those rainbow colors winking in the chandelier. Her mouth twitched, and she almost smiled.
She visibly, ruthlessly tamped it down again.
“But Delilah . . . here near the docks . . . the people who want to stay in an inn might be a little . . . well, they might not be the sort a countess is accustomed—”
Delilah waved a breezy hand. “Oh, we’ll have mixed company, of a certainty. But it could be so lively! I would love it. Just imagine! You might be able to use all of your languages.”
Angelique began to laugh, then she bit her lip to stop it.
But now Delilah was slowly rotating, as if filling all the shelves with food and imagining a cook before the stove.
She pressed on, her words rushing together now. “At first I thought I might be mad, too. But the more I think about it, the less outlandish it seems. Between us we’ve enough experience to run a large home. We need only allow people we like to stay, and we’ll charge them handsomely for excellent service. And—” She allowed the fantasy to bloom fully, drumming her fingers on her chin. “And we’ll require guests to eat dinner together at least four nights per week and sit in the drawing room with other guests most nights out of the week. So we’ll all come to know one another and feel like family. Oh, we can even have musicales.”
It was very nearly everything she’d ever wanted.
She clasped her hands beneath her chin in something like entreaty.
Dot was lit up with reflected zeal and hope.
Angelique had gone very still. Her hazel eyes were abstracted as if she were calculating something on an internal abacus.
And hope was a bit like that pallid light forcing its way through the chinks in the shutters. It would find a way, given the slightest bit of an opening.
“But you own the building, Delilah. Which puts me in a position I never want to be in again—beholden to someone. How would we make my participation official?”
It was the perfect sort of shrewd question that convinced Delilah she was absolutely right to put this proposition to her.
“Presumably you know where to sell the jewels we own outright. We’ll pool our funds and draw up papers.”
And after a moment, during which Delilah held her breath, Angelique gave a slow nod, as if Delilah the pupil had just given a correct answer.
“I do know where to sell them, as it so happens. And to find people willing to do the dirtiest of the heavy work for reasonable pay.”
“Splendid! And as for the location, well, we will make this place so appealing that people will go well out of their way to stay here, and won’t want to leave. And we’ll call it something very enigmatic and exclusive, like . . . like . . .” Delilah waved one hand like a sorceress with a wand. “The Grand Palace on the Thames!”
“Ohhhhhhhhh, Lady Derring . . .” Dot breathed. “That’s tray magnefeek.”
Angelique gave a little snort. But her posture suggested that some sort of internal knot had finally loosened.
“Can you picture it?” Delilah demanded on nearly a whisper.
“I can picture it,” Angelique conceded. “And it’s not only not mad, we might never have to be at the mercy of another man again.”
“Precisely my thought.”
Delilah took a breath. “Shall we shake hands on it?” Her voice was shaking.
Angelique drew in a long, long breath.
And then with a certain ironic flair, extended the hand Delilah had lately stopped from taking that last sip of sherry.
They shook briskly.
“To The Grand Palace on the Thames!”
“To The Grand Palace on the Thames!” Dot and Angelique echoed.
And they all raised their lanterns and toasted each other with light.
Chapter Six
Six weeks later . . .
The facade of Number 11 Lovell Street had been washed, and recently. This was either optimism or folly; Tristan knew it would be coated in a fine layer of coal smut apace, like everything and everyone else in London, particularly here by the docks.
Still, this clean white box of a building seemed to him as improbable as Brigadoon emerging from the mists. Seldom did dens of iniquity call attention to themselves thusly, but iniquity came in many disguises, he knew.
Ironically, it was a fifteen-minute brisk walk from where the Zephyr was docked.
He was here because bloody Tavistock had finally returned from his holiday and had revealed—after skillful, charming yet vaguely threatening, coercion—three fascinating things: Derring had indeed died in great mounds of debt; he’d