Ways to Be Wicked (8 page)

And besides, he’d promised The General, who doubtless had something tastefully titillating in mind, and only a lithe girl would do.

“Daisy—” he began diplomatically.

“Now listen to me, ye beautiful sod.” She whirled on him and wagged her hairbrush at him. Mother-of-pearl-handled, the thing was, had cost a small fortune, as had everything in this room, the plush pink furniture, the soft rugs, the grand gilt mirror, all to please her, to reward her. “Do I need to remind ye of the reason this theater stands ’ere at all?”

“Because I had the good sense to take advantage of your talents?” He gave her a winning smile.

She tried to scowl, but it was clear she couldn’t quite force herself to do it in the face of that smile. So she sighed instead. “Come ’ere, Tommy, ye’ve a thread.” She beckoned with a hand and he inched forward obediently; she reached out and wrapped a loose thread hanging from one of his coat buttons around her finger and gave it a yank to snap it. She smoothed his coat down with absent affection.

“Wouldn’t want a thing to mar yer perfection now, now, would we, Tommy?” A faint tang of bitterness in her tone now.

He wasn’t certain how to deal with this fear and bitterness and pride. He remained silent, and knew she would interpret his silence as sympathy, and would hate it. But Daisy had become a bit comfortable in her diva role, avoiding the other girls or treating them with coolness, arriving late for rehearsals, holding court like a buxom empress in these dressing rooms after the show. Tom was just as familiar with her origins as he was with his own; perhaps, he thought, this was her way of continuing to distance herself from her past, the way owning grand theaters and producing bawdy spectacles and accumulating money was his.

But
he’d
provided a place and the throne for Daisy to blossom into divahood. She’d never abandoned her gutter accent, nor even attempted it, the way he had buffed his own methodically out of existence through listening to gentlemen talk and imitating their inflections, learning their words phonetically, discovering through any means possible what the words meant. Swallowing pride and asking; charming people into teaching him to read. It simply hadn’t been necessary for Daisy to make the effort when one possessed a bosom as unforgettable and profitable as hers.

“Ye’ll get old, too, Tommy, ye bugger,” she said softly. It wasn’t an accusation or a threat; it was more like a plea. It made him desperately uncomfortable.

He decided to change the subject. “You’ll never guess who I saw, Daisy. Biggsy Biggens.”

“Biggsy!” Daisy’s eyes widened in surprise. “Good Lord! Where’d yer see ’im? Swingin’ ’t the end of a rope?” She said it only half-jokingly.

“He was robbing the coach I was aboard, actually.”

Daisy snorted. “A good ’eart, but precious little imagination, Biggsy always had. ’E’ll come to a bad end yet.”

“He asked after you, Daize.”

“Yes, well, ye see, Tommy, because even after all of these years, I leave
quite
an impression.” She addressed this to the mirror, but her eyes met and held Tom’s, pride and defiance. . . and nervousness. He hated the nervousness; Daisy was a peacock, a diva, it was out of place. And it made him feel a cad; he slid his eyes casually away from hers, toward the brandy decanter, then decided he’d already had enough at his investor meeting.

“ ’E didna shoot ye, apparently? Biggsy?”

“I managed to persuade him not to, for the sake of old times. He required a kiss from one of our passengers, however, as the price of leaving with most of our belongings.”

Daisy smiled at this. “I take back what I said about ’is imagination. Did ’e get one?”

Tom paused. “He did. Someone...volunteered.” Tom saw the image in his mind, Sylvie’s slim body, shoulders squared, standing on her toes to reach the highwayman’s mouth, Biggsy’s near-humble acceptance of the favor proffered, the awe and gratitude lighting the ugly man’s face. Tom felt a sharp twinge of something, a pang of indefinable emotion, intriguing but uncomfortable.

Restlessness surged. This conversation with Daisy was taking too long; he decided it was time to be firm. “Daisy, I’d like another girl to play the part of Venus. I haven’t decided who it should be. But I have also hired a new girl.”

She looked up sharply. “Ye’ve ’ired a new girl? When?”

“Today.”

“Does The General know?”

Ah, but Daisy was shrewd. Tom smiled faintly. “He does now.”

Daisy thoughtfully regarded him in the mirror. “ ’Oo is this girl? She’s the replacement for Kitty?”

“She’s not a ‘replacement’ for anyone, Daisy,” Tom said sharply. “She’s the one from whom Biggsy extracted a kiss.”

Daisy’s mouth set; however, she looked reluctantly intrigued. “Ye took ’er on out o’ pity? Seems unlikely, Tom.” She said it dryly.

Tom knew a moment of pique; Daisy perhaps more than anyone had benefited from his pragmatism and good business sense, and he was not without a heart, and she knew it. He ascribed it to her wounded pride, and let it go, and knew the fact that he had let it go would hurt her pride even more. It could not be helped.

“I took her on an impulse.” Somehow he thought she would find this a more acceptable answer. He smiled crookedly. “She also jabbed me with a knitting needle when I touched her arm.”

Daisy gave a short, surprised laugh, a reluctant little sound. She was intrigued, too. “She’s pretty?”

“No, I thought it would be a nice change of pace to hire a homely girl, Daisy.”

She snorted at this. “Jus’ makin’ certain yer still possessed of yer faculties, Tommy. This girl . . .” She faltered momentarily. “Ye think she’s yer Venus?”

Yes. Oh, yes. No. Perhaps.

“I haven’t yet decided, Daisy.”“But ye’ve decided it willna be
me.
”“I’m glad you understand, Daisy,” he said briskly.He saw her jaw drop nearly to her collarbone as he left the room, but wisely, she said nothing, having known Tom long enough to know when enough was enough.

The General drilled them for three hours, and the seemingly tireless Josephine played the same several tunes again and again. It might have driven another person mad; but Sylvie understood the need for it, having danced over and over to the same tunes for much of her life, having repeated the same motions again and again until they were flawless.

The demands on her body were minor. The demands on her dignity, however, were rigorous.

The other girls did the dances cheerfully, or at least willingly enough, taking it on as matter-of-factly as pushing a broom about the floor, smiling, twirling, hopping, twitching hips, showing a saucy bit of ankle. But Sylvie would never, never, never become accustomed to throwing her derriere up in the air and singing out “whee!”

Molly even sang a bawdy song while the other girls sang a chorus behind her and suggestively wielded their wands—Sylvie now understood the eloquence of that particular prop—and patted their own behinds.

And then, to Sylvie’s dismay, they turned to pat the behinds of the girls in front of them.

As it turned out, it was
her
destiny to pat Molly’s comfortably plush behind. A rump like a pair of pillows, Molly had.

Good God.

Sylvie became adept rather quickly, as none of it really required the grace or precision of a
grand jeté,
and after the first hour The General only shouted at her once or twice per song. “Get it up there, Sylvie! And don’t make that face when you pat Molly! She’s a very fine arse! Consider it an honor!”

I can’t grow an arse in only three hours,
Sylvie felt like grousing to him.
This is all the arse I have.

Good God. Only three hours and she already sounded like an English street urchin in her thoughts. What sort of word was “
arse
”?

Sylvie had begun to see spots before her eyes from hunger, when rehearsal came to a close with a hearty “Thank you, ladies!” from The General.

The girls drifted away, down the stairs of the stage, filing toward their dressing room to change from fairies into girls again. Sylvie hovered, wondering whether she should follow, then looked up at a touch on her arm. It was Josephine, a bit red-faced and mussed from her energetic turn at the keyboard.

“Mr. Shaughnessy asked me to see to ye, Sylvie, and I think we need to get some food into ye now—ye’ve gone right peaky. Come wi’ me.”

She followed Josephine through a narrow corridor, past the dressing room where giggles and squeals came from behind the door, and it occurred to Sylvie that perhaps she should change out of her big fairy dress and put her wand away, and she almost felt excluded from the merriment. She wondered if they would receive her more warmly now that she’d bent and patted derrieres all afternoon.

But then, even in Paris, her status as Prima Ballerina set her apart from the other girls, and there were those who fawned and wanted to be her, and those who plotted and were cold and wanted to be her, or those who were overtly jealous and wanted to be her.

It left her rather as she had been in the mail coach today, with an invisible wall of sorts about her.

She reached her hand up to cover her heart, touched the miniature of her mother lightly through her fairy dress. Thought of Susannah, Lady Grantham.
Perhaps this is someone with whom I belong.
She wondered how she would go about learning when or how Susannah had returned from France.

Josephine saw her glance at the dressing-room door. “Food first, I think, m’dear. Mr. Shaughnessy willna be pleased if ye faint away, like. Sets a bad example fer the other girls.” She smiled to show she was teasing. “And I’ll show you where ye’ll be sleeping.”

They traveled the corridor; behind a set of wide doors, much like those that opened onto a ballroom, Sylvie heard the sounds of hammers and saws; something dropped with a deafening clatter, someone swore colorfully, a string of English phrases. She could have sworn it was The General.

“They’re building sets,” Josephine confided in a low voice. “For Venus.” She said the word “Venus” with a hushed sort of reverence.

What on earth was
Venus
?

Josephine took Sylvie up a steep flight of stairs, like the servants’ passage, to another corridor lined with rooms, long and narrow, lit by a small window at the far end; candles were tucked into simple sconces along the walls. The wicks were cleanly trimmed; none of them seemed to have been lit recently.

“The White Lily was a bit of a wreck when Mr. Shaughnessy bought it. Turned it into a right beautiful theater,” Josephine said as proudly as if he was her own son.

She stopped at the third door from the left in the corridor. “ ’Ere’s your room, luv. The girls usually take dinner on their own before the show. We’d the ’ousekeeper bring up summat t’ eat.”

On the little dressing table Sylvie saw a tray covered by a cloth; she tentatively plucked at the corner of the cloth and peeked beneath, afraid of the English food she might find. She discovered thickly sliced brown bread, and a yeasty scent still rose from it, so no doubt it was somewhat fresh. Feeling more confident now, she tugged the cloth all the way off and saw slices of cheese—she was a bit worried abut English cheese, too, but this was pungent and sharp-smelling and sliced in generous slabs, at least; there were two small rosy apples and a few slices of what appeared to be cold breast of fowl roasted in herbs, if the golden, crusty edge of the meat was any indication. She tugged at a roll of white linen; it proved to be a napkin, and a shiny knife and fork tumbled out. A tiny pot of tea and a cup and saucer completed the setting.

Hunger suddenly took Sylvie so violently her stomach nearly turned in upon itself, and she almost retched. She realized she hadn’t slept for nearly a day. And suddenly she was thoroughly weary, so weary she didn’t think she could form a sentence or do anything besides satisfy the needs of her body.

She looked around the little room and saw a rectangle of a hooked rug on the swept wood floor, a narrow iron bed made up with white sheets and a coverlet was pushed against the wall, a blue blanket was folded into a rect-angle at the foot of it, and at the head two snowy pillows looked almost obscenely plump and welcoming. A wooden stand in the corner held a pitcher and a washbasin. There was no window or fireplace, but there was a small dressing table, and a small oval of a mirror hanging from a ribbon looped over a nail.

It was nothing at all like Claude’s small, dark, cluttered apartments in Paris. And it was a world—or at least a continent—away from what she knew her life with Etienne would be, gilded, marbled, gleaming, vast. But something about its size and clean simplicity was soothing in the way she imagined a nun’s cell might seem soothing.

And this thought made her nearly laugh aloud. Hunger was making her delusional. Thanks to Etienne, she was most certainly not a nun.

“Chamber pot under the bed,” Josephine said matter-of-factly. “Come down to the kitchen later, if ye like. Mrs. Pool is making a tart. Just follow the smell down the stairs. There’s some what live ’ere, at the theater. Meself and the ’ousekeeper, Mrs. Pool, and the maids, and there’s Mr. Shaughnessy—”

“Mr. Shaughnessy lives here? At the theater?” This surprised Sylvie. She thought for certain he’d have a suite of rooms of his own in London, or a grand town house, rooms as glittering as his appearance.

But then again, she’d met the man in a mail coach. Perhaps his budget was apportioned to silver buttons on his coat.

“Mr. Shaughnessy is a practical man,” Josephine said approvingly. “ ’E lives where ’e works. ’E knows the meaning of economy.”

But not,
Sylvie thought,
the meaning of restraint.
It was an interesting juxtaposition.

“The General, ’e ’as rooms in town,” Josephine volunteered. “And if ye’ve skill wi’ a needle, Sylvie, I’ve need of some ’elp wi’ the costumes for all of it, so when ye’re not rehearsin’...” Josephine looked hopeful. “It’s Mr. Shaughnessy, ye see, and ’is ideas. Always wi’ the ideas, and ’e always wants ’em straightaway. So we can sew in the mornings, rehearse in the afternoon, and do a show at night.”

Sylvie wondered whether she would be offered any additional money for sewing, then wondered what on earth she might do with the rest of her time here at the White Lily, and decided she might as well sew. She found herself nodding, agreeing.