friend.
“Rest his soul,” he said somberly.
“Rest his soul,” she echoed rotely.
“Did he introduce himself to you?”
She looked caught.
“No,” she admitted, after a hesitation. “But he spoke to a friend of mine. A woman. Sitting alone. A good sort of woman,” she said hurriedly. “He introduced himself to her. And she told me who he was. That’s how I know who he was.”
“Do you know the proprietresses of the boardinghouse, Frances? Ought I take a room there?”
“Lady Derring and Mrs. Breedlove are all that is good and kind.”
So Lady Derring was there.
“Thank you for your opinion, Frances,” he said gravely.
What on earth would make a countess undertake the running of a boardinghouse? If that was indeed what she was doing?
“I knew I was right to stop in here today, Frances.”
He drank his dark and left a gratuity large enough to put high color in Frances’s cheeks.
After she locked it, Delilah touched the door—only half-whimsically—to see if it was hot, the way it might be if a flame had licked all the way up to the entrance. Because the backs of her arms had furred with an odd heat and her heart was beating as though she were competing for a prize.
Or running from something.
She could not recall ever before meeting a man who reverberated after he was gone. She wasn’t certain it was entirely pleasant; she did not like the realization that her senses could be so easily overcome without her permission, because she didn’t like being reminded of vulnerabilities. But she was also oddly regretful, as if a stirring piece of music had been interrupted.
She whipped off her cap and apron and dashed up the stairs, her bunch of keys jingling all the way. She was musical nearly every time she moved now, and she didn’t mind in the least. She’d sung quite a bit for no reason at all in the past few weeks.
She found Dot hemming a curtain in the upstairs sitting room. Gordon, their striped cat, whose head was as big as a small pumpkin and body as plump as a cushion, was lounging in a basket next to Dot.
“Dot, you need to remember to lock the door after you open it! A gentleman just strolled in and there I was on the stairs, singing like a looby in my cap and apron.”
“Oh, my apologies, Lady Derring! But you sing very nicely, not like a looby! Was he indeed a gentleman? Did he want to stay?”
Dot sounded wistful. They were all getting to be wistful for the days when gentlemen—people with money and manners—were thick on the ground. They had no illusions about the wonderfulness of gentlemen.
However, they did like—and need—money.
Because they’d been open for business for a fortnight.
And until today, not one person had knocked on the door.
Though, more precisely, the man with the silver eyes had simply strolled in.
“He meant to go to the pub.”
Dot looked crestfallen. And Dot’s blue eyes were enormous and worried like those of a forest creature at the best of times.
“Don’t worry, Dot, it will just take a little time for word of our establishment to spread. And then you’ll see.”
“A little time” was all they had, if time was measured in pounds and shillings.
For the rest of the day those few minutes the man had stood in their foyer kept returning to Delilah, much like an itch she couldn’t reach. She told Angelique about him briefly that night in the small sitting room at the top of the stairs. They’d gotten into the habit of gathering there in the evenings, talking and laughing; sometimes Delilah or Angelique read aloud—they were working their way through the Greek myths, and had just gotten to poor Persephone, who was presently still stuck in Hades.
Angelique absorbed this news silently. There were a good deal more wordless stretches between all of them as the weeks wore on and no one came to stay.
“Perhaps if we place an advertisement in The Times,” Delilah finally said, into the silence.
“Perhaps if we sent Dot out into the street with a bell like a town cryer,” Angelique countered tautly. “That wouldn’t cost a thing.”
Dot’s head shot up.
“I do like bells,” Dot allowed, somewhat worriedly.
Delilah sighed. “We won’t be sending you into the street with a bell, Dot.”
Dot began to smile.
“Yet,” Delilah muttered, a moment later. She was only half joking.
It was just that the fortnight of stillness was a shock after weeks of ceaseless and, quite frankly, exhilarating and triumphant activity. Together Angelique and Delilah made decisions about