CHAPTER ONE
“Until next Wednesday, my dear.” Now fully dressed, Lord Pelham stooped to fetch his silk topper and gold-headed cane from the red velvet chaise longue upon which Marianne was now reclining, the silk folds of her peignoir revealing her body from thigh to toe.
His Lordship stopped, seemingly in rapt admiration, before he said with a frown, “My dear, weekly visits cannot do justice to what such a magnificent creature as yourself can offer me. Perhaps that should be the subject of a discussion with Madame.”
Marianne inclined her head just so, hoping the glow from the fire would aid the blush his lordship no doubt expected as the natural result of his particular attentions.
“Nothing would give me greater happiness in this world, my Lord,” she murmured, offering him her lips for his departing kiss.
The merciful silence following his departure was quickly broken by the little maid hurrying back into the room after seeing off Marianne’s most regular consort.
“‘’Ow exciting, Miss Marianne! It sounds like Lord Pelham wants to set you up good and proper!” Minnie said, bending to tend the fire. “I hope Madame can strike a handsome bargain. Ain’t it just what all you young ladies want? A feller wiv more coin than sense to establish you in a grand ’ouse and buy you all the pretty fings you could fancy?”
Marianne smiled. “Is that what they tell you? The girls at Madame Chambon’s, I mean?”
Minnie looked up from stoking at the coals, her soot-smudged face blank with surprise. “‘Ow else you goin’ to ’ave a roof over yer heads and enough victuals in yer bellies to keep yer skin white and yer hair glossy? I’d be doin’ what you’re doin’ in a flash, Miss, if I only knew ’ow to talk proper and had a bit more bosom.”
Marianne rose, the heavy silk of her wrapper brushing against her bare feet as she crossed the thick Axminster carpet of her short-term bower and lowered herself onto the cushioned window seat.
“Then perhaps you’re lucky you don’t,” she murmured.
Outside, the leafy, secluded avenues of St. John’s Wood disappeared into the gathering dusk. It was a picturesque suburb of stuccoed villas and hidden walled gardens—a haven built expressly for discretion, and highly favoured by wealthy gentlemen looking to establish their chères amies far away from the prying eyes of Mayfair.
“No, Minnie, if you knew how to talk proper, you’d want to be a lady… or a governess,” she said.
Through the polished glass, Marianne considered the first green buds of May blooming in the gated park opposite. New life. Regeneration. New hope. For a fleeting, agonising second, she felt the faint, unfamiliar budding of those very things within herself—though the prospect of being offered a formal établissement as a permanently kept woman gave her little joy. But it was a step up. Lord Pelham was becoming genuinely attached. And for a girl in her desperate situation, that attachment was the only fragile anchor to which she could pin her survival.
“Then why ain’t you a lady or a governess?” Minnie asked, pausing with the heavy brass poker in hand. “Because it don’t pay so well?”
Marianne contemplated the youngster for a moment. Minnie was one of seven, born and bred in the squalor of Seven Dials—a notorious, sprawling rookery in London’s East End where existence was measured in shillings and scraps. Of course the girl thought only in pounds and pence; it would be uncharitable of Marianne not to forgive her narrow view of the world.
“I was once,” Marianne said softly, her gaze returning to the window.
Minnie looked first surprised, then wary. “A lady or a governess? Are you ’aving a lend of me, Miss Marianne?”
“No. I was first a lady, and then I was a governess.” Marianne shrugged her shoulders. “And then I became… this.”
Minnie narrowed her eyes, no doubt trying to reconcile the grand, mythical ladies of her imagination with the flesh-and-blood woman before her. “How come? I mean, if you was a lady before? Ain’t that what you’re tryin’ to get back to?”
“I can never become a lady again,” Marianne said, the stark truth weighting her voice with a sudden, unexpected grief. After all, it was hardly a startling revelation. “Or a governess.”
For a moment, the room fell silent, save for the rhythmic crackle of the fire. Then Minnie’s eyes widened in dawning comprehension. “You was ruined?” she whispered. Minnie might not be lettered, but she understood the merciless consequences and resulting hierarchy of the world they inhabited. “Oh, me poor lady. No wonder Madame Chambon treats yer so respectful. Because she knows what a fall it must’ve been. If you was a proper lady once.”
Marianne shook her head. “It’s a slippery, one-way slope, this descent into ruin, Minnie. And Madame Chambon knows she’s lucky to have me. No, I shall never be a lady again, and no respectable mistress of any household will ever employ me to teach her innocent children, lest I communicate my indelible sin to them.” She shrugged again, more stiffly now. “It’s the way of the world. And in this world, Minnie, you actually have a much greater chance of climbing to a higher rung than I do. For once damned, forever cast out.”
Minnie bit her lip, deep in thought as she stared down at the floorboards. “You ain’t got no one, Miss? No bruvvers or sisters? No ma or pa? Not that a pa would be much ’elp if ruined is wot you are. Even though it’s always a man wot does the ruining in the first place.”
Out in the gated park, two small girls in matching starched pinafores were playing hoop-and-stick, their nursemaids watching closely from a nearby bench. They were not sisters, likely—one was dark-haired and the other fair—but the sight struck a chord of painful familiarity in Marianne’s chest, reminding her sharply of her own youth. Of her own blood.
“I had a twin, once,” Marianne murmured, her warm breath fogging the chilly glass. “Called Celeste. She was the wild one. The one who came to grief before I did, though I tried to help her.”
“Once?” Minnie’s voice dropped. “You mean she’s dead? Lor’, I’m that sorry to hear it, Miss. What happened to her?”
“She disappeared three years ago,” Marianne replied, her voice tightening. “I spent months trying to find her…before I ended up here.”
“Oh, Miss. ’Ow terrible that you still haven’t found her.”
Marianne wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “I very much fear the worst, but until I can be certain, I will not leave one stone unturned to find my sister. To discover what happened to her.” She hesitated, the room suddenly feeling very cold. “And who was responsible?”
“Responsible?” Minnie breathed.
Marianne turned her head slowly, looking directly at the maid. “My beloved sister used to write to me after she was turned out of the home we shared.” Her breath hitched. “Her silence leads me to fear the worst. In fact, given what I have discovered so far, I very much fear she was murdered.”
Minnie gasped, dropping the brass poker onto the stone hearth with a sharp, echoing clatter. “Oh, Miss! Murdered?”
Marianne nodded slowly. “That’s why I came to London. Because this is where I suspected Celeste had come. And then the trail went cold. Don’t ask me why I ended up at Madame Chambon’s—it is a long and sorry tale. But really, Celeste’s story began long before she ever set foot in London. If I had only known then what I know now, I would have bypassed this house entirely and paid a visit to the place where her fate was truly sealed.”
“And what house was that, Miss?” Minnie whispered, utterly enthralled.
Marianne returned her gaze to the darkening London sky. “Greyveil Manor.”
