What Happens in Piccadilly - Chasity Bowlin Page 0,1

night, or in this case, the early afternoon, with the runaway governess.

From her vantage point inside the front door, she could see the drawing room. Without further ado, she moved toward it. Once there, she settled into a chair near the fireplace, though it was dark and no fires were necessary given the warmth of the day. In fact, she even removed her pelisse. Since no servants seemed to be willing to make the effort to take it for her, or were in fact even aware of her presence, she simply draped it over the back of her chair and waited. After a few minutes, the little boy reappeared. His sister, much smaller than she’d appeared from the ground, and also much dirtier, stood next to him. She clutched a doll in the crook of her arm. As she looked at Calliope with pure malicious challenge in her eyes, she shoved a thumb into her mouth.

Right on their heels came the third sibling, the oldest, a girl who had also clearly been weeping. She appeared to be around eleven or so, and was wearing a dress suited to a much younger girl. It was inches too short and also impossibly tight, stretched at the seams to the point it couldn’t possibly be comfortable.

“Hello. I’m Miss Calliope,” she offered. “I thought, if you’d like, I could tell you a story. Won’t you sit down?”

“Is this a trick?”

The word came out “twick” as the little girl had asked it around her thumb. Calliope bit back a smile. “No, it isn’t a trick. It seems to me that your house is in a bit of disorder and disorder is not very good for children, I find. So I will sit with you here and we will stay out of the way of all that’s happening out there and I will tell you a story until your father returns home.”

“He’s not our father. He’s our uncle. Our father is dead. So is our mother,” the little boy from the porch said.

It was said so matter of factly that it took Callie aback. “Oh. I’m very sorry.”

“Are your parents alive?” the oldest girl asked, a challenge in her voice.

“I don’t know,” Calliope replied with complete honesty. “I never knew my parents.”

The little girl popped her thumb out of her mouth. “That’s the story I want to hear.”

Calliope considered the request for a moment. It would need to be a somewhat edited version, but she saw no harm in it. “Very well. That is the story you shall have.” After taking a moment to collect her thoughts, Calliope began, “Once upon a time—”

“I thought we were getting your story. Not some blimey fairy tale,” the boy said, clearly disgusted.

“You shouldn’t use that word either… the one that began with a b,” she corrected him.

“Can’t spell, can I?”

“You can’t spell?” Calliope asked. “Can any of you? Spell, read, write?”

“I can a little,” the oldest girl said.

“But you all should have been reading and writing years ago! Why not?”

“Well, our first governess was more interested in Papa than in us. Of course, Papa was more interested in her than he was us, too,” the littlest one replied. “Mama and Papa fought about it all the time, then Mama sacked her. What’s that mean? To sack someone?”

“It means that you end that person’s employment and they do not get to work for you anymore,” Calliope said. “But go on, you were saying?”

“After that, Papa yelled and Mama cried and he said he was bringing the lot of us back to England. So we got on a ship. Then Papa died and then Mama, and we came here,” the little girl explained, then promptly popped her thumb right back into her mouth.

The oldest one spoke up, “And our last governess, the one our uncle hired, was only interested in the butler. I don’t think we’ve had a single lesson since we’ve arrived.”

Oh, dear heavens. She’d wandered into bedlam. “I see. Well, enough about your governesses and their apparently numerous failings. I am telling you the story of why I don’t know who my parents are, but I am telling it as a fairy tale. So, no more interruptions. All right?”

All the children nodded their agreement and Calliope began again. “Once upon a time, there was a place called the St. James Workhouse, which still stands today. And in eighteen hundred and four, a little girl was left on the doorstep there. Her name was Calliope. But Calliope was too small