“I wouldn’t dream of stopping you.”
“It’s this: I’m not an entirely pleasant person all the time.”
“Oh, I can tell. You are as vicious as a little chipmunk.Grrrowr.”
“Stop that right now.” Delilah clapped her hand down on the table. Both Dot and the snoring man jumped a little, opened their eyes, shut them again. “I won’t have it.”
Angelique’s eyes widened.
“See what I mean?” Delilah said this in a sort of gleeful wonderment. She didn’t apologize. It was just so exhilarating not to lilt.
“I do see.” Angelique sounded as though someone had just explained a tricky mathematical equation to her, to her delight.
“My thoughts are sometimes unkind and even, daresay, shar... that is, sarcastic.”
“Never sarcastic! I believe they hung witches at Tyburn for sarcasm.”
Delilah surprised herself by laughing.
And Angelique laughed, too, a merry, genuine sound.
Dot’s head jerked up off her chest and she laughed, too—“ha ha ha!”—sleepily, before nodding off again.
Of all the peculiar things that had happened in the last several days, laughing with her late husband’s mistress scarcely a week after his funeral might have been the oddest.
“Derring never laughed at my jokes. But I laughed at all of his, even though I didn’t find him amusing. He sulked if I didn’t,” Delilah said.
“It’s a small but killing thing, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“He wasn’t funny at all.”
“He really wasn’t.” Delilah felt only a twinge of disloyalty. It was the truth. She was beginning to like the truth, though, like sherry and cursing, she suspected it was probably best to be judicious in the partaking and delivery of it.
A lull fell.
“So what will you do now, Mrs. Breedlove?”
“Well,” Angelique said, “I intend to finish this sherry, fill my pockets with rocks, and wade into the Thames. Oh, and do call me Angelique.”
Delilah’s breath left her in a gust. “You don’t mean it!”
“Oh, I’m quite serious,” Angelique said almost blithely. “I’ve had enough. I have played all of the modest hand that I’ve been dealt in life and I have played it badly, and I have lost again and again, and I am out. I am weary of the perfidy or sheer tedium of men, and I see no way to prosperity or comfort without saddling myself with one of those creatures, and I haven’t the fortitude to begin again, or the imagination to become a flower peddler, for instance, and dream of being rescued by a prince. Princes do not exist, and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t exert the effort to rescue me. Dreams are pointless. I am done. But cheers to you, Lady Derring. I wish you the best.”
“But... your jewels! You can sell your jewels and live on the proceeds!”
Was she was actually campaigning for her husband’s former mistress to sell the jewels he’d bought her?
“If I sell them, I shall have enough to live in relative comfort for a year, perhaps two. I aspire to more than mere survival.”
And with that, she reached for her glass of sherry.
Delilah seized Angelique’s wrist and held it fast.
And suddenly Delilah knew, without a doubt, that she was stronger when someone needed her. Stronger, perhaps, than this woman, who might be sophisticated and clever and jaded but who had acquired her polish the way gems in a tumbler do. Angelique might know infinitely more than Delilah did about all manner of things. But she suspected one could only be tumbled and jostled so many times before sayingenough.
Delilah had been a countess for six years, after all. She’d gotten accustomed to controlling one or two things.