During the second course, I caught a lady in gold satin looking at me. Her gaze went instantly to her lap, where she fussed with her napkin, ceasing her low conversation with one of the nieces of Mrs. Reynolds. But I had caught the last word she spoke, watched it form, ugly on her lips. The word was
I knew what they were discussing: the young heiress who had so scandalously and unrepentantly carried on with a servant in her uncle’s household, who had chosen to live with a lunatic rather than put him properly away in an asylum. My temper warmed like the hot air. I tried to put my thoughts on Uncle Tully, to think about rooms and walls, to lay the plan of Mrs. Reynolds’s house clear in my mind. Then I tried to take my mind away from my uncle, confused, ill, uprooted, and without me; the thought left me nearly unable to swallow. Fourth course, and I realized the table’s open conversation had turned to the war.
“… preposterous,” a man was saying. “Whipped like puppies when we had the Russians outmanned and outgunned. The shame of the Royal Navy. Admiral Price shot himself and no wonder. Fought like schoolgirls, they did.”
I raised a brow, thinking this man must have had a very limited experience with schoolgirls to make such a statement, but I also pricked up my ears. Mr. Wickersham had mentioned this defeat of the navy in my morning room.
“But do you not think, Monsieur Fortescue,” said Mr. Marchand, the impertinent young Frenchman, “that the shame of your navy is the age of its boats, and not its captains? If your English ships had fought with the power of steam instead of waiting for the winds, if your Royal Navy could have had the use of ironclad batteries to bombard the shore, like the French, do you not think the British would have defeated these inferior Russians?”
Mr. Fortescue spluttered indignantly. “Floating batteries of iron, you say? And you think Russian cannon shot will bounce right off them, do you?”
The young Frenchman grinned, stretching his tiny mustache. “Like so many rubber balls. And neither shall they catch fire, as your English ones do.”
Mr. Fortescue turned red in the face, evidently interpreting this remark as some sort of slight to his nation. “Gentlemen, do enjoy your pudding,” Mrs. Reynolds suggested, which did nothing to lessen the man’s color.
“I think, Monsieur,” Mr. Marchand continued, leaning back in his chair, “that the country that builds these ships of steam and of iron from which the shot will bounce, I think this nation will need a new name for its monarch. Which do you think it shall be, Monsieur? ‘Queen of the oceans’? Or shall it be ‘emperor of the seas’?”
The man threw down his napkin, blowing out his breath in outrage, but before he could speak, Mr. Marchand half raised his glass, his light French almost a purr. “To allies, sir,” he said, “and the ingenuity of both our countries.” And just before he drank, he looked straight at me and winked.
Every head at the table turned, instantly distracted from the political squabble. I looked away from the staring eyes, from Mrs. Reynolds’s rising brows, frowning at my place settings. How dare he treat me in such a familiar way? Did he think my character so tainted that I would tolerate such behavior, and in front of all these people? And who were these people to judge me, in any case, and who was I to care for their judgment? I sat up straighter in my chair, and turned to the bearded gentleman next to me.
“And what think you, sir?” I said loudly. “Will England and France continue to be allies, or will the Emperor Napoleon use these new iron ships to start a war in Europe and spill the blood of thousands of Englishmen, as his late uncle did?”
One rattle of a spoon disturbed the charged silence that now reigned in Mrs. Reynolds’s dining room. Not only had I spoken out, I had spoken on a subject that was not in a lady’s province, spoken of it rudely, and in such a way that one half of the guests was like to be set against the other. Good. I took a slow bite of my pudding, enjoying a moment of satisfaction as I waited politely for the poor man’s reply, his expression now that of a gasping fish. Mrs. Reynolds folded her napkin deliberately, set it beside her plate, and stood, her austere face thunderous.
“Ladies, we shall leave the men to their port. Coffee is served in the drawing room.” The only thing lacking from her statement was the command of
I dabbed the corner of my mouth, all my pleasure transforming into shame. So much for the demure young woman I’d described to Mr. Babcock, the one who had promised not to draw undue attention. I would be the talk of several drawing rooms tomorrow; I might as well have put an advertisement in the papers. I filed out with the other ladies, crushed among the bell-shaped dresses, careful to give the impression that I had not noticed the grinning young Frenchman once again half raise his glass to me. Never had I seen Mrs. Hardcastle look so amused.
11
I was the last through the velvet curtain and into the foyer. The ladies were disappearing through the door I’d noticed before, the room I thought shared a wall with my salon, and I saw a little maid in a starched white apron pressed flat against a cabinet, eyes on the floor as the tittering conversations passed. The clock in the foyer said three minutes past eleven, and my heart squeezed. I would have to hurry. When the last skirt had been squashed through the doorway, I approached the maid.
“Excuse me, but can you tell me if there is a … retiring room, for ladies?”
The little thing looked at me quizzically, and I was afraid that perhaps she only spoke French, but then her face unclouded and she said in a bright, brass British accent, “Oh, you’ll be wanting the WC, Miss? Is that it? The water closet?”
I nodded, glancing at the open door to the drawing room. I hoped none of the ladies inside were hearing this conversation. Then I changed my mind and hoped they were.
“Well, you just go straight up the stair thataway, Miss, and be looking for the little door on your left.”
“Thank you, indeed,” I said, well pleased. She scurried off, and with one quick look back, I picked up my skirt and went noiselessly up the stairs, though I did not stop at the first landing. I took the next flight up, and then the next, pausing only to catch my breath. There was a small oval window straight ahead, looking into a bit of garden, the same as on our fourth floor, and surprisingly there were also two doors to the right of the stairwell, where I had thought there should be none. I tiptoed to the first door on the right, found it unlocked, and peeked inside.
The room was being used for storage, dim, dusty, and windowless, but in the light from the doorway I could see that it was shallow, not nearly as long as I might have expected. Leaving the door open, I tiptoed around piled boxes to press my ear against the only clear patch of peeling plaster I could find along the far wall, the rest being covered with cast-off furniture and stacked trunks. I could hear nothing, no voices, no movement. But I also could not be sure that Uncle Tully’s rooms were actually on the other side of this wall. I shut the door to the room as gently as possible, brushed off my skirt, and opened the next.
A plain bedroom, and just as shallow as the storeroom, though it had the sloped ceiling and one of the high windows like Uncle Tully’s new workshop, the moon shining down onto the floor matting. I stole quietly across the room, passing shapes in the dim that it took me several moments to realize were easels, cloths thrown over their canvases. I tried to imagine Mrs. Reynolds in a paint-spattered smock with a brush in her hand, ignored the urge to peek beneath one of the cloths, and again pressed my ear to the far wall.
Silence. Encouraged, I closed the door, hitched up my skirt and padded down to the next landing, pausing just a moment to listen for nonexistent noise. The dinner party seemed to have left the upper floors completely deserted. Directly below the rooms I had just visited, there were again two doors beside the stairwell. I chose the one closest to the front of the house, twisted its knob, and slipped inside.
The gas was on, and I saw a large bedchamber, more than double the length of the rooms above. I smiled. Then Uncle Tully must have been on the other side of the walls I had pressed my ear to, and therefore, had to also be just over the farther half of this room. I stood underneath the far section of ceiling, white plaster roses and
