A Little Light Mischief Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  An Excerpt from A Duke in Disguise Chapter One

  About the Author

  By Cat Sebastian

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  London, January 1818

  Alice had her eye on that lady’s maid.

  Most lady’s maids Alice had met were either French or at least pretended to be French; failing that, they were Englishwomen of the austere, rail-thin variety. Molly Wilkins was neither, and Alice didn’t know how she was supposed to concentrate on her sewing—or whatever it was she was meant to be doing—when there was an ample bosom or a pert backside within reach at all moments.

  Not that there was much of anything to do. Alice had never been so idle in her life. Some lady’s companions were little more than unpaid drudges, and that was the fate she had gladly anticipated when Mrs. Wraxhall rescued her from the vicarage; it had been the only kind of life she had ever known. But no, Mrs. Wraxhall didn’t need an extra set of hands to help with the mending or settle matters of domestic diplomacy among the staff. She had servants for those tasks, as well as for tasks Alice hadn’t even known existed before arriving in London, such as packing gowns between layers of tissue paper, which Molly was doing presently.

  When Alice had ventured to ask her benefactress in what small ways she could be of use, Mrs. Wraxhall had waved an airy hand and said, “Simply adorn the drawing room, my dear.” Alice had to bite the inside of her cheek so she didn’t laugh herself into a stupor; she had never adorned a blessed thing in her life, and at twenty-eight wasn’t apt to start now. So she hid in the sewing room, away from Mrs. Wraxhall’s callers, and amused herself with the most useless stitchery she had ever done in her life.

  If it weren’t for the not-so-small matter of Molly Wilkins’s bosom and the absolute conviction that the lady’s maid was up to no good, Alice thought she could be quite content in Mrs. Wraxhall’s household. Well, as long as she stayed in the sewing room.

  She tore her gaze from the maid and bent over her embroidery. Her silks were in a frightful tangle, possibly because she had spent most of the morning distracted by Molly’s packing of Mrs. Wraxhall’s trunks and hadn’t properly attended to her own work. Not that embroidering handkerchiefs with flowers and fairies and all manner of silliness counted as work—it was just a way to fill the hours in between meals and sleep, a way to use hands that had spent decades at another’s service.

  The crux of the matter was that every time Molly leaned over the trunk, her fichu came untucked, giving Alice an eyeful of creamy breasts. And when she tried to tuck her scarf back in, as she was this very minute, much to Alice’s consternation, she made a great show of patting herself down and rearranging the contents of her bodice. Alice tried to tell herself that it was the coarseness of the girl’s behavior that had drawn her attention, but found she couldn’t sustain the lie. That was another problem with idleness—there was nothing to distract her from the unwanted thoughts that flitted in and out of her mind.

  “Oh, drat,” Alice said in frustration, realizing she must have dropped her needle while gawping at this latest episode of tucking and self-groping.

  “Let me get it, miss,” Molly said with her emphatically not-French accent, falling to her knees on the carpet. Alice struggled to find a place to look that wasn’t Molly’s backside. “Here it is!” Molly held up the needle, smiling in that lazy, crooked way she had. She had a gap between her top teeth that gave her a faintly rakish air and a crinkling around her eyes that made it impossible to guess her age. Only a few years younger than Alice herself, she reckoned, but Alice felt withered and dry in comparison.

  Alice’s hands clenched around the edges of her embroidery hoop. “Thank you,” she managed, her voice sounding rusty with disuse.

  Instead of handing the needle directly to Alice, Molly slid it into the edge of Alice’s work. It felt impertinent, this practiced gesture. Too familiar. As if they were friends, as if Alice had the capacity for anything like friendship. Alice wasn’t made for that; she was made for more practical things like lending a hand on washing day, or persuading the butcher to wait another month for payment—all the stretching and scraping that went into making things right for her father. Even this fanciful embroidery wasn’t what Alice’s hands were meant for; this was the sort of work that she would have spent all day looking forward to, if she had ever been in the habit of looking forward to things. Now it was all she had in the world.

  Perhaps some of that showed on her face, because Molly took her hand. “Everything all right, miss?” Her fingers were warm and her touch gentle, and Alice didn’t know what to do with either warmth or gentleness. Alice didn’t want to look at her eyes to find out whether they shared those qualities. It was taking all her effort to hold on to her knowledge of who she was and what she was made for. The one thing she knew was that a minute too long in Molly Wilkins’s company would send her careening far, far out of her place.

  “Look at your hands,” Molly cooed, kneeling at Miss Stapleton’s feet. “Your calluses are nearly gone.” She was trying to make conversation, that was all; she just thought it might be nicer for both of them to have a bit of a chat instead of sitting stone-faced in the sewing room hour after hour. After all, Miss Stapleton could have been downstairs in the drawing room where she belonged. But instead she was here, nearly every day, watching.

  Molly was used to being watched—by suspicious gentlefolk who knew a thief when they saw one, or by gentlemen with an eye for mischief—but never like this. Sometimes she thought she could actually feel Miss Stapleton’s gaze on her flesh, but whenever she glanced over, the lady’s eyes were bent down over her work.

  She ventured to run her finger along the inside of Miss Stapleton’s wrist. When Miss Stapleton first came to Mrs. Wraxhall’s house, her hands had been as raw as a washerwoman’s. Those hands had scrubbed and polished as much as Molly’s own hands, but the poor girl wasn’t a farthing the richer for it, and that was a sin and a shame. Molly had spent many an hour wondering what good it was for Miss Stapleton to call herself a lady, when as far as Molly could tell, all it meant was that she was unfit to work for wages but without enough coin to buy so much as a shift.

  But Molly knew Miss Stapleton hadn’t ever really been a proper lady, not like the ladies Molly had served. Miss Stapleton’s dingy gray frocks, all mended and trimmed dozens of times in a way that screamed poverty, had been a good deal shabbier than Molly’s own clothes. Mrs. Wraxhall had instructed Molly to ensure that Miss Stapleton’s clothing was ruined in the wash. The replacement wardrobe Mrs. Wraxhall insisted on purchasing was much finer, but still boring beyond all reckoning. Never had Molly seen such a proliferation of gray. It was as if Miss Stapleton had her own personal fog that followed her about.

  “Have you been using the salve the housekeeper gave you?” she asked.

  Miss Stapleton snatched her hand away, so that must have been the wrong thing to say. Chin tilted up, lips pressed tight, dusty blue eyes flashing, she looked at Molly like she had never seen anything so unseemly in her life.

  She knows. Molly jumped to her feet and had carefully folded another stack of chemises before remembering that there wasn’t anything to know. There wasn’t anything to find out, and wasn’t that a strange feeling? Molly had been on the straight and narrow for a while now: no b
its and bobs of her ladyship’s toilette conveniently going missing, no carrying on with the coachman. Only honest work.

  Molly had gone into service to get her foot into the door of one of those big Mayfair houses where they just left silver and ivory lying about, where there were gentlemen who might give her a bracelet or a gold coin for her troubles between the sheets instead of the pittance she’d earn in the rookery for the same work. But she had soon realized that compared to the constant threat of Newgate or starvation, life even as a scullery maid was a blessed relief. She stole less and less and worked more and more. Here she was, well-fed and clean, with a position of respect in the household, and enough money to take care of Katie.

  That’s what she ought to be thinking of now. Not Miss Stapleton’s hands, or her eyes, or the mystery of why she sat in the corner of the sewing room like an especially prim shadow. But that was Molly’s problem and always had been. She was no good at doing what she ought to. She could almost hear the voices of every housekeeper and butler she had worked under, a couple coppers, and maybe even her ma, if she could remember that far back, all telling her she was no better than a jumped-up gutter snipe, and would come to no good. Well, she couldn’t afford to bollocks it up this time. She had more than just herself to think of. And she knew that somehow Alice Stapleton was going to be the ruin of everything she had worked for.

  Alice couldn’t seem to pry her fingers loose from the parcel. She had tied it up so carefully, with an extra layer of brown paper and double-knotted twine, her sister’s name and direction written carefully on the outside as well as on the sheaf of papers within. She had pressed each handkerchief between a sheet of tissue, as she had seen Molly do to Mrs. Wraxhall’s delicate gowns.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Wraxhall?”

  Alice’s benefactress leapt to a start, nearly knocking over her inkwell. “Gracious, Alice! You mustn’t go about creeping up on people like that!”

  After a lifetime of tiptoeing around her father, shushing her sisters and brothers, calming the beleaguered servants, and overall making herself as invisible as a person could be, Alice was as stealthy as any cat burglar. “I’m so sorry,” she said, tittering nervously. “You’ll have to tie a bell around my neck, like a cat.”

  Mrs. Wraxhall put down her pen and regarded Alice’s person as if contemplating where a bell could be attached. “Not a bell, perhaps, but a string of pearls would not be at all amiss . . .” she murmured.

  The lady had enough money to deck all the spinsters of Mayfair in ropes of pearls if she so chose, and didn’t seem to grasp that her companion was not a doll to be outfitted and adorned at another person’s whim. Her father had been a merchant of some sort, and—according to the housekeeper’s gossip, which Alice ought to have ignored—had all but purchased his daughter an aristocratic husband. The husband, however, was nowhere to be seen. His bedroom door remained locked, and the only signs that he had ever lived in the house were an unused ashtray that rested near the fire in the drawing room, and a cushion that had evidently been used by his dog. Sometimes Alice caught Mrs. Wraxhall looking wistfully at one or the other of these objects, but the sadness always passed quickly from her face, and she reverted to her usual good cheer.

  Alice decided to interrupt before Mrs. Wraxhall actually went so far as to send for her jewel box. “I was wondering if you might have one of your servants, the coachman perhaps, bring this to my sister while you’re in Norfolk.” She held out the parcel. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I mean.”

  “Why on earth wouldn’t you bring it yourself?”

  “I have no means to bring it.” Sometimes Mrs. Wraxhall needed to be reminded of the facts of life for those not born to wealth and status. Alice had no money to hire a private post chaise and nip over to the vicarage several counties away.

  “While we’re at Eastgate Hall, you’ll use my carriage,” Mrs. Wraxhall said, in the manner of one explaining the alphabet to a child who ought to have learnt it already.

  “No, no,” Alice protested, realization dawning. “I’m not going to Eastgate Hall.” As if being here in a fine house in London weren’t bizarre enough. To start traveling to house parties? Impossible.

  “Of course you are. You’re my companion. I require your company.” She said this with a smile, as if telling Alice of a special treat. “It’s not so close to your father’s parish that you need to worry about anyone having heard of your . . .” She let her voice trail off.

  Alice hadn’t even thought of that. Eastgate Hall was perhaps an hour’s ride from the village where she had grown up, but she had so seldom ventured farther than the nearest market town, that Eastgate might as well have been as unreachable as Paris or the moon.

  “No, I’m not worried about gossip following me to Eastgate Hall.” She tried a different line of argument. “The house party will be filled with people who are clever and amusing. You won’t need me in the least. I could stay in London and . . .” She desperately rummaged around her brain, trying to think of some excuse to remain, some service she could perform that would warrant her staying in town, but that was the crux of the problem: she had no purpose, either in town or country or anywhere else on earth. She had nothing to do, and no one to do it for.

  Mrs. Wraxhall cocked her head. A lock of her carefully curled brown hair had escaped her cap. “Have you no wish to be among clever and amusing people, Alice?”

  “I . . . but . . .” Alice sputtered. She would, in fact, rather be burnt at the stake than spend a fortnight at a strange house among people who had in common a wealth and education that she did not share. Every conversation would be like embroidering a flower she had never seen, only heard of second- or third-hand. “I’ll oblige you in any way you wish, of course.”

  Mrs. Wraxhall sighed. “Perhaps you’ll meet ladies and gentlemen who will properly appreciate your worth.”

  No doubt this was meant as a compliment, but Alice knew her worth. She knew it down to the tuppence. She knew that despite her sleepless nights and tireless work, she wasn’t worth so much that she couldn’t be cast aside with scarcely a backward glance.

  Or perhaps Mrs. Wraxhall thought that among the guests, there would be a gentleman—a semi-impoverished curate or a gentleman farmer of the middling sort—who might find it cheaper to take a wife than to hire servants. That would be familiar enough ground. A part of her wanted to jump at the chance to return to a life she understood.

  “I doubt my sister will receive me anyway,” Alice said in a rare moment of self-pity. “So it doesn’t signify.” She turned the package over and over, so gingerly, so carefully, when really she could have tossed it into the fireplace for all it mattered. “My letters are always returned unopened.”

  It had been months since Alice’s father had cast her out. Months of silence, months of shame. If it hadn’t been for the happenstance of Mrs. Wraxhall—who had her own reasons for seeking to thwart the wishes of imperious men—being near to hand when Alice’s misfortune had occurred, Alice would have been without a roof over her head or bread on her plate. As it was, she was lucky. All she had lost was her family, none of whom evidently gave a fig for her. And, of course, she had lost her purpose

  “I had heard as much.” Mrs. Wraxhall’s mouth was a tight line. “But I thought that perhaps if you brought them in person . . .”

  “I can hardly act surprised,” Alice said, even though a part of her indeed was surprised whenever one of her letters was returned. “Disowning would be rather meaningless if we kept up a correspondence.”

  “Idiots,” Mrs. Wraxhall said under her breath. “Fools.”

  The paper wrapping the parcel crinkled under Alice’s fingers as she clenched her hand. She must have been deluded to think that these silly fripperies could possibly get through to her family when years of Alice’s honest work hadn’t mattered in the least. She would toss the entire parcel directly into the fire and be rid of it.

  “What rankles the most,” Mrs. Wraxhall went on, “is that he’ll
never meet with justice in this world, and I have sadly little faith in justice being meted out in the next.”

  Alice was momentarily taken aback. Justice was in the same category as diamonds and gold—utterly unavailable to her, and therefore not worth thinking about. She was rather surprised that Mrs. Wraxhall still believed in it. But then again, people clung to stupid ideas long past the point of reason. She glanced at the parcel in her hands. Hope was one of them.

  “Oi!” Molly grabbed Miss Stapleton’s wrist and tugged it away from the fire. “Stop that!”

  “I beg your pardon!” the lady said, all offended-like, as if Molly were a pickpocket. Her cheeks were red and her eyes blazing bright, and this was the most color Molly had yet seen in her face.

  “Won’t,” Molly said. “Not till that parcel is well away from the fire.”

  “Have it your way.” The lady dropped the little bundle into Molly’s hand. “Do what you please with it.”

  Molly narrowed her eyes. “Really? These the handkerchiefs?” Miss Stapleton nodded. “You spent a couple months squinting over them, and now they’re kindling?”

  “I don’t care what they are.” She was in a fine state, was Miss Stapleton.

  Molly raised an eyebrow. “Then you don’t mind if I sell them?” It said no good things about Molly’s character that when confronted with a person on the brink of a towering rage, she had to go the distance and topple them right off the edge.

  Molly hadn’t expected a loud trill of laughter, though. “Please yourself.” Oh, and that little sniff of indignation the lady gave was something special. “I doubt you’d get a shilling for the lot.”

  “Oh, you’re wrong there.” Molly knew what a brand-new, prettily embroidered handkerchief would fetch, because she had stolen and pawned her fair share. A matching set? Now, that would bring a tidy sum to tuck away for Katie. “Maybe a guinea?” she mused aloud.