Lady Derring Takes a Lover - Julie Anne Long Page 0,8

they were perhaps warehouses, or workshops. She had never been in this neighborhood before in her life.

Above those, into the fast-deepening mauve of the night sky, rose the spires of ships, looking almost churchly. And high above those was the glowing disk of a full moon.

Distantly, she heard voices raised in argument.

Raucous laughter floated toward them from another direction. It concluded in a violent coughing fit and an extravagantly, protractedly juicy spit.

She and Dorothy winced.

Somebody screamed off in the distance. It was a bit difficult to tell if it was due to murder or glee.

Dot jumped six inches and then nearly climbed Delilah like a frightened cat.

Delilah batted her down and set her firmly away from her.

“It was just someone expressing a powerful emotion, Dot. Nonetheless, it might be best to hold your hatpin in your hand.”

“Very well, Lady Derring.” Dot’s voice was a little wobbly.

The scent of sea was layered like a complex perfume, wild and briny, a bit foul, a bit sweet, carrying with it a bit of everything it swept through on its way to where they stood: tar and salt and smoke, among other things. A wind whipped through and tried to steal her hat and she slapped her hand down upon it. Their skirts billowed and lashed their legs.

“Would you be so kind as to wait for us here, Paul?”

Her driver, Paul, was one of the servants who hadn’t yet fled, but he’d told her he’d accepted new employment. And yet he’d been kind enough to drive her out to the docks without so much as a raised eyebrow. She wondered if he thought that, now that she was penniless, she was doing the practical thing and going straight away to join a brothel, because surely that’s where the brothels were, down by the docks.

“Of course, Lady Derring.”

He pragmatically yet surreptitiously laid his musket across his lap and retrieved a flask from his coat pocket.

Lovell Street barely qualified as a street; it was more like a bit of fringe dangling at an angle from the main thoroughfare. As far as she could tell, three buildings occupied it.

Number 11 was the largest.

Her building was the largest.

She had never owned anything of such significance outright before. Hers, and hers alone.

Mine. She’d never realized what a powerful word it was.

Of course, two prone bodies were propped at odd angles against it. Drunk rather than dead, she hoped. Prayed.

One of them stirred and murmured, chuckling to himself.

Chuckling wasn’t terribly sinister, was it?

The building was about the width of two and a half townhouses and filthy with coal smut. A battered sign creaked and swayed on rusty chains in front of it; whatever it had once said had worn away.

She shifted her gaze upward; were those gargoyles?

Suddenly something savory wafted out the door of what appeared to be a little pub adjacent. Her stomach, a crucible of terrible emotions all day and filled with nothing else, growled.

The pub’s battered sign, rocking and dancing in the wind on its chains, read “The Wolf and.” The final word was no longer legible.

Ladies did not frequent coffeehouses or pubs, she knew, unaccompanied or not. But what did she have to lose? If she was kidnapped and sold into slavery or murdered for the joy of it, it would at least be a dramatic denouement to her story.

She was hungry and thirsty and doubtless poor Dot was, too. They would enter her building fortified.

“Dot, we’re going into this pub to have a meal and perhaps a coffee.”

Dot hesitated. “Oh, Lady Derring, but ladies don’t—”

“Widows may go wherever they choose. But widows ought not go alone, which is why I’m grateful for your company.”

Dot looked relieved. “Is that so? I’m right famished, Lady Derring.”

“Well, in we go then.”

The Wolf And was snug and nearly dark as a cave and glowed like an ember thanks to a healthy fire at one end and a series of lanterns hooked across the smoke-dark beams.

A century of smells seemed to have soaked into the timbers of the place—smoke, ale, food—and she wouldn’t be surprised if blood had found its way into the mix. It was pungent, but not oppressive.

A young woman with a resolute expression and dark hair scraped and pinned back away from her face was swishing a rag over the bar with one hand and pushing a sloshing tankard over to a man with the other. Next to the fire, another man in a chair snored like a tree branch cracking. Another two men were in the