Devilish Lord, Mysterious Miss

‘Clearer than you, I reckon, by the smell of your breath. Had a heavy night, have yer?’

Lord Matthison grimaced as the lad’s words sank in.

He had not taken a drink in seven years. Had been astounded by what a tolerance for gin he seemed to have, marvelling at the fact he was still on his feet. Well, he might be on his feet, but he was sure as hell not sober.

The woman was real. He had not called some spirit up out of the pit. Cora had not deliberately turned her back on him, run from him, and slammed the door in his face. He had just seen some servant girl climb up the area steps from the servants’entrance, and go about her legitimate business.

Which had nothing to do with him.

The fact that she had looked uncannily like Cora was mere coincidence. Or…had she even born that much of a resemblance to his late fiancée? He frowned. He had not been close enough to see her face clearly. It had been her build, and the way she walked, that had convinced him he was seeing a ghost.

His head began to ache.

Typical!

He was getting a hangover before he was even sober.

He pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes, digging his fingers into his scalp. There was no point in trying to make sense of any of this until he had sobered up.

‘Is this your patch?’ he asked the crossing sweeper, running his fingers through his hair.

‘Yessir!’ said the lad, rather too loudly for Lord Matthison’s liking.

‘Then find out whatever you can about the red-head,’ he said, dipping into his pocket, and flipping the lad a coin, ‘and I shall give you another of these.’

The boy’s face lit up when he saw it was a crown piece. ‘Right you are! When will you be coming back?’

‘I shall not,’he replied with a grimace of distaste. He despised men who loitered on street corners, hoping to catch a glimpse of the hapless female that was currently the object of their prurient interest.

‘You will report to my lodgings. What is your name?’

‘Grit,’ said the boy, causing Lord Matthison to look at him sharply. And then press his fingers to his throbbing temples. It was all of a piece. The boy he was employing to spy on Cora’s ghost could not possibly have a sensible name like Tom, or Jack! Everything about this night bore all the hallmarks of a nightmare.

‘I will tell my manservant, then, that if a short, dirty person answering to the name of Grit comes knocking, that he is to admit you. Or, if I am not there, to extract what information you have, and reward you with another coachwheel.’

‘And who might you be?’

‘Lord Matthison.’

He watched the light die from the boy’s eyes. Saw him swallow. Saw him try to hide his consternation. But Grit was too young to quite manage to conceal the belief he had just agreed to serve the devil’s minion. He kissed goodbye to the prospect of ever finding out anything about the red-head who had worked him up into such a state. The lad would never pluck up the courage to venture to his lodgings. Or if he did, his conscience was bound to hold him in check. Even a dirt-poor guttersnipe would think twice about selling information about a defenceless female to a man of Lord Matthison’s reputation.

‘In the meantime, perhaps you could find me a cab,’ he drawled, eyeing the shop across the street one last time.And then, because he got a perverse kind of pleasure from playing up to the worst of what people expected of him, he added, ‘I dislike being abroad in daylight.’

Chapter Two

Mary dashed across the main shop, through the velvet curtains that divided it from the working areas, and pounded up the three flights of stairs that led to the workroom. The one place where she had learned to feel secure.

She had no idea why the way that man had emerged from the shadows on the other side of Curzon Street, with his black clothes, black hair and forbidding expression, had shaken her so badly. Or why, for an instant, she had got the peculiar impression that the shadows themselves had thickened, solidified and spawned the living embodiment of her nightmares.

It was terrifying, though, to feel as if your nightmares had invaded your waking life. Particularly since those nightmares were so vague.

All she could remember when she woke up from one of them was that there had been something hovering behind her. Something she dared not turn and face. Because she was sure that if she did, it would rear up and swallow her whole. And so she would curl up, trying to make herself disappear, so the Thing would not notice her. But she could always feel it coming nearer and nearer, its shadow growing bigger and bigger, until eventually, in sheer terror, she would leap up and try to run away.

In her dreams, she never managed to move one step. But her legs would always start to thrash around the bed.

‘Wake up, Mary,’ one of the other girls would complain, prodding her with their sharp elbows. ‘You’re having one of your dreams again.’

They would tell her to lie still, and she would, clutching the sheets to her chin, staring up at the ceiling, terrified to close her eyes lest the dream stalked her again.

She sighed, rubbing the heels of her hands against her eyes. Deep down she knew that shadows did not turn into men, and chase girls down the street.

Though it had not stopped her running from him.

Just as she fled from whatever it was that stalked her dreams.

‘Mary!’The angry voice of her employer made every girl in the workroom jump to attention. The fact that Madame Pichot had left her office at this hour of the morning did not bode well for any of them.

‘What is the matter with you now? You are as white as a sheet! You are not going to be ill again, are you?’

Mary could not blame her for looking so exasperated. She was nowhere near as robust as the other girls who sewed for Madame. Never had been.

‘That doctor promised me that if you took regular walks, your constitution would improve,’Madame complained. ‘I cannot afford for you to take to your bed at this time of year!’Although the workload had slackened off slightly, now that the presentations in the Queen’s drawing rooms had mostly taken place, there were still enough orders coming in for Madame to keep her girls working from dawn till they dropped into bed from sheer exhaustion.

Madame Pichot stalked across the bare floor and laid her hand on Mary’s forehead.

‘I am n-not ill,’ Mary stammered, as much alarmed now by Madame’s censure, as by what had happened in the street. ‘B-but there w-was a m-man…’

Madame Pichot rolled her eyes, raising her hands to the ceiling in one of her Gallic expressions of exasperation. ‘The streets are always full of men. I am sure none of them would be interested in a little dab of nothing like you!’ she snapped, tugging off Mary’s gloves, and untying her bonnet ribbons.

‘N-no, he was shouting,’ Mary exclaimed, recalling that fact for the first time herself.

‘There are a lot of men hawking their wares at this time of the morning,’ Madame scoffed. ‘He wasn’t shouting at you.’

‘But I think he was,’ she murmured, trying to examine what had happened without letting the panic that had gripped her on the street from clouding her perception. ‘He chased me!’ Though why some man she had never seen before should suddenly take it into his head to pursue her, shouting angrily, she could not imagine. But she had definitely seen him roughly pushing a tradesman out of his way. With his vengeful, dark eyes fixed on her. And for one awful moment, it had felt as though the curtain that separated what was real, from what existed only in her head, had been ripped in two. She had not known where she was. Or who she was.

That had been the most frightening moment of all.

‘Mary, really,’ Madame said, tugging her to her feet, and undoing her coat buttons, while the other girls in the workroom began to snigger, ‘just because you saw a man running in the street, does not mean he was chasing you. Who on earth would want to chase a scrawny little creature like you, when there are willing, pretty girls for sale on every street corner?’

It should have been reassuring to hear Madame repeat the very fact that had her so bewildered. Except that she knew he had been chasing her. Her.

‘Now, Mary,’ said Madame firmly, shoving her back down on her work stool, and thrusting her spectacles into her hands, ‘I forbid you to have one of your turns. There is no time for it today. Not when you have the bodice for the Countess of Walton’s new gown to finish. Whatever happened outside, you must put it out of your head. Do you hear me?’

‘Yes, Madame.’ In truth, there was nothing she wanted more than to put it out of her mind. She was really glad she had such a complicated piece of work to do today. For concentrating on making something utterly beautiful had always had the power to keep her demons at bay. Even when she had been a little girl…

With a startled cry, Mary dropped her glasses. It always gave her a jolt, when one of these little glimpses of a past that was mostly a complete blank flared across her consciousness without warning.

Hearing Madame’s huff of disapproval, Mary dropped to her knees to grope for them. They would not have slid far along the rough planks of the workroom. She would find them in mere seconds, pick them up, and be quickly able to get on with her work.