Ways to Be Wicked (20 page)

“My room is at the top of the theater, Sylvie, as you know. You’ll find me there . . . most nights.”

And he turned and left her, closing the door quietly behind him, as if to leave her alone with those words.

Most nights.
The words sank home.

And when they did, she almost laughed. She almost cried.

If she’d had something to throw, she might have thrown it at the door.

And this was Tom Shaughnessy, forever causing her to feel everything she possibly could feel all at once, and in so doing making her feel more alive, somehow, than she’d ever felt before. It infuriated her, because she didn’t want to feel. . .
alive.

She needed, in the end, to feel safe.

And nothing,
nothing
about this man was safe.

Most nights.

She almost cursed him for leaving the choice in her hands. A fine time for Tom Shaughnessy to pretend he was a gentleman.

Chapter Twelve

S
YLVIE DIDN’T SLEEP
. She tossed this way and that in her narrow bed, marveling, resenting the fact that her body seemed to be mutinying against the discipline she’d imposed upon it for years. It wanted something that made no sense and had no order or purpose.

He would shoot the heart right out of a target, he knew how to use a knife for something more sinister than slicing cheese, he might very well be keeping a mistress named Kitty in Kent.
What does it matter?
Her body wheedled.
What does any of that matter? Take him. Take him. Take him.
Her body wanted Tom Shaughnessy’s hands and lips upon her skin, wanted his body covering hers. It was as simple as that.

And so she but sleepwalked through the rehearsals the following morning, smiling, bending, patting bums without feeling them, eliciting The General’s approval for once. “Thank you for not pulling a face when you pat Molly, Sylvie!”

She’d joined Josephine for an hour or so to repair fairy dresses and gossamer clothes for nymphs and pantaloons for pirates, driving needles into them to stitch their wounds closed, and absently wished the solution to her own troubles was quite so simple. A wound had not been opened in her by the kiss. It was more like a portal. She didn’t know where it led, she hadn’t known it was there, and she couldn’t close it again. Her choices were to walk away from it, knowing always it stood behind her, missed.

Or to walk through it.

Or to lose herself in dance, where everything was choreographed and planned and made perfect sense, where discipline was required to make beauty, and not consider it for an afternoon.

She excused herself from Josephine early, offering no explanation, and left for her attic room to dance away her thoughts, if she could.

And now Sylvie stretched and balanced, arms floating out straight like wings aloft on a current of wind, one leg outstretched. A perfect—no: nearly perfect—arabesque. She could almost hear Monsieur Favre’s voice in her head.
Mon dieu, you are dancing, not pulling a plow, Sylvie.

She arched her back a fraction of an inch, extended her arms forward aaaand. . .
there.
That was perfect. She could feel it.

“What do you call
that
?”

Sylvie congratulated herself on not toppling over. She nearly flinched, but when she heard the voice, she was proud she managed to do nothing more than blink.

“Ballet,” she said simply, to Molly. As though she’d been expecting to see her all along.

Sylvie drew her arms down, dropped her leg, curved her arms above her head and dipped into a
plié
to stretch her muscles. Her body knew the position from feel, could create the movements of a dance the way a musician’s fingers could find a song by memory. Still, she wished for a mirror and a barre. She almost wished for Monsieur Favre.

Mostly she wished—though this was probably the most futile wish of all—that God would roll back time to the point just before Molly had discovered that Sylvie danced at the top of the theater, and then perhaps knock her unconscious.

She imagined Molly had followed her here, just the same as Tom had. Soon the bloody attic would boast as much traffic as the bottom of the theater.

“ ’Oo would want to watch ye . . . squat?” Surprisingly, Molly didn’t sound entirely scornful.

“Princes,” Sylvie said idly. “Kings.” She moved her feet and arms into fourth position.
Relevé.
Still, her heart was beating a little harder than usual with the effort to sound nonchalant.

Molly snorted.

It was the snort that made Sylvie do it. She stood
en demipointe
and thrust her arms up over her head, then spun in a dazzlingly effortless series of
ronde de jambe
turns across the room, the room blurring in circles before her eyes. She concluded
en attitude croissé,
then arched her back and sank into a kneel; her body, she knew, looked as soft as folding velvet.

She rose once more, her face expressionless, and assumed third position.

A moment later she flicked a glance at Molly.

She saw in Molly’s face longing, and an impotent sort of fury. A helpless admiration that no barbs or amount of pride could ever hope to disguise.

Sylvie knew a deep shame. It had been unworthy of her, unfair, her cocky demonstration of something that had taken her years of sacrifice and work to render effortless. Her own pride had made her momentarily cruel.

Molly was flushed. She swallowed and looked toward the window, studying it. “Wants cleaning,” she muttered.

“Mmmm,” Sylvie responded. She returned to her exercises. She lifted one arm over her head in a gentle arc, raised the other lightly across her waist. From fourth position she would—

“Why...why do ye do it? So men will admire ye?”

Sylvie paused and looked at Molly, who was struggling for understanding through her own pride. The question was asked in all seriousness.

“Because...No. So that
I
will admire me.” It was an answer, but only in part.

Molly was quiet again.

“And is ballet why ye’ve got no—” Molly gestured with her finger to her breasts, one at a time “—t’ speak of?”

It was an entirely serious question. Sylvie didn’t know whether to laugh or sigh.

“It might be,” she allowed at last. “Did you follow me here, Molly?”

Molly said nothing for a moment. “I thought...” She turned, didn’t complete the sentence. She instead wandered across the room, found something fascinating about an old barrel, studied it with her back to Sylvie.

“Why do you dislike me?” Sylvie thought it might disarm her to be direct.

Molly turned to her, and Sylvie was slightly amused that she didn’t deny it, and Molly had a half-admiring tilt to her mouth. She actually seemed to be giving the question some thought. As though she wanted to give precisely the correct answer.

“ ’E looks at ye.
Really
looks.” Molly looked away from Sylvie as she said this. “ ’E doesna see the rest of us. Never ’as,” she added, half-bitterly, half-amused.

“Who?” Sylvie asked. Though she suspected she knew, and something inside her gave another grand leap.

“Who?”
Molly scoffed. She might as well have added, “you fool,” for that was precisely her tone.

She didn’t complete the sentence. Sylvie didn’t ask her to.

Molly studied Sylvie. There was a resigned twist to her mouth, and wry pain, suppressed, in her voice. “ ’E’s the best man I’ve ever known.”

Sylvie was struck silent. It would never have occurred to her to describe Tom Shaughnessy in quite that way.

“What of your lover?” Sylvie asked gently. “The one who is as handsome as a duke?”

Molly paused, and then her mouth twisted again. “ ’E’s a man.” A lift of the shoulder. And the faintest hint of scorn, for herself, or for her lover, Sylvie wasn’t certain. ’Even ’
e
asked about ye. Said ye looked...wrong.” She looked half-pleased, half-troubled by this assessment. “ ’E wondered why ye were ’ere at the White Lily at all. I told ’im ye’d a lover right ’ere at the White Lily, that was why,” Molly said half-casually, half-spitefully. And tossed a glance over her shoulder again.

Uncomfortable, suddenly, with the drift of the conversation, unwilling to engage in any sort of confirmation or combat, Sylvie touched her hand to a barrel for balance and dipped into a
plié
. She allowed Molly to watch her. She imagined she did look wrong onstage, despite her best efforts to sway and bend and pat derrieres. Odd, but she was a little stung by the criticism.

“Is it difficult to learn?” Molly said. She said it casually. “This way of dancing?”

Brutally difficult. It takes everything from you, it requires all you have, it will make your feet ugly and your body thin and powerful and you will never know a moment when a part of you does not physically ache. Only a very few are truly wonderful, and I am the best, the very best, and I
worked
to be the best.

Molly sought the answer in Sylvie’s face.

And Sylvie thought she saw the faintest traces of a bruise remaining below her eye on that fair, smooth skin, the mark left by Belstow’s hand. It was the price Molly had paid for living so men would admire her.

And then Sylvie understood then that her answer to Molly had been almost unfairly untruthful.

For she had committed her whole self to the dance in order to have a life other than ordinary. In order, in many ways, to attract a man like Etienne, who would give her a future so different from the one Claude now lived out, with its careful, spartan economies, tawdry memories, resigned to the loneliness and bitterness of living out her days in the twilight of society in a tiny apartment with an intelligent, foul-mouthed parrot.

In short: Sylvie had done it so men
would
admire her. She had grown to love the dance, but the reasons she had committed herself to it were twofold and inextricable from each other.

Still: She knew to own such a skill was to own magic and power.

She gazed at Molly and couldn’t believe what she was about to say.

“Would you like me to show you how?”

Chapter Thirteen

A
MIDST HIS PLANS
for the Gentleman’s Emporium was correspondence from the man who was to provide mirrors for the dressing rooms, and that afternoon, while Sylvie danced in the attic Tom fished it out, smiling to himself. He had a marvelous idea. It involved mirrors.

And then he saw another missive centered on the plan in the middle of his desk. A different seal, a different handwriting.

But Tom knew what it would say even before he opened it, and the smile disappeared.

“Viscount Howath backed out,” Tom told The General before the evening’s show. “He sent a message today.”

It was odd, this one-by-one backing out by his investors. Like death by little cuts, and highly uncharacteristic of this group of men, who had been friends and patrons for some time now. And
none
had been to the theater lately. He hadn’t seen them about town.

Which could only mean they were avoiding him.

It was the sort of thing he found maddening. He could persuade, he could cajole, he could convince with facts and charm. He would happily—perhaps not happily, but at least logically—accept a reason for backing out at a very inconvenient moment. He could deal with
anything
directly.

But he loathed the quiet and evasion. He considered it cowardly, and there was nothing he could do to combat it. It was inexplicable, and it was difficult not to attempt to ascribe it to a single cause.

And yet he couldn’t think of one.

He was distantly amused. Not since he was a small boy had everything in his world seemed so precarious. And odd how that even as one dream took shape, began to crumble in his hands, caused him to scramble to salvage it, something else presented itself, and it was this, too, that made his world seem more precarious than usual.

He’d thought to solve this yesterday, with a kiss. He’d kissed women before, naturally, and enjoyed it; kisses were typically preliminaries to very pleasant foregone conclusions. He’d imagined, before he kissed Sylvie Chapeau, that kissing her might at last restore balance to his world. Desire, once indulged, inevitably faded, and curiosity, once indulged, ceased to plague. She had been both—curiosity and desire—since she’d landed on his lap and poked him with a knitting needle.

He hadn’t known that from the moment he’d idly touched her that touching would simply never be enough. And he hadn’t known a single kiss could become howling, impatient hunger that robbed him of sleep and also made him want to lay the moon at her very feet.

Well, if he couldn’t bring down the moon for her, he would begin with...mirrors. He smiled a little. She would see them soon enough.

“Have you ever been in love, Gen?”

The General’s head snapped toward him. An irritated dent appeared between his eyes.

“Good God, Tom, how much of that brandy have you consumed? Are we going to do this every evening now, like a pair of girls? Exchanging our ‘hopes and dreams’?” he mocked in a girlish voice. “I want none of it.”

Tom laughed silently. “I want to know, Gen.”

“Are you wondering whether
you’re
in love, Tom, is that it?” The General said slyly. “Why don’t you just say it?”

Tom stared at him evenly. “
I
found you filthy, drunk, lying on the street—”

The General shot him a black look. “Good God, but you play dirty, Shaughnessy.”

Tom shrugged cheerfully.

The General sighed. “All right. Yes. I’ve been in love.”

“And?”

“It makes you feel ridiculous, helpless, awkward, glorious, and immortal.” The General sounded downright surly, and as though he was ticking off a list. “Happy now?”

“And?” Tom urged.

A long pause.

“She thought I was too short.” He said it lightly.

Tom felt the words as surely as if a tiny knife had twisted right into his own heart.

“You’re the biggest man
I’ve
ever known, Gen.” He made sure he said the words lightly, too.

“And that doesn’t surprise
me
in the least.”

Tom laughed. Smoothly, he said, “So shall we do a harem bit in a week or so? I think Daisy might make a splendid centerpiece for the harem bit.”

“Daisy might make a splendid Christmas ham,” The General muttered darkly.

“Oh, you might be right. Pink, and plump, and warm, and succulent...” Tom mused, drawing each word out, mischievously, deliberately.

Tom noticed that The General’s ears went decidedly pinker with each word.

A day away from an incendiary kiss and a good night’s sleep after last evening’s show made Sylvie feel much stronger. It in fact seemed downright possible not to think about Tom Shaughnessy for entire minutes at a time.

Until she arrived that afternoon in the attic.

She stopped at the top of the stairs, nearly blinded by the dazzle. It took her a moment to realize why.

Mirrors. A series of mirrors had been propped along one wall, each tall and rectangular.

And the sun came through brilliant now, nearly blinding, striking light from them.

The windows of the little-used room had been scrubbed clean, both inside and out. One of them had even been pried open, and a breeze had pushed its way in. As this was London’s East End, a number of unidentifiable and objectionable smells came in with it. But a breeze would be lovely on the back of her neck as she danced.

Sylvie put her hand to her cheek; her heart gave a sudden
grand jeté
of sweet, strange joy. She was breathless with the surprise of it and didn’t know why. She’d been given gifts before. Etienne showered her with gifts. Most of them jeweled or scented or lushly crafted of silk or fur or velvet.

But when she looked, she saw her awe reflected in Tom’s gift to her, those mirrors.

Six of them, spanning one side of the room. It was perhaps the first gift she’d ever received that was specific to her, that some other woman would not have been just as happy to have.

And she studied her face, for it was an expression she’d never before seen on it, and it was like seeing a vivid, joyous stranger who might just be related to her. And it made her wonder about Susannah. Whether living a different life would have given her sister different eyes, whether they would be bright with curiosity and joy, or dull with complacency. Whether they would be more or less knowing than Sylvie’s, more or less kind.

More or less awed by a simple, perfect gift from a beautiful, dangerous man.

There’s no money in it.
Tom Shaughnessy, gaudy on the surface, shrewd penny-squeezer who slept in an attic beneath, had decided to indulge her gift, anyhow.

There was a creak on the stairs, and her heart lurched. She whirled.

Somehow, she didn’t want to see him just yet. And somehow it seemed unlikely he would seek her here to witness a response. She wanted to be alone with the fullness of her thoughts, to decide what it was she wanted.

Wanted.
Simply to take something because she wanted it seemed a foreign concept, and her mind fumbled at it like a child attempting to pick up a toy too big for its hands.

Sylvie turned toward the stairs and saw nobody. But still the footsteps creaked up. Slowly, steadily up.

Which is when she realized it must be The General if she couldn’t yet see the top of his head.

And it was.

“Well,” he said, when he saw the mirrors.

The word was full and eloquent. The General was no fool, naturally. She would not have been able to obtain those mirrors and haul them into the White Lily on her own.

She gazed at him, eyebrows lifted, waiting for the next words.

“You’ve transformed the room quite a bit since I saw it last,” he said finally. “You. . . hadn’t mirrors.” Again, meaningfully.

“No,” she said carefully. Waiting for the next, more specific question. The one she didn’t want to answer. “I hadn’t mirrors.”

The General’s eyes, she decided, were decidedly too shrewd, too knowing. She suddenly realized she knew how to deflect that gaze.

“Do you happen to know a Mr. Beedle, General?”

Ah, and the result of that question was deeply gratifying. Those sharp eyes flew wide. Hectic color flooded his cheeks. He blinked rapidly several times.

Then all of it disappeared—the blinking, the color, the wide eyes—as he gathered his composure.

“Why?” he demanded curtly. And then: “Do you ask?” he completed, as if this would make the question more polite.

She drifted across the room, viewing herself in yet another of those mirrors. She felt as though she wanted to see herself in each one.

“Because I once knew of a Mr. Beedle, an English choreographer, very talented. He visited the Paris Opera, and we danced for him. He married one of his ballerinas, I believe. Maria Bellacusi. She was quite gifted, too. I lately heard he worked in the English court. But ballet is not so popular here in England.”

“No.” The General narrowed his eyes. “Not so popular.”

“Just at court. For the king.”

“Yes. Just at court. For the king.”

Sylvie smiled at him and tilted her head. “You love ballet, perhaps. But not. . . ballerinas.”

The General let out a startled bark of laughter.

And then he paced a bit across the room, almost as if taking the measure of it, the bright sun counting off the shiny buttons on his coat. He turned to look at her.

“It was more, Miss Lamoreux...that a ballerina did not love me.”

Honored and startled by the confidence, Sylvie was quiet for just a moment, but made certain to speak before he felt awkward.

“Did you come to pay me a social call, General, or to tell me I am needed somewhere else in the theater?” she said to him.

He clasped his hands behind his back. “I came, Miss Lamoreux, because I have an idea.”

He said this with all appearance of dignity, but she could see the anxiety in the clasping of those hands. And what very much looked like ...hope. . . taut in his face.

“An idea?”

“For a...”he cleared his throat. “For a ballet.”

“I meant only to protect her.”

Claude Lamoreux and Guillaume the parrot had been reunited. From a perch on her shoulder, Guillaume every now and then gave loving nibbles to Claude’s ear. Claude sat, pale and distraught, dabbing at the corners of her eyes, across from the Viscount and Lady Grantham. Her hair was dark, with threads of silver running through it at the temples. Eyes very large, very dark, puffs of fatigue bulging beneath. Grooves were worn into her face on either side of her nose. Time was drawing her face downward; she would, in a few years, Susannah could see, have laps of skin on either side of her mouth. It looked as though life had not been easy, on the whole, for Claude Lamoreux, who had never truly been pretty and who had never married.

“I feared what would become of Sylvie if she knew the truth of her life. If Etienne, her lover, knew the truth of her life.”

Susannah knew she should be more worldly, but really, the use of the word “lover,” as though it were “settee” or “teapot,” would take a bit of getting accustomed to.

“He wants to marry her, you know, and she will have a good life, a much better life than ever I had or could ever give her. He is a prince. Of the House of Bourbon.”

Claude could not entirely disguise a very small bit of smugness in this. A prince certainly outranked a viscount.

“So I burned the letters you sent, Lady Grantham. I am sorry, Lady Grantham. I was afraid, both for Sylvie and for myself.”

Susannah had been torn between wanting to depart for England immediately in search of her sister and wanting to wait for Claude, but the shipping schedule ultimately made their decision for them. It would be days before a ship could take them home. And so they sat now in the room in which Sylvie, her sister, had lived for almost her entire life. Small as a closed fist, the apartment seemed, careful years of economy epitomized in the plain worn furniture and carpets, with one bright window letting light into the parlor, landing a beam on Guillaume’s perch. He clearly had the run of the place, as Susannah could see feathers and fluff scattered about. No doubt they were the bane of Madame Gabon’s existence.

Susannah reached out and covered Claude’s hand with her own. “Thank you for caring for her all these years. I know what a risk it was.”

“I danced a bit at the Green Apple long ago, you see, which is where I met Anna, and Daisy Jones. I learned through Daisy of your. . . plight. . . and when I returned home to France I...I brought Sylvie with me to raise as my own. And as no one ever heard from Anna again...I

never told Sylvie about her, as there never seemed a need to trouble her with it. I never knew what became of the other little girls—of you, Lady Grantham, or Sabrina. And it was wisest not to write of it to anyone, for the danger was. . . the danger was...”

Guillaume murmured an English obscenity tenderly and gave Claude another nibble.

Claude looked up apologetically. “He belonged to a sailor once, long ago,” she said. “He has a remarkable vocabulary.”

Remarkable did not begin to describe Guillaume’s vocabulary.

Susannah gave her a weak smile. Kit held her hand in his, and squeezed it. He, she suspected, was trying not to laugh.

“I’m sorry, Susannah.” Claude’s voice thickened again, and she dabbed at her eyes.

“Oh, Claude, I am not angry,” Susannah told her, “for I likely would have burned the letters, too, for someone I love. You told us that Sylvie’s letter said that she went to England. Do you know where she might have gone when she arrived?”

“I do not know. I am sorry. Daisy Jones is my only English friend, you see. But I do not believe that Sylvie knew of her.”

Claude sniffed. “I am worried. As you can see, our life is not grand, and it was not easy when she was very young. But Sylvie. . . she is now the finest ballerina in Paris. Everyone knows she has gone. Monsieur Favre . . . Madame Gabon tells me is very angry.”

“Sylvie is a ballerina?” Kit repeated, fascinated.

And Susannah was instantly a wee bit jealous, because it
did
seem like a fascinating thing to be.

And then she was a wee bit proud, because it was fascinating to be related to a ballerina.