A Kiss at Midnight

Though at the moment they weren’t yapping. As she entered her small room, they rose in a little wave and surrounded her ankles in a burst of furry waving tails and hot bodies. They were probably lonely. Before the bite, they were always at Victoria’s side. Perhaps they were hungry. Or worse, they might need to visit the garden. If only she had a bell in her room . . . but persons of her status had no need to call servants.

“I suppose,” she said slowly, thinking of the stairs and her aching legs, “I have to take you outside.” In point of fact, she should be grateful that they had not urinated in her room; it was so small and the one window so high that the smell would last a month or more.

It took a few minutes to figure out how to attach ropes to their jeweled collars, not helped by the fact that they had begun yapping, jumping up and trying to lick her face. It was hard not to flinch away.

She trudged down the back stairs that led to her room, her steps echoed by the scrabbling little claws of the rats. She was so tired that she couldn’t even remember their names, though she thought they were all alliterative, perhaps Fairy and Flower.

“What do they eat?” she asked Cherryderry a few minutes later. He had been kind enough to accompany her to the kitchen garden and show her the area fenced off for the dogs’ use.

“I sent Richard up to your chamber an hour or so ago; he fed them and brought them out for a walk. I will admit to disliking those dogs, but they’re not vicious animals,” he said, watching them. “It’s not really their fault.”

They were all piling on top of each other, a mass of plumy tails and sharp noses.

“Caesar didn’t intend to bite Miss Victoria,” he continued. “You needn’t worry that he’ll bite you.”

“ Caesar? I thought they were all named after flowers.”

“That’s part of their trouble,” Cherryderry said. “Miss Victoria never quite settled on names for them. She changed them every week or so. They started out as Ferdinand, Felicity, and Frederick. Currently they are Coco, Caesar, and Chester. Before that, they were Mopsie, Maria, and something else. The lead dog—see the slightly larger one? That one is Caesar. The other two are Coco and Chester, though Chester never learned to respond to any name other than Frederick or Freddie.”

“Why did Caesar bite Victoria, anyway? I never thought to ask.”

“She was feeding him from her mouth.”

“ What? ”

“Holding a piece of meat between her lips and encouraging him to take it from her. Foolish business, coming between a dog and his meat.”

Kate shuddered. “That is disgusting.”

“Princess Charlotte has trained her dogs to do the same by all accounts,” Cherryderry said. “The princess has a lot to answer for.”

“So how do I keep them quiet at night?” Kate asked, longing for her bed.

“Just treat them like dogs, with respect, but firm-like. Miss Victoria made the mistake of thinking they were babies, and then she would get annoyed and send them down to the kitchen whenever they misbehaved, so they never learned better. I’ll give you a little bag of cheese scraps. Give them a piece every time they do something right and they’ll be fine.”

Back in her room Kate discovered that the dogs had their own personalities. Caesar was remarkably unintelligent. He seemed to believe that he was very large: He prowled and pounced and kept issuing promises to attack anyone who entered the room. In fact, he reminded her of an imperial general; his name befitted him.

Frederick was lonely, or at least that’s what she surmised when he jumped onto the bed, licked her knee, and wagged his tail madly. Then he gave her a dramatically imploring look, quickly followed by a roll onto his back with his legs in the air. In short, he was silly and Freddie suited him better than Frederick.

Coco showed every sign of being remarkably vain. Victoria had glued tiny sparkling gems into the fur around her neck, and rather than trying to scratch them off, as would any self-respecting mongrel, Coco sat with her paws perfectly aligned and her nose in the air. She showed no sign of wishing to approach Kate’s bed, but arranged herself elegantly on a velvet cushion that had appeared on Kate’s floor along with a bowl of water.

Kate pulled Freddie out of her bed and dropped him on the floor, but he jumped straight back up again. And she was too tired, too bone-deep tired, to do anything about it.

So she lay there for a moment thinking about her father, little pulses of anger going through her body. How could he have done this? He must have loved Mariana; otherwise, why would he marry his mistress?

It was a good thing that she never made her debut. She knew little of society, all things told, but she knew that no one would befriend a young lady whose stepmother was a woman of ill repute, even given that Mariana did marry her protector.

And yet Mariana and Victoria had simply marched into London, opened up her father’s town house, and established Victoria as a beautiful young heiress.

There was a lesson there, she thought sleepily.

Six

The next morning

T he French coiffeur and the two London doctors arrived together the next morning, one prepared to cut off Kate’s hair and the others to lance Victoria’s lip. Both sisters refused. Mariana had hysterics, waving her cigarillo around her head and shrieking like a fishwife.

But the session with Rosalie the evening before had cleared Kate’s mind. She wasn’t getting any younger, and her only crowning glory was her hair. She already looked too thin, almost haggard. Her face might look even worse without her masses of hair.

“I refuse!” she declared, raising her voice over Victoria’s sobs.

The odd thing was that she had rarely refused anything. She had fought her stepmother tooth and nail in the past seven years: fought her when she sacked the house steward and told Kate to do the purchasing instead; fought her when she dismissed the bailiff and threw the books at Kate and told her to do them at night.

But she had never refused to do anything. She had taken up the estate books, and the bills, and the general management, said goodbye to her governess, to various maids, to the bailiff, and to the house steward.

She found it rather ironic that vanity was the point over which she discovered her backbone. “I won’t do it,” she repeated, over and over.

Monsieur Bernier threw up his hands, declaring in a trilling French accent that a smart crop would make her look ten years younger, and (he implied) mademoiselle needed every one of those ten years.

Kate hardened her heart. “I am grateful for your opinion, monsieur, but no.”

“You’ll ruin it,” Mariana cried, her voice careening to the edge of frenzy and back. “You’ll ruin everything. Your sister won’t be able to marry, and she’ll have her child out of wedlock.”

Kate saw Monsieur Bernier’s eyes widen and she gave him a look. Seven years of estate management had given her a quite effective glare; he flinched.

“It’s all right, Mother,” Victoria put in, sniffling, “Kate will simply have to wear wigs, that’s all. She’ll be hot, but it’s a matter of only a few days.”

“Wigs,” Mariana said, with a kind of strangled gasp.

“I have them in all sorts of colors to match my dresses,” Victoria said. “If Rosalie plaits Kate’s hair every morning and then pins it flat, she would be perfectly fashionable and everyone will simply assume that I love my wigs.”