Finally, she cleared her throat. “I’d like to help. I hate being idle.” That was the truth, and it felt strange to admit it—as if she were confessing to something more improper than a fondness for work. “And you know my stitchwork is good.”
Molly snorted. “It’s wasted on a hem.”
“But that’s what I like to do. Decent, simple work. I don’t need to adorn things. I like to do the kind of work that matters to people.” She missed it terribly. Her fingers itched to be useful. “The kind that helps the people I’m fond of.”
Molly regarded her for a moment, then tugged Alice’s hand so she had to come closer or let go. Alice stepped forward, and now their boots were almost touching, their hands clasped together. She stood perfectly still, staring fixedly at Molly’s shoulder.
“And you’re fond of Mrs. Wraxhall?” Alice didn’t need to look to know that Molly had that sly, crooked smile playing across her lips.
Alice was indeed very fond of Mrs. Wraxhall, so she nodded.
“And of me, too, aren’t you?”
Alice closed her eyes to avoid the temptation of looking at Molly’s mouth. She nodded again.
“Good,” Molly said, and it was little more than a breath. Alice could nearly feel it on her cheek.
Molly stepped back, and Alice let go of her hand. But as Alice sat in the chair by the window, avoiding looking at the too-familiar Norfolk countryside, her hands deftly restitching the fallen hem, she thought she could feel the echoes of that warm touch on her skin for the rest of the afternoon.
“I think,” Molly said, much later, “it’s high time I called you Alice.”
Molly woke at dawn, startled to find a slender, pale arm draped across her chest. She wouldn’t have figured Miss Stapleton—Alice—for a cuddler.
She rolled to face her bedmate, enjoying the closeness. She didn’t get much of that these days. It was time to get out of bed, time to make sure Mrs. Wraxhall’s gowns bore no creases, that her tea had the correct amount of sugar, that the stableman was prepared to saddle her horse at the appointed hour. Through the chimneys, she could hear the faint clatter of the household getting down to the business of the day. If she didn’t get started herself, she’d pay the price the rest of the morning.
But still she stayed in bed, watching the rise and fall of Alice’s chest and the way her breath rustled a single lock of moonshine hair. Only when Alice stirred did Molly make a great show of yawning and stretching, acting like she had just awoken.
“Oh!” Alice said, snatching her arm away from Molly. “I’m sorry!”
“About what?” Molly said sleepily, as if she hadn’t noticed the arm, as if she couldn’t still feel the warmth from where Alice had touched her. She got out of bed and stretched again, and this time she saw Alice watching her out of the corner of her eye. From a man, it would be a leer. Maybe from Alice it was a leer, too. Molly rather suspected it was, for all Alice was a fine lady.
Molly took her time at the washstand, conscious of Alice’s gaze on her. Finally she threw a look over her shoulder, catching Alice in the act.
“I’m sorry,” Alice said, pink guilt splashed across her face. Damn it if Molly weren’t well and truly tired of all this sorriness. Bollocks on apologies. Bollocks on guilt.
“Nah,” Molly said, raising her arms over her head in a way she knew did something special to her bosom. Alice’s eyes widened in response. “Nothing to be sorry for. You can look all you like.”
“Oh heavens,” Alice squeaked, diving under the quilt.
“It’s only natural,” Molly argued, feeling wicked and righteous all at once.
“No,” Alice said, her voice muffled by the bedclothes, “it’s just that I haven’t any of my own, not really. Not like you do.”
Oh no. That would not do at all. Such a bad excuse was even worse than the pink, embarrassed apologies. Molly crawled across the bed towards the lump under the covers that was Alice. “That’s not why you look at them, though.”
“I don’t know what you could possibly mean.” Alice sounded as haughty as was possible from under a quilt.
“Just what I said.” Molly poked what she guessed was Alice’s backside. “You haven’t any bollocks, but John the footman has a pair of them. I don’t see you trying to get an eyeful of that, though.”
“An eyeful of bollocks, indeed.” Alice’s indignant face popped out from under the covers. “I have no interest in John the footman’s bollocks, nor anybody else’s.”
“That’s right, you don’t,” Molly said cheerfully. “You’re more interested in bosoms.”
“That’s not what I said!” The pink of embarrassment was replaced with a pink that meant something else entirely, unless Molly was very much mistaken.
“It’s all right, though,” Molly said, all reassurance. “I like to look at yours too.”
Alice gasped and tightened her fingers on the quilt, as if to pull it up to her chin. But she didn’t. “I don’t have anything to look at—”
“Sure you do.” Molly rested her hand on the edge of the quilt and raised an eyebrow. She wasn’t going to do this without the go-ahead. “I bet they’re sweet.” Alice obligingly dropped her hands away, and Molly drew the quilt down. Through the thin linen of Alice’s shift, Molly could see the outline of Alice’s breasts, her nipples tightening before Molly’s eyes. Molly licked her lips. She wanted to bend her head and take one in her mouth. Alice’s lips were slightly parted and her expression a bit dazed. She liked this, being looked at, being wanted and a bit exposed. God help her, Molly could think of a dozen different ways to use that bit of information, but there wasn’t time for anything now, not if she wanted to keep her job. And Molly needed this job. She shouldn’t even have done this much. She ought to already be downstairs, not lazing about in the bedroom, seducing vicars’ daughters.
Gently, Molly raised the edge of the coverlet to just beneath Alice’s chin. Then she threw her dress over her head, knotted her hair plainly in the back, stepped into her boots, and left the room before Alice could reappear.
Chapter Four
Much to Alice’s relief, there was plenty of work to be done at a house party. Despite Mrs. Wraxhall spending the morning out riding, Alice kept herself busy by managing the tricky bits of embroidery for a lady who was too busy catching up on gossip with her friends to be bothered with the fussier aspects of needlework. That suited Alice quite well, as it gave her an excuse to be silent without looking awkward. She felt that she blended in most unobjectionably, almost as if she were a standard-issue lady, rather than a shabby lady’s companion who was thinking of doing unspeakable acts with a servant.
She snipped a length of emerald-green thread and attended to the gossip.
“I heard he wasn’t coming this year. Something about having to dance attendance on a wealthy aunt,” said the lady whose cushion Alice was doctoring.
“Then why would the housemaids be readying a bedchamber for him this very morning?” asked her interlocutor with a smile that spelled victory.
“Well! That changes things.”
“I should say it does. It changes what I’ll be wearing at dinner, for one.”
They tittered. “He’s handsome, but he’s dangling after a rich wife.”
“What do I care what kind of wife he wants? Not a fig, that’s what. My plans for Horace Tenpenny have nothing to do with marriage.”
At the sound of that name, Alice sucked in a breath of air. She had hoped never to hear it again, but of course couldn’t be so lucky, not with Mr. Tenpenny traveling in circles not so different from Mrs. Wraxhall’s own. And now he was to be here, in this house, at the dinner table with her? She clutched the embroidery in her hand, and then gasped when she realized she had pricked herself on the needle. Before she could collect herself, a bead of bright red blood had formed on her fingertip and dropped onto the cushion. “Oh no!” she cried. “I’ve quite ruined your work!”
“Oh, bother my work,” said the lady. “You’ve done most of it
yourself anyway. Stevens, ring for a plaster for Miss Stapleton, will you?” As if to underscore her point, she threw the embroidery, hoop and all, into the fire. Alice yelped anew, because surely some of the piece could have been salvaged, some corner with which to make a pincushion or a coin purse. That was, somehow, a more potent reminder of Alice’s unbelonging than even the news that the odious Mr. Tenpenny would be arriving.
Pleading the necessity of tending to her wound, which had already stopped bleeding and would soon be nothing more than the ghost of a pinprick, Alice went upstairs as quickly as was compatible with dignity. She would feign illness and stay in her bed the remainder of the house party. That was the only way. Facing Mr. Tenpenny was out of the question.
But staying in bed meant more time around Molly. Molly, who knew. Molly, who had caught her looking, which was bad enough. What was worse was that Molly hadn’t seemed to mind. Alice knew how to handle outrage—she could have apologized, she could have tried to disappear in a cloud of polite self-recrimination. But Molly had only responded with blithe acceptance and then gone on to do some looking of her own.
Perhaps she could borrow enough from Mrs. Wraxhall to take the stagecoach back to London. But the house in Grosvenor Square was closed up for the next month while Mrs. Wraxhall attended a succession of house parties. There was nowhere for Alice to go.
She flung open her bedroom door and shut it quickly behind her, as if she were being chased by a pack of wolves.
“Lord help me,” Molly exclaimed, leaping up from the table where she was sewing silk flowers to a pair of dancing slippers. “Are you all right?” Petals were scattered at her feet.
“Yes, quite.” Alice was struggling to catch her breath, and the words came out as more air than sound. “I’m fine.”
“Well, that’s a lie. What happened?”
Alice contemplated making an excuse, but then figured she had nothing to lose. After this morning, was this sordid tale likely to make a difference? “It’s only that I didn’t realize that Mr. Tenpenny was going to be here.”
“Oh?”
“I can’t meet him again.” Alice wrung her hands. It was one thing to decide to tell the story; it was another thing entirely to find the words. She finally settled on, “He’s the reason I was sent from home.”
Molly’s eyes opened wide in confusion, before narrowing to slits. “You . . . you and this Tenpenny fellow?”
“No!” Alice lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. The words might be easier to say if she didn’t have to watch Molly’s reaction. “He . . . did something untoward, and I was blamed.”
“He touched you?” Alice could hear the fury in Molly’s voice. The last time she had told this mortifying tale, there had been fury in her father’s voice, but that time the anger had been directed towards her. Alice knew without asking that Molly placed all the blame on Mr. Tenpenny.
Squeezing her eyes tight, Alice forced herself to speak. “He opened his trousers.”
A sharp intake of air. Exasperation, not shock, if Alice had to guess. “Made you look at his prick, did he?”
Alice nodded.
“Bastard. I’ll never understand why men need to show the world their pricks. We’ve all seen them.” This was the best possible reaction: disgust mingled with annoyance. That was precisely how Alice might feel about the incident, if it hadn’t resulted in her losing everything she had loved.
“I hadn’t.” She opened her eyes and turned her head to look at Molly.
“Right. Forgot about that. It must be a terrible shock for fine ladies, never to see a proper cock until they’re married.”
Never would Alice have guessed that she’d find something to laugh at in this situation, but laugh she did, a great wave of amusement sweeping over her until she was pressing her face into the pillow to smother the sound. “A proper cock,” she repeated in between gusts of laughter.
“Or a very rude and improper one,” Molly said.
“Rude indeed,” Alice agreed, breathless. “Such an unprepossessing article. And he seemed so smug about the wretched thing.”
Molly came over to sit on the edge of the bed, her weight dipping the mattress and causing Alice to roll slightly towards her. “What happened to get you tossed out?”
“When he took out his . . .”
“Prick,” Molly supplied, which was very helpful because “member” was a good deal too dignified for the occasion.
“Well, I screamed. I ought to have . . .” Alice still didn’t know what she ought to have done. Smile politely? Thank the man for his offering, the way she did when one of her brothers or nieces brought in a half-rotten turnip from the garden?
“Bugger ought to have,” Molly said. “Nothing wrong with screaming. Who knew what he meant to do with the thing? He might have meant to do more than show it to you.”
Exactly. That was what Alice had feared. She was inexpressibly grateful to be understood. “I screamed, and servants came running. I went to my bedchamber, trying to avoid everybody. But he put word about that we had been . . .” She paused, hoping Molly would fill in the gaps in her vocabulary.
“Fucking?”
Well, that wasn’t a word she had ever thought to hear in reference to herself. Much less would she have guessed that such a word on Molly’s lips would somehow resonate deep in her own belly. “Yes, that,” she managed. “And that my screams were— this was the most awkward part of the entire mortifying ordeal—“the result of pleasure.”
“Oh, the shit-eating bastard.”
“Precisely. My father didn’t believe me, and he decided that I had to be sent from home to protect his reputation. My father is a clergyman, you know, and Mr. Tenpenny’s uncle is Lord Malvern, who owns my father’s living and could cast my father out on his ear if trouble got back to him.” That was what had started all the trouble. Mrs. Wraxhall and Mr. Tenpenny had been among the guests at a nearby house party; Alice and her father had been invited to join the party for supper. It was the sort of invitation Alice had been accustomed to. She had worn her least shabby gown and prepared herself for an evening of conversation with another spinster or someone too tiresome for the real guests to endure. Instead she had been cornered by Mr. Tenpenny in a shadowy alcove, then dragged home by her father only to be berated and cast out. Mrs. Wraxhall had somehow gotten wind of what had actually happened, and if it hadn’t been for that, Alice didn’t like to think about what would have become of her.
“And now the fucker’s here?” Molly’s indignation somehow served to tamp down Alice’s own sense of being put upon.
“He’s expected tonight, I gather. I can’t go downstairs.”
Molly tucked one of her feet under her other leg and propped herself up on a hand. This small adjustment only lessened the distance between them by a few inches, but it seemed to Alice that it caused the temperature in the room to go up by several degrees. Suddenly she was very aware of the fact that if she moved her own hand a bit to the side, her own little finger would touch Molly’s.
That little finger felt like a question that needed answering. Alice’s hand was prickling with awareness, her entire being concentrated on one small digit, until the decision to move it or not move it seemed the most fundamental one of her life.
Almost without thinking, she slid her hand that final inch towards Molly’s, and as soon as she felt the warm brush of skin against skin, Molly moved her own hand to cover Alice’s. She could feel Molly’s calluses against the places where her own calluses used to be. She could feel Molly’s pulse beating against her own.
“You don’t need to go downstairs,” Molly said, and her voice did not sound entirely normal to Alice, which was reassuring because Alice felt nothing like normal herself. “But if you don’t, people might talk about why.”
“I’m sure nobody even knows that I’m here.” She had done her best to fade into the wallpaper. It was a skill she had finely honed.
The mattress shifted again, and when Alice opened her eyes she saw Mo
lly lying next to her. Their hands, still clasped, were between them.
“Here’s the problem, though.” Molly’s voice was soft, only loud enough to be heard by someone sharing the same pillow. “This Tenpenny bastard seems just the sort of snake who would find out you were here, and then spread word that you were avoiding him because your heart was broken after he ended your affair.”
Alice groaned, recognizing the truth of this. She turned to bury her face in the pillow once more.
Then came the brush of Molly’s hand against her temple, sweeping a bit of hair back from her face. The gesture caught Alice by surprise. It was so gentle and tender, it felt meant for someone else entirely. Molly’s warm, kind fingers seemed as out of place on Alice’s head as a crown of diamonds would be. Alice didn’t deserve either. She shifted away from Molly’s touch.
“Hey, now,” Molly whispered, evidently mistaking the cause of Alice’s unease. “You’ve survived worse.”
It was true. She had survived far worse than an evening of awkward embarrassment. But that didn’t make encountering Mr. Tenpenny any more appealing. “You’re right. I’ll grit my teeth and get through it.”
“Bugger grit.” Molly smiled her crooked smile, her lips so close to Alice’s they were nearly touching. Nearly, but not quite. “We can do better than that.”
Molly showed Alice exactly which seams to unpick and how they needed to be resewn.
“But—” A line appeared between Alice’s eyebrows.
“Trust me.”
And Alice did as she was told, as if she really did trust Molly, and wasn’t that something. Molly kept expecting Alice to realize that Molly was nothing more than a street urchin with a dishonest past. Sooner or later everyone did.
A Little Light Mischief Page 4
