you can stay long enough to earn it.”
Anya tried not to wince. “It sounds perfect. What would I have to do?”
“The duchess requires you to visit her four days a week, to read to her, help her with correspondence, and generally do anything else she requires.”
“I’ll do it.”
In the end, it had been a perfect fit. Anya had liked the dowager duchess immediately. She was as sharp as a pin and keenly observant, with strong opinions—which were usually correct—and a love of scandal and gossip. Her scathing commentary on almost everyone in the ton was extremely amusing, and a friendship had developed between the two of them, despite the fifty-year age difference. Anya thought of the older woman as an additional grandmother.
On several occasions, the dowager had tried to coax her to move into the huge Grosvenor Square townhouse she inhabited, but Anya had refused, citing Elizaveta, and her need for independence. Recent events, however, had caused her to reconsider that option. Her roommate had gained a beau; a handsome, charmingly disorganized barrister by the name of Oliver Reynolds.
Elizaveta had found work as a seamstress for Ede and Ravenscroft, a tailor in Chancery Lane specializing in ceremonial robes; black cloaks for judges in court, gowns for university dons, and the ermine-trimmed capes worn by peers for the state opening of Parliament. They’d met when Oliver had come—in a great hurry—to buy a new set of court robes for an appearance at the Old Bailey. He’d set fire to his previous set by leaving them too close to the stove. Elizaveta had assisted him, and by the end of the encounter, they had both been equally smitten.
Elizaveta snipped off the end of her thread, smoothed her hand over the fur-edged cloak she’d been trimming, and glanced at the mantel clock Anya had purchased from the pawn shop down the road. Unlike the beautiful, hard-paste porcelain produced by the Russian factories, this was a cheap, soft-paste English piece that resembled a lump of cake icing that had melted in the sun. The gaudily painted, lopsided couple supporting the clockface looked permanently intoxicated. Anya loved it.
“I should go and get ready,” Elizaveta said.
“You’re meeting Oliver tonight?”
“Yes. He’s taking me to see Edmund Keane play Sir Giles Overreach at Drury Lane again.”
“I heard his first performance was so powerful that Mrs. Glover actually fainted on stage.”
Elizaveta giggled. “Oh yes, he’s quite terrifying. Which gives me the perfect excuse to clutch Oliver and for him to put his arm around me!”
Anya laughed approvingly. “You’re shameless.”
The sound of someone tripping on the stairs, and a muffled oath, interrupted them, and Elizaveta rolled her eyes fondly. “That will be him now.”
Anya shook her head. Oliver was tall and thin, with the air of a man who’d grown to adulthood without ever becoming accustomed to the additional size of his own body. He was always bumping into things and sporting interesting bruises on his person. If there was a runaway donkey, a pot of ink to spill, or a set of steps to trip up, Oliver would find them.
Luckily, his physical ineptness masked a mind as incisive as a razor. He was a formidable barrister, fiercely intelligent, though prone to going off on obscure tangents if distracted. Elizaveta, with her practical, organized nature, was the perfect complement to his haphazard style. Anya had no doubt the two of them would be blissfully happy together.
The looming possibility of their engagement, however, had forced her to question her own future. She loved her job with the dowager duchess, but it didn’t give her much opportunity to mingle with many men her own age.
Unlike Elizaveta, who was firmly entrenched in the working classes, Anya had found herself in a strange subset of society reserved for governesses and penniless-yet-genteel poor relations. She featured somewhere above servants and tradeswomen, but below the landed gentry and aristocracy, who lived off the income from tenants, property, and investments.
She had all of those things back in Russia, of course. And despite her disappearance, she had no fear that her property would have been dispersed among the remaining members of her family. A few weeks after they’d arrived in London, she’d written to her trusted man of business in St. Petersburg, informing him that she was taking an extended tour of Eastern Europe. She’d been sure to request that should anyone—especially one Vasili Petrov—inquire about her, that Mr. Lermontov feign complete ignorance of her whereabouts. Since Lermontov’s family had served as financial advisors to the Denisovs for