Her Ladyship's Curse

Page 5

My money was as good as any man’s, which made me think about taking him to property court, but then bad luck solved the problem for me. Five of the pork trader’s buildings had been unexpectedly inspected and condemned as firetraps and promptly demolished. He’d come back to me, desperate for coin, and with a little dickering I bought the building for half my original offer.
I knew it was foolish to keep the other flats empty, but I liked living alone. When I had a little money, I did some renovating here and there. Eventually I hoped to convert the whole place from a flathouse into a single-family home.
For convenience’s sake I lived in the first-floor flat, which was also the largest, the other floors each being split between two units. This also gave me direct access to the kitchen, pantry, and bathing room.
I hung up the borrowed dress before I went in to stoke the stove and put on the kettle. I rarely cooked; it was easier to pick up something quick at the pie shop or one of the corner wichcarts. I retrieved a leftover tart from the piesafe, made my tea, and carried both into the bathing room.
I could hear my mother in the back of my head, gently scolding me: Ladies don’t eat in the bath, Charmian. They bathe.
I set down my mug and plate and went to my tub. It was an old claw-footer, made from thick clearstone gone white on the inside from years of use. I cranked the pump for a minute before I opened the tap and tested the flow with my fingers; there was no hot water left from last night. I needed to replace the old coal boiler outside with an in-house furnace, but then walls would have to be torn out to convert the pipes, work for which no decent piper would barter. I was saving up for it, though, and in the meantime made do with what I could coax out of the old blackpot.
Wrecker arrived at my door promptly at three thirty and peered at my face as he helped me up into the carri. “You all right, Miss Kit?”
“No hot water for my bath.” I pinched my cheeks to bring some color to them and recalled the ugly words sliced into the back of Diana Walsh’s hands. “Wrecker, do you believe in curses?”
He pushed out his lower lip. “Don’t disbelieve. All manner of things in this world, Miss Kit. Man’s gotta keep an open mind.”
I shivered a little and blamed it on the ice-cold bath I’d been obliged to take. “To the Hill, please, Wreck.”
He nodded and started off toward the main thoroughfare.
The Hill, also known to the lesser citizens of Rumsen as Poshtown or the Vineyard, constituted the newest part of the city. The land it occupied had once been sacred to a local native tribe, long since exterminated by the first settlers, who had then plowed and cultivated the slopes into enormous vineyards. The dense, fertile black soil had produced some of the sweetest dark wines in the province, but not for very long. When the Crown had decided to prohibit drink, the army had been obliged to round up the winemakers and distillers and smash their vats and cookeries. To protect the city, the vineyard had been subjected to a controlled burn, and the ashes plowed back into the ground.
Only clover and sweet grass had flourished on the Hill until that time when it—and most of Rumsen—was bought up by a beloved bastard son of an English duke. He had the slopes cleared again so that he could build a towering mansion from which he could overlook his new domain.
The bastard son had died without issue, but rather than add the property to his entitled estate, the old duke had sold it off piecemeal to other wealthy families in the queensland, who in turn built homes there for their undesirable relations. Over time the blues had intermarried with the merchant class to create the first ton. The result was the Hill: some four hundred mansions covering every square inch of the old vineyard, and housing Toriana’s only claim to aristocracy.
No doubt guilt over stranding their castoff kin on the other side of the world from the queensland had loosened many purse strings; some of the finest manors ever built on Torian soil marched up the Hill. Gildstone and bronze cast work glittered in the bright midday sun, while the genteel pastel colors of the paintwork gave off a subtle glow, thanks to the ground sparkglass that had been added to the different tints.
Many of the men who built the Hill soon after begun coughing up blood. All of them died lingering, painful deaths. The city’s more superstitious dolts had claimed old native magic had death-cursed the workmen, but more scientifically, it had been inhaling the sparkglass that took them out. Once breathed in, the tiny, deadly grains began eating into their noses, throats, and chests and caused them to waste away slowly from internal bleeding. The Hill was beautiful, but the price it extracted had been too costly. There wasn’t a builder in Rumsen who hadn’t sent a dozen men or better to early graves from glasslung.
Walsh’s Folly, a modest-size palace occupying a respectable two acres, had been styled with the later fashion of turrets and crowswalks, with dozens of balconies from which the inhabitants could gaze upon the sea, the city, the pastureland to the south, and the forests to the north.
It was also pink and sported wardlings over every threshold, so I hated it at first sight.
Wrecker handed me down, promised to return in two hours, and took off before the butler could get a good look at him through the peeper. I gathered my borrowed skirt and made my way up the right steps of the two-sided stair—built so that ladies and gents could ascend separately to prevent any unintentional vulgar glimpse by male eye of female ankle—and took the correct place before the door so that I could be viewed from within. One did not knock on doors or ring bells on the Hill.
After a moderately insulting five minutes, the door slowly opened inward, and an iron-haired scarecrow in immaculate blacks glared down at me without a word.
“Miss Kittredge to see Lady Walsh.” I offered him a name card and waited with a blank smile as he read every letter on it four times over. He then looked around me as if trying to find something. “I have no maid with me,” I said helpfully.
“Come in,” he said in a dour, disapproving tone, and barely waited until I was over the threshold before closing the door. “This way.”
I followed the towering old winge through the lovely foyer and past several open doors, through which I saw beautiful rooms filled with enough antiques to stock several shops. Along the walls were portraits in oil of every Walsh who had ever drawn breath, I presumed, noting the succession of weak chins and receding hairlines. Walsh came from a family of bankers, judging by the bleakness of their dress and the cut of their waistcoats. Men who handled money for a living were the most conservative of dressers and never enslaved themselves to the whims of fashion; they wanted to project an aura of unwavering knowledge and sober experience, not flightiness and impulsivity.
The butler halted in front of two double doors, knocking once before opening them and standing on the threshold. “A Miss Kittredge,” he said in the same tone he’d use to announce that a stray dog, one that might possibly be rabid, had been found on the premises.
“Dear Cousin Kit,” Lady Walsh said, rising and crossing the room to take my hands in hers. “You’re as lovely as I imagined.”
“You’re too kind, Lady Diana.” I bobbed a curtsey to mollify the butler. I thought of all the glasslung that painting this monstrosity must have inflicted and added with a touch of irony, “Your home is quite breathtaking.”
“It is a lovely sanctuary from the worries of the world.” She squeezed my hands before releasing them. “Now come and let me introduce you to the family.”
The family present in the receiving room consisted of two men and one lady. The eldest, a weak-chinned, nearly bald man of fifty in a heavy dark-blue suit, was the master of the house, Nolan Walsh. A thin, mousy-looking woman dressed in an exquisitely fitted lavender half-mourning gown was introduced as Miranda Walsh, Nolan’s younger daughter. A leaner version of Nolan stood by the mantel fiddling with a timepiece; he was the only son and doubtful heir, Nolan Jr., called Montrose.
“My wife tells me you and she are connected through the Landaus,” Nolan said after introductions had been made. “It must be a happy thing for you to meet your distant cousin.”
The way he emphasized distant made me brighten my smile. “A great and humbling happiness, milord.”
Lady Walsh rang for tea, which she served with the elegance of long practice. I refused her offer of cakes and pretended to take a sip now and then while I let my tea grow stone-cold. We spoke of the fine weather, the agreeable effect it was having on the city’s gardens, and whether it promised a milder winter than last season.
As we began to run out of polite topics, Montrose shambled near and bent over oddly, until I realized he was peering at my face.
“I can’t see anything of Diana in you,” he said in a voice that sounded female and querulous. “Are you the get of the gambler or the drinker?”
“Monty, what a thing to ask.” Lady Walsh uttered an embarrassed titter. “Cousin Kit is the daughter of the third son of my great-aunt Hortense Landau.” To me she said, “You do bear a striking resemblance to her, my dear.”
That was my cue. “Thank you for saying so, cousin. I never had the pleasure of meeting my father’s mother.”
“Well, why not?” Montrose rasped. “The old bat lived until she was ninety-seven, didn’t she, Di?”
“She and my father were estranged for quite some time.” I noted the faint yellow tint to the whites of his muddy brown eyes, and the network of fine red lines webbing the skin around his nostrils. Even if I’d missed them, I couldn’t escape his breath, which reeked of gin. The drips might have rendered Junior barren, but it was the blue ruin that was going to kill him.
Montrose showed me his overbite. “What did your old man do, marry a squawk?”
Diana became a beautiful statue, Miranda sucked in a shocked breath and tried to cover it with her bony hand, and Nolan Sr. cleared his throat.
“Why, no, sir,” I said as pleasantly as I could. “That would have been against the law.”
“You’re as dark as one.” His gaze wandered over my black hair before settling on my eyes. “Who were your mother’s people?”