“Do you suppose she married someone like Captain Hardy, too?” Dot wondered.
“Well, given that there’s only one Captain Hardy...” Delilah said.And he’s all mine,were her happy unspoken words. Although she was kind enough to wish that kind of love for everyone.
“It’s just a way of standing, like, and speaking, like,” Dot explained. “She looks very young and pretty and her clothes—half-mourning, from the looks of things—are quite good and her complexion is ever so fine.” Dot rubbed the back of her hand against her own cheek. “But she’s...” She paused dramatically and put her hand up to her mouth and whispered, “...alone.”
“Ah,intriguing. No companion or lady’s maid?” Angelique asked.
“She brought a trunk with her, but no maid.”
“Hmm,” Delilah mused, dubiously. “Well, widows may now and again travel alone. Look at Mrs. Pariseau.”
Mrs. Pariseau was one of the first permanent guests of The Grand Palace on the Thames, a dashing widow of middle years blessed with a wicked sense of humor and a (sometimes disconcertingly) open-minded intelligence, and striking white stripes in her dark hair. When she wasn’t enjoying the company at The Grand Palace on the Thames, she gallivanted about London with her many friends, enjoying her late husband’s money.
“Mrs. Gallagher downstairs looks a bit like... well, I always imagine dice get very dizzy when they’re rolled, and she looks a bit like that.”
Delilah and Angelique exchanged a swift glance.
“Youalwaysimagine this, Dot?” Delilah ventured. Glimpses into the deep inner workings of Dot’s mind could be disorienting.
Dot hesitated.
“When I think about dice,” she clarified, finally, somewhat cagily.
Delilah and Angelique regarded her in bemused silence.
“It’s just she looks as though she’s had a few jostles, you know, the way dice are jostled when they’re rolled,” Dot insisted. “And now she’s come to a stop and is trying to get her breath and she looks relieved but perhaps a bit dizzy.”
In all fairness, put this way, Delilah and Angelique could at once picture this, and this made it a good description, indeed. If anyone knew about jostling, it was Dot. The list of things she’d inadvertently dropped or jostled was long and varied, and the tea tray was at the top of it.
“Will you go and speak to her, please?” She clasped her hands in entreaty. “She seems so nice. I told her we are very exclusive and that you would need to chat with her first.”
“Exclusive” was one of Dot’s favorite words. She loved to see the expressions on the guests change accordingly.
“Of course. We’ll go down and see her. Will you bring in tea, please? And perhaps see if Helga can spare a few scones. Tea is the ultimate restorative.”
Dot gave a delighted little hop and went to do just that. Bringing in tea and answering the door to the surprise of new guests were her favorite things.
Chapter Three
While Angelique and Delilah discussed her, their potential new guest paced before the hearth in the reception room, whispering, “How do you do? My name is Mrs. Mary Gallagher. How do youdo? I’m Mrs. Mary Gallagher. Howdoyou do? My name is Mrs. Mary Gallagher.”
During the passage from Calais to Dover, a woman named Mary Gallagher had told Aurelie a witty story about haggling over the price of beef with a butcher. Despite everything, she’d been fascinated. She’d never before had such a conversation. Her life was not meant to intersect with the lives of women like Mary Gallagher, who knew how to do things like haggle. Aurelie had instead learned to conjugate sentences in five languages, embroider, paint, and play pianoforte, and had never questioned that these were the precise accomplishments needed to prepare a gently bred girl for marriage.
Now they almost seemed a ruse perpetuated to prevent gently bred women from learning how to shoot to kill.
It had been one month and three days since her confidence in such assumptions had been blasted to smithereens. And assumptions were like roads cut through a thicket—how did one travel through life if one could not assume from certain observations thata man was a gentleman, or a woman was a lady, or that a person was good or bad? How would one know what to say or do or be? How ironic that she’d been obliged to plunge blindly into the world the very moment she’d been made brutally aware that she knew almost nothing about it.
Through the dirty window of the hired hack, she’d scanned the faces on the London street as though she’d never seen humans before, fully appreciating for the first time now that every person likely contained an unfathomable universe.
And that included her.
A trunk filled with someone else’s clothes, an emerald necklace, and a small sheaf of letters: these constituted her plans and her entire hope for the future. But she was learning new things about herself all the time. For instance, somehow she’d known how to alchemize terror and shame and rage into cold, methodical determination.
She’d slept very little for more than a month. Her nerves felt stretched taut as pianoforte wires and her entire being seemed to vibrate at a single urgent pitch that drowned out every thought, feeling, or impulse unrelated to escape.
She’d borrowed Mary Gallagher’s name because it struck her as strong and plain, the sort of name countless women shared. She liked to think that if Mary Gallagher had known the reason, she would not have minded. More than anything at the moment, Aurelie wanted to be one of indistinguishable thousands. Like just another blade of grass in a meadow. Invisibility, for the moment, was safety.
After driving over every bump and rut in London, the garrulous hack driver had put her down in front of a little building set like a pearl amongst thecoal smut–begrimed structures of the docks. The sea air whipped her hood from her head and stung her cheeks and eyes. She liked it. Above, modest gargoyles presided over the roofline; below, a wrought-iron fence surrounded what appeared to be a tiny park. The freshly painted sign danced in the sea breeze gently on chains which miraculously did not creak.