentle.”

Georgette smiled, then turned to her harried cousin. “I received a letter from my brother. Shall I pay the postage?”

“Oh.” Cousin Mary shut her eyes, swaying as much with fatigue as to soothe the baby. “Maybe. From where was it sent? Not France again, I hope?”

Georgette pulled out the letter to see. Since recipients paid for their post, she'd had to lay out a great many coins for Benedict's letters over the years. When he'd been studying medicine in Edinburgh, at least he'd got a frank from Lord Hugo so Georgette didn't have to pay postage.

She almost dropped the letter when she saw where it had come from. “From Derbyshire. But I thought—” She'd thought he was sailing with the
Argent
again. How lowering to realize she was not kept apprised of which continent her brother was on.

“That's all right, then. We'll cover the postage. Lord knows you do enough around here to help.” Mary managed a smile. “It's nice that he wrote to you. Maybe he has a place for you to come and live with him.”

“Maybe he does.”

Georgette knew he didn't, of course. She and her brother were all but strangers. He had never liked books and had begged to go to sea, taking a post as a cabin boy at the age of twelve. She'd been only three years old then. For almost eighteen years, they hadn't shared a home. Not even when he went blind and almost died had he returned to London. Nor did he come back when their parents grew ill and
did
die the following year.

Part of Benedict's condition of sale to Cousins Mary and Harry was that Georgette must be allowed to live with them until she was twenty-one.

Which was less than a month away. And then what would become of her? She was a colorless girl to look at, all pale blond hair and pale skin and pale eyes. Just the shade of a book's pages; she faded into the bookshop as though she were part of it. There was no hope a customer would enter and be bowled over with love at the sight of her.

Well, there was always hope. A faint sliver. But such a hope had gone unfulfilled year upon year, as Georgette read novels and fairy tales and minded the shop. Through its windows she watched the
ton
eddy by, passing and changing each Season.

“I'm going to read my letter, Cousin, and then I'll open the bookshop.”

“That would be lovely. Once Mr. Fundament returns”—Mary and Harry were formal before their spinster cousin—“I'd love to catch a bit of sleep.”

“'Liza all done.”

The proud two-year-old had opened the parcels, which contained unbound books. Seeing more paper, she had kept right on “opening” them, shifting pages from one pile to another.

Georgette could have groaned. “And I'll take these down with me and sort them out.”

The housemaid, Polly, came from the larger bedchamber with a one-year-old and a pile of stinking cloths. “We'll need the laundress today and no mistake.”

Mary's face fell. “I haven't time to go for her. Polly, could you—”

“I'll go for her,” said Georgette.

“Be quick, then. I'll open the shop if you're not back in time.” A nervous glance at the clock. “But of course you want to read your letter first. I forgot.”

Mary wasn't unkind, just stretched beyond her limit. Georgette worried sometimes that the slightest thing could break her, and she didn't want to be that thing.

It had been different when Mama and Papa were alive, though not in the warm family manner some might imagine. No, it was different because the business was
theirs.
Because Georgette was the only child at home, and they trusted her to help, and the harder she worked, the better her family prospered.

This won the distant fondness of her parents, both scholarly types who had surely met and mated between the pages of a book. They were too distracted to pursue anything but knowledge; it was left to Georgette to pursue business. Now that the typhus had taken them, any gains were to the benefit of Mary and Harry.

Georgette had had the benefit of a haphazard but broad education. She knew plenty. Enough that she would never throw in her lot with a scholar again.

She carried her letter into her bedchamber, a cubby of a space containing a desk, a trunk, and a narrow bed. Seating herself at her desk, she pushed aside a litter of newspapers and books and skimmed the tidy lines from her brother.

And then she slapped the paper down, furious. “That . . . that
rat
.” She wished she knew more curses. She wished she knew a word bad enough for a brother who visited London to sell a manuscript but who had not visited the bookshop in which he was raised.

He had not even come to say hello to her.

Instead, he had hared off to Derbyshire for a pressing errand . . . what errand? Lord Hugo was in London, and Benedict's other friends were scattered about the world.

Honestly, she got more news of Benedict from Hugo than she did from her brother himself. Lord Hugo Starling called on her irregularly and perfunctorily. It was clear he'd rather be anywhere else but interacting with a dull human creature such as she.

At least he bought a lot of books whenever he visited the shop.

She picked up the letter again, skimming the lines.
Derbyshire . . . do not worry about anything . . . I will write again soon.

Ha. Right. She'd just spend the leisure she didn't command relaxing into the pile of money she didn't possess.

The only bit she could put any faith in was that he was in Derbyshire.