Ways to Be Wicked (16 page)

“Thank you, Mr....”

“General,” he said. “The. General.”

Tom returned to the White Lily a little later than he would have preferred; still, the sun wasn’t entirely high overhead. He expected to find the rehearsal of the pirate show in motion and to add his wisdom to the proceedings, should it be required.

All was silence.

He
did
see the pirate ship on the stage. The General had done a fine job, as usual. It was a magnificent little thing, cobbled together in a tearing hurry though it had been.

And suddenly he pictured, for an instant, what it might be like for a small boy to climb about the rigging and bound about the deck with a small wooden cutlass. How delightful it would be for a
crew
of small boys to—

What a startling thought. A foreign and
unprofitable
thought, and his mind seldom had room for those sorts of thoughts. He dodged it and moved briskly toward his office, when. . .

Wait. He peered more closely at the pirate ship.

There seemed to be a torso poking up out of the deck of the ship.

An
unmistakable
torso.

“Daisy?” he questioned tentatively.

“Tommy? Yer back, are ye then? They just. . .
left
me here, Tommy,” she said plaintively. “Get me ou’ of ’ere!”

He struggled not to laugh. “Are you. . .
stuck,
Daisy? In the hatch? What
happened
?”

She glared ferocious dark brown daggers at him. Her face was a dangerous shade of pink. “No, it’s me new costume, Tommy,” she said nastily. “The ship is. Now, ye bugger, get me out of ’ere!”

“Where’s The General? Are you being punished? Were you naughty, Daisy? You can tell me.” He was laughing silently now.

Then he had a horrible thought. “How long have you
been
there?” He realized any length of time like that would have been too long, so hilarity gave way to sympathy, and he loped up to the stage and took her by her arms, and pulled. Nothing happened, except that she squeaked when he tugged.

“Daisy, luv, I believe you’ve swelled up a bit. I don’t want to hurt you, so we’re going to have to cut you out. I’ll go fetch a saw. Where’s The General?”

“Scolding the new girl. She pinned Molly to the floor with a cutlass.”

“
Did
she now?” Tom felt that increasingly familiar, marvelously slow, Sylvie-inspired grin spread across his face. “She can’t be trusted with sharp things, you know. I imagine it was provoked.”

“Oh, it was. I saw it all. Molly poked ’er in the arse with a cutlass. On purpose, now, mind ye. She ’ad it comin, that Molly did. There was quite a little battle.” And Daisy, for the first time in an hour, smiled a bit.

Tom made a quiet mental note to himself; he was probably going to need to apologize to The General for the idea of a competition for Venus. Ah, well.

Wait:A
battle!
A pirate battle! A
female
pirate battle!

The audience would all but swoon for it.

Inspiration
did
arrive in the most unusual ways.

“
I
see the light in yer eyes, Tommy. Ye’d like there to be a battle up onstage.” Daisy was watching him. She’d propped her elbows on deck, and propped her face in her hands. “Ye’d be askin’ fer trouble, especially with this lot of females.”

“You may have a point, but you must admit, Daize, it’s a pretty splendid idea. I refuse to abandon it entirely. Now let me fetch a saw to get you out of here. Where have all the boys gone?”

“They scattered, too. Forgot all about me.”

Those last four words, the very idea that anyone would forget all about her, Tom knew, was what terrified Daisy the most about the future. He still didn’t know precisely how to reassure her; still, he knew reassuring her was tantamount to acknowledging a future without adulation. He gave her a brisk pat on one of her round arms and pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll return in a moment, Daize. I promise I shan’t forget you.”

He leaped down from the ship into the aisle, which is when The General emerged from backstage then, Miss Sylvie Chapeau at his side.

Tom slowed, then stopped, and his eyes...feasted. She was dressed like a pirate, a blouse, a sash, those clever, just-shy-of-erotic pantaloons, a warm pink in her cheeks. The flush of the freshly scolded, perhaps. Or perhaps a flush fresh from a vigorous battle with wooden cutlasses.

The General saw Daisy still wedged in the pirate ship, stopped, and stared back at her.

“Happy, ye wee bugger?” she called to him, almost resignedly.

“It suits your eyes, Daisy,” The General called in all seriousness. “The ship does. The brown. You should wear it more often.”

If Tom was not mistaken...a blush crept in under Daisy’s rouge.

“
You
”—The General whirled suddenly on Tom—“owe me an apology for your brilliant idea, Shaughnessy.
This
”—he gestured to Sylvie—“is what results from making Venus a
competition.
Cutlass battles.”

“Can’t be brilliant all of the time!” Tom confessed cheerfully. “It was worth a try, you must admit.”

The General didn’t appear to be in the mood to admit anything of the sort.

Tom turned away from the little man’s glower and addressed Sylvie instead, as he much preferred to look at her.

“I turn my back for one moment, Miss Chapeau, and what do I hear? You’ve been brandishing sharp objects yet again.” It was meant to be teasing, a crisp scold. He was surprised to hear his own voice emerge as nearly husky.

Sylvie looked swiftly up at him, read his eyes. Responded to what they saw there.

“I shall endeavor to be good, Mr. Shaughnessy.” Her tone solemn, her eyes brilliant, her breath held in seeming anticipation.

“I imagine being good will be...a bit of a stretch for you.” Never had a sentence been so redolent of innuendo.

And she laughed, a full-throated and feminine laugh, head thrown back.

The laugh splashed over Tom like a sudden burst of sunlight, washed all other thought from his mind. Tom was motionless for a moment. He just watched her with a faint wondering smile on his own face, and felt peculiarly breathless. Peculiarly light.

They both knew he’d not said anything particularly funny.

And then a silence followed that neither Tom nor Sylvie seemed to notice, as they were watching each other.

But The General and Daisy watched the two of them for a moment and then exchanged speaking looks with each other.

“I’ll fetch a saw, Tom,” The General said firmly. It sounded like a warning.

“A saw?” Tom repeated absently, turning his head with apparent difficulty toward his friend.

Sylvie Chapeau had turned her own head away at last and was now studying the murals, forehead slightly furrowed, as though she was trying to place precisely which gods were which, or was counting them.

“A
saw,
Tom. To free Daisy?” The General repeated patiently. “I’ll fetch it. You might wish to know a message arrived for you whilst you were out. You’ll find it in your office. And Miss Chapeau, will you please collect the rest of the girls so that we may conclude our rehearsals? That is, if
you’ve
no objections...Tom?”

More irony from The General.

“No objections,” Tom said, cheerily enough.

Without another word, Miss Sylvie Chapeau turned to go. Tom watched her go, those sweetly narrow hips moving beneath her pirate trousers, those slim, elegant shoulders almost militantly squared, the little cutlass thunking at her side.

And when Tom turned for his office, he sang softly under his breath all the way there.

“Thrust your sword laddie, now thrust your

sword...”

When Sylvie opened the door to the dressing room, a Tom-Shaughnessy-induced smile still faint on her lips, she saw all the other girls clustered together as if for protection, motionless and utterly silent. At first thought it was because of her, and she was tempted to hold her hands up over her head to show them she was unarmed and came in peace.

But then she noticed they were staring at something on Molly’s dressing table, eyes fixed and bulging as if a wild animal had all cornered them in the room. Sylvie stood on her tiptoes to see what it might be. And saw . . .

Well, they had all received their share of flowers, ranging from flawless hothouse bouquets to sorry clumps purloined from flower boxes in drunken inspiration on the way to the theater. But these were . . .

Daunting
flowers.

Immense roses, red as actual hearts and nearly as large, so vivid they nearly seemed to pulse, twined with lilies and ivy. Standing as high in their vase as a two-year-old child. Drowning the room in scent, as if their intent was to drug all the room’s occupants.

“
Cor,
Molly!”

“There’s a box! A little box with it!”

Molly snatched it up, slid a small triumphant glance and a matching smile toward Sylvie. Sylvie’s dressing table was bare, whereas all the other girls’ tables sported at least a trinket or two.

They all crowded snugly around Molly as she lifted the lid, and six pairs of eyes blinked when she did, and there was a collective catch of breath.

Inside was a pair of hair combs, studded with real pearls and sapphires. They were brilliant even in the indifferent lamplight of the dressing room.

Pearls and sapphires. They were the colors, of course, of Molly’s fair skin and eyes. She would look like a queen with them tucked into her chestnut hair. The combs were another strategic little gift.

Molly slowly lifted them, held them up to her hair wonderingly, and stared at herself in the mirror. It was clear that her confidence of a moment ago was shaken; her bravado gone. Sylvie rather knew how she felt. For Etienne’s gifts had gradually increased in expense and glory, until at last she was lifting out of boxes intricate jewels designed just for her, furred pelisses, things that so spoke of his wealth and power they managed to make her feel somehow both immensely important and much smaller all at once.

Sylvie’s hand went up absently then, circling the wrist of her other hand. She rubbed at it gently. A peculiar reflexive gesture, as though she wanted to ascertain they weren’t bound. She turned away from Molly’s reflection swiftly.

“Yer new bloke sent these, Molly?” Lizzie asked. “When can we see ’im?”

“ ’E’s only been but twice. But ’e took a box when ’e did,” Molly said, trying to sound important, but still sounding half-awed. Even a little subdued. The theater boxes, as they all knew, were terrifyingly expensive to take, and only very wealthy men could afford the discretion they provided. And no one was ever certain precisely when the boxes were taken, for the curtains were drawn about each one during each show. “ ’E sends ’is man to meet me after the show, an’ takes me to ’im. An’ ’e’s not ’
alf
’ ’andsome, I tell ye. ’andsome as Mr. Shaughnessy.”

The faces of the girls instantly became skeptical, as if this was an impossibility.

“’E
could
be a bloody duke,” Molly insisted. “And ’e’s only kissed me but once. ’Ere.” She pointed to her fair cheek. “ ’E jus’ asks about everyone ’ere, and asks about my day, and listens to me talk and talk. Says ’e wants t’ court me proper fer a time.”

The room fell silent, as every girl in it wondered what it would be like for someone to court her proper.

“. . . send me, send me to my reward, hmm, hmm,

hmmm...”

In his office, Tom found the message The General had mentioned centered on the plans for the theater on his desk. He recognized both the seal and the handwriting, and frowned very slightly, a little puzzled but not terribly

concerned, as he slid a finger beneath the seal to break it.

The words stopped his singing.

He stared at them, scowled at them a moment, absorbing the small unwelcome shock, breathing through it until it ebbed. He was faintly amused to realize that it ebbed more slowly than it might have a few mere weeks ago; risk was as native to him as breathing, typically, and he recovered from disappointments quickly enough.

It was an admission to himself that more was at stake now.

Specifically, the future of a small boy in Kent.

“The major backed out of the Gentlemen’s Emporium, Gen.”

Outside the walls of the Satyr room, the sounds of men rumbled more thickly than usual, which Tom found comforting. One of the boxes would be occupied this evening, too; a discreet note had been sent to Tom, and he’d arranged for Poe to escort the man in question into the White Lily theater.

“Mmm,” The General grunted his own surprise. “Bit late to find another investor now, isn’t it? Didn’t you commit to the building?”

“He sent his apologies. But no explanation. And he hasn’t been to the White Lily of late, has he? And he’s been nearly every night for the past year.”

“He
knew
he was about to back out, then.”

Tom nodded grimly. So the major was avoiding him. Tremendously odd, and he couldn’t conceive of a single reason why this should be the case, but it remained manageable as long as the other investors remained. And if Venus proved to be the success he anticipated it would be when they debuted it in a week’s time. . .

Well, it would have to be a
very grand
success now to compensate for the loss of the major’s backing.

Tom smiled. He was confident it would be a grand success.

“I peeked in at the workshop again tonight, Gen. The oyster shell for Venus will be smashing. You’ve outdone yourself.”

“And in the footlights, Tom, it will be even more incredible,” The General said confidently. “I’ve found a splendid paint—there’s this bloke who has found a way to make it glow just so—a special ingredient, you see. And the fish, we’ll have them swimming from the rafters . . .”

But Tom heard the recitation of The General’s vision in terms of a list of expenses. He ticked off in his head the cost of the shell, and the fish, and the splendid paint, not to mention the costumes for the girls, and knew he would need an influx of fresh capital soon, even more than the healthy amount that flowed in nightly from the shows.