Read Online Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles by Karina Cooper - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Karina Cooper
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intentions yet?”
My fingers tightened on the fragile handle of my cup. Suddenly, all thoughts of murder—real and hypothetical—fled. “I beg your pardon?” was all I could manage, a misstep. It confirmed what she suspected; what all of London suspected.
Mad St. Croix’s daughter was no longer quite the earl’s interest.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said, every bit the picture of sympathy and intrigue. “I’m sure you’ll find a fine enough match in time.”
“In time?”
She had no need to explain. I knew the words left dangling between us. Find a husband before my age dictated me quite firmly on the shelf. Before I would be competing with the fresh-faced young misses introduced every Season.
Appalling that even the ladies of this set focused so on marriage. But that was not what gnawed at me.
How long had he been returned? Why had the columns not said?
Had he deliberately failed to visit me? To send word?
Not, I reassured myself as Miss Dorring prattled in my ear, that I cared a whit what one marchioness’s son did.
And did not do.
B ooth took me home at the luncheon’s end.
With the passage of the horse and carriage—no need for them on London’s narrow walkways—the stature of a household came instead on the design of the gondola.
Some were fancy things, hand carved by master craftsmen and gilded to perfection. They boasted up to three pairs of pipes at the tail, from whence a steady stream of blue flickered. Others were subtler in design, dark wood polished to a fine gleam but with none of the excess.
The St. Croix gondola is not the finest of them upon the drift. Commissioned years before I’d ever needed it, gifted to my mother from my father’s own coffers. To say my father had not been wealthy is a mild understatement, which placed value on the gift. He’d had it designed by a craftsman, an Italian working as a piano maker far below the drift in Hackney. It lacked the frivolity of many of the peerage’s crafts, and boasted only one pan-flute array of pipes along the back, but it retained a covered box and a privacy screen, as well as a clean-air machine for days the fog shifted.
The apparatus by which aether was extracted from the air and used to fuel the device was among the more silent, only a distant hum as Booth guided the gondola along the surface of the fog billowing in the canals. There were those whose rattle could be heard for blocks, and others still even quieter than mine.
But no matter how nice the gondola, the true value came with the skill of the gondolier. Booth was brilliant; not only could he hold a straight line, but he’d mastered the levers lining the driver’s seat to such an extent that the bottom of the gondola only just skimmed the fog.
The ride home was quiet as I could like. Or, more accurately, as quiet as Fanny could like, who had stayed at home due to Lady Rutledge’s assurances as to my reputation’s safe harbor. Silence tended to give me too much time to think.
Too much time thinking ended only in the same thoughts plaguing me from all angles. Earl Compton had returned from his hasty leave of absence, and he had not sent word either before or after.
As Miss Dorring ever so neatly intimated, this could only mean that he had not meant any of the silver-tongued platitudes he’d levied upon me that afternoon in the exhibit.
I had never needed evidence that a man, by his very nature, remained bent only on conquering. War was a telling thing, and so, too, were the auction tables in the worst of the gaming hells below the drift. The Menagerie sold women by the pound, and Monsieur Marceaux was not kind to the girls in his employ.
Those girls, that is, who could not make of themselves something worth selling for alternate demand.
I knew what men wanted.
I should not have been so surprised—or hurt—that Earl Compton was the same.
I must acknowledge how much admiration I hold for you, Miss St. Croix.
My gloved fingertips settled over the
My fingers tightened on the fragile handle of my cup. Suddenly, all thoughts of murder—real and hypothetical—fled. “I beg your pardon?” was all I could manage, a misstep. It confirmed what she suspected; what all of London suspected.
Mad St. Croix’s daughter was no longer quite the earl’s interest.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said, every bit the picture of sympathy and intrigue. “I’m sure you’ll find a fine enough match in time.”
“In time?”
She had no need to explain. I knew the words left dangling between us. Find a husband before my age dictated me quite firmly on the shelf. Before I would be competing with the fresh-faced young misses introduced every Season.
Appalling that even the ladies of this set focused so on marriage. But that was not what gnawed at me.
How long had he been returned? Why had the columns not said?
Had he deliberately failed to visit me? To send word?
Not, I reassured myself as Miss Dorring prattled in my ear, that I cared a whit what one marchioness’s son did.
And did not do.
B ooth took me home at the luncheon’s end.
With the passage of the horse and carriage—no need for them on London’s narrow walkways—the stature of a household came instead on the design of the gondola.
Some were fancy things, hand carved by master craftsmen and gilded to perfection. They boasted up to three pairs of pipes at the tail, from whence a steady stream of blue flickered. Others were subtler in design, dark wood polished to a fine gleam but with none of the excess.
The St. Croix gondola is not the finest of them upon the drift. Commissioned years before I’d ever needed it, gifted to my mother from my father’s own coffers. To say my father had not been wealthy is a mild understatement, which placed value on the gift. He’d had it designed by a craftsman, an Italian working as a piano maker far below the drift in Hackney. It lacked the frivolity of many of the peerage’s crafts, and boasted only one pan-flute array of pipes along the back, but it retained a covered box and a privacy screen, as well as a clean-air machine for days the fog shifted.
The apparatus by which aether was extracted from the air and used to fuel the device was among the more silent, only a distant hum as Booth guided the gondola along the surface of the fog billowing in the canals. There were those whose rattle could be heard for blocks, and others still even quieter than mine.
But no matter how nice the gondola, the true value came with the skill of the gondolier. Booth was brilliant; not only could he hold a straight line, but he’d mastered the levers lining the driver’s seat to such an extent that the bottom of the gondola only just skimmed the fog.
The ride home was quiet as I could like. Or, more accurately, as quiet as Fanny could like, who had stayed at home due to Lady Rutledge’s assurances as to my reputation’s safe harbor. Silence tended to give me too much time to think.
Too much time thinking ended only in the same thoughts plaguing me from all angles. Earl Compton had returned from his hasty leave of absence, and he had not sent word either before or after.
As Miss Dorring ever so neatly intimated, this could only mean that he had not meant any of the silver-tongued platitudes he’d levied upon me that afternoon in the exhibit.
I had never needed evidence that a man, by his very nature, remained bent only on conquering. War was a telling thing, and so, too, were the auction tables in the worst of the gaming hells below the drift. The Menagerie sold women by the pound, and Monsieur Marceaux was not kind to the girls in his employ.
Those girls, that is, who could not make of themselves something worth selling for alternate demand.
I knew what men wanted.
I should not have been so surprised—or hurt—that Earl Compton was the same.
I must acknowledge how much admiration I hold for you, Miss St. Croix.
My gloved fingertips settled over the
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