The Bride of the Unicorn. Kasey Michaels
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to him. And yet some of the puzzle pieces were already beginning to fit. He had to continue the search for his instrument of revenge against Richard Wilburton. He had been patient for three long years. It was time to act. “An hour, Miss O’Hanlan, and no more. And don’t breathe a word to anyone.”
“Me?” Peaches responded, scrambling to her feet. “It’s close as an oyster I’ll be, and ye can take that as m’word.”
“I’d prefer not to take either your word or your person anywhere, Miss O’Hanlan, but as you Irish say, ‘Needs must when the devil drives’.”
Morgan swung himself up into the saddle. “Oh, and one more thing. Kindly bathe before I come back. You reek of the sewers, Miss O’Hanlan.”
Peaches gave a flirtatious flip of her bony hand as Morgan guided his horse toward the path. “Dip m’self in parson’s ale? Well, all right—but only a little bit, and only ’cause ye’re a such pretty thing, boyo.”
CHAPTER THREE
Beware, as long as you live, of judging people by appearances.
Jean de La Fontaine
“DULCINEA? DULCINEA! You sweet, wretched angel, I see you skulking out there. Come in here to me at once! I have just now had the most splendiferous notion!”
Caroline Monday lifted her small chin from her chest, where she had let it drop while she indulged herself in a moment of exhaustion not unlike all her waking moments, and tiredly hauled herself up from the slatted wooden bench pressed against the wall of the hallway outside one of the small rooms reserved for affluent patients.
“Aunt Leticia, all of your notions are splendiferous,” she soothed kindly as she walked toward the open doorway, “and as you have these notions at least three times daily, I see no need to rush lickety-split to hear the latest one.”
“Oh, pooh,” Leticia Twittingdon, who would never see the sunny side of fifty again, complained from her cross-legged perch on the wide cushioned window seat, thrusting her lower lip forward in a pout as Caroline entered the room. Miss Twittingdon’s long, angular body was dressed from head to toe in brightest scarlet, and a crimson silk turban perched primly on her childlike curls. “And I was so certain you’d want to have me teach you the names and various titles of all of good King George’s royal princes and princesses. All accomplished young ladies should know these things by rote, Dulcinea. It isn’t enough merely to be beautiful. We must complete your education. Let’s see, is Princess Amelia still alive? I seem to remember some tragedy about that dear little thing.”
Caroline bent to pick up Miss Twittingdon’s wool shawl, which had somehow found its way to the threadbare carpet, and laid it over the back of a wooden chair. “Another time, dear lady,” she said, smiling wanly as she pushed her palms against her arched back at the waist, trying to ease her aching muscles. She was so tired. But then, she was always tired. “This particular well-informed debutante is woefully late emptying the chamber pots today.”
“Dulcinea! How many times must I remind you that genteel ladies such as yourself do not speak of such base mortal necessities? Chamber pots, indeed! Don Quixote de la Mancha, that dearest and bravest of knights—a veritable saint!—would have deemed them golden chalices. Oh, dear. Should I have said that? Have I been sacrilegious?”
“I really wouldn’t know. If I understand the meaning of the word correctly as you have taught it to me, life itself is sacrilegious. Perhaps you should call me Aldonza, as in Mr. Cervantes’s book?”
“Never!” Miss Twittingdon lifted one index finger and jabbed it into the air, as if to punctuate her denial. “I may not be a man, and thus forbidden the splendiferous adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha, but I will not be denied my Dulcinea!”
“Of course you will not be denied her. Please forgive me, Aunt Leticia. I must be overtired to have forgotten my high station so far as to mention the pots. I spent most of the morning peeling potatoes in the kitchens and half the afternoon on the public side attempting to convince Mr. Jenkins of the folly inherent in his wish to bite off Mr. Easton’s left ear as he held the little fellow tight in a stranglehold.”
Miss Twittingdon shivered delicately as she leaned forward, her long, needle-sharp nose all but twitching, to hear the latest gossip. “The horror of it! And did you succeed?”
“I’m not quite sure,” Caroline told her before sinking into the chair and leaning back against the shawl, which smelled of dust and the old lady’s rose water. “Mr. Jenkins ended by biting off the bottom half of Mr. Easton’s right ear—although Mr. Easton didn’t appear to mind. But then, Mr. Easton doesn’t mind much of anything, not even his lice. Tell me, should I consider a change of ears a success?”
Leticia tipped her head to one side, pressing a finger to her thin lips. “I shall have to ponder that a moment…. No, I don’t believe so, Dulcinea. I thought you told me that Mr. Jenkins confined himself to the occasional proboscis. But truthfully, my dear, I don’t know why you bother going over to the public side at all.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially as she added in a near whisper, “A lady shouldn’t say this, I suppose, but they’re all as mad as bedlamites over there, you know. As mad as bedlamites.”
Caroline turned her head away from Miss Twittingdon who, after five years in the private side of the asylum, had yet to recognize that she, too, was an inmate and not a pampered visitor. Perhaps if she visited the public side she might begin to understand the precariousness of her position, for if her brother—“the Infernal Laurence”—ever chose to stop sending quarterly payments to the proprietors of the asylum, Leticia would soon find herself in one of those narrow, unheated cells. But then, what good would frightening such a dear, harmless old lady do?
The only wonder was why she, Caroline Monday, hadn’t been reduced to madness herself in the year she had worked as a servant of all work at the Woodwere Asylum for Lunatics and Incorrigibles. From her first day there, when one of the inmates had flung his own excrement at her, Caroline had known that her move from the Glynde orphanage had provided no great stepping stone up to a better life.
But Caroline had survived.
She had survived because the only alternative to survival was the unthinkable failure of death. Or, as Peaches had suggested, she could travel to London and join the ranks of the impure who hovered around Covent Garden hoping to make a passable living at “a fiver a flip”—at least until her teeth loosened from a bad diet, her body showed the ravages of one or more of the many venereal diseases rampant in the area, or her love of blue ruin, one of Peaches O’Hanlan’s many colorful names for gin, left her “workin’ the cribs for a penny a poke.”
Peaches hadn’t really wanted Caroline to become one of the soiled doves of Covent Garden. Caroline knew that now. She had simply intended to frighten her into realizing that a life spent as general dogsbody in an asylum full of raving maniacs was preferable to following in the footsteps of so many of the orphans who were pushed out of the foundling home to make their way as best they could.
“Will you have time for lessons this afternoon, Dulcinea?”
Caroline shook herself from her reverie and looked to the older woman, smiling as she saw the apprehension in her face. Miss Twittingdon hated to be alone and in charge of filling her own hours, for she often found them stuffed with unladylike thoughts concerning her brother, thoughts that frightened her. “And of course I do, Aunt Leticia, don’t you know,” she answered. “Don’t I do my best to make time for you every day?”
Miss Twittingdon frowned, shaking an accusatory finger in Caroline’s direction. “No, you don’t—or else I wouldn’t be hearing snippets of heathen Irishisms slipping back into your voice. We do not begin our sentences with ‘and’ and then tack a ‘don’t you know’ on the end of them. Both are appalling examples of Irish cant. To speak so is a sure sign of low breeding. You will remember that, won’t you? You must! Or how will you be able to show yourself to your best next Season when you make your come-out?”
Caroline rolled her