Regency Seduction. Lucy Ashford

come back tomorrow and endure the stage show yet again; there was nothing else for it. But to go upstairs, on offer to all those men …

      ‘Well, look at little Miss Prim and Proper!’ It was Charlotte, sneering at Rosalie’s drab cloak. ‘So you’re disappearin’ already, are you? Of course, you won’t want to face the fact that nobody out there is going to be in the slightest bit interested in paying out good money for you!’

      ‘That’s as well, isn’t it?’ answered Rosalie calmly. ‘Since I never wanted them to.’

      Charlotte glared. ‘I told Perceval—Dr Barnard—you was too high in the instep for this place! He’s just doin’ his accounts, down in his office, but soon as he arrives up here, I’ll tell him you ain’t nothing but a stuck-up troublemaker!’

      Down in his office. Botheration. Rosalie put down her clothes and shook her hair loose. ‘Actually, Charlotte,’ she said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I am staying.’

      Charlotte’s mouth opened and closed. Sal swung back to Rosalie. ‘Oh, my Gawd, girl, don’t do this just for me! You said you were dead set against joining the dancing, and I understand, I really do …’

      Rosalie set her chin stubbornly. ‘Sal, how long does Dr Barnard usually take to do his accounts?’

      ‘Oh, ten minutes or so, that’s all, then he’s eager to mingle with his gents upstairs!’

      ‘Well, I’ll go upstairs, too,’ declared Rosalie. ‘Just long enough to make sure he sees me there, then I’ll slip away. Will that do?’

      ‘Won’t it, just!’ breathed Sal. ‘Thanks, gal, for savin’ my job here. But …’ she patted Rosalie’s cheek ‘… put some rouge on, eh? You got to look as if you mean it!’

      Sal hurried off upstairs. Slowly Rosalie dabbed on a little rouge, hating it. Once more, now that she was on her own, she remembered that terrible winter night two months ago, when she’d received the message from Helen. Rosalie, I’m so sorry, I’ve found your sister.

      Memories of a spring morning came back to her unbidden. She had been a small but leggy ten-year-old and Linette just eight. There’d been a storm in the night, with the wind and rain howling around the oak woods that surrounded their village, and at first light she and Linette had raced down to the stream at the bottom of their garden to see how the moorhens’ nest they’d been watching for days had fared.

      Linette had been entranced by the newly hatched chicks, huddled in their sprawling mound of twigs that was lodged precariously against a small island in the centre of the river. But the morning after the storm Rosalie saw that the high waters had loosened the nest and any minute it might be dragged away, chicks and all, by the muddy brown flow.

      Hitching up her skirts and pulling off her shoes, Rosalie had waded in, while little Linette, so pretty even then, had watched from the bank, her hands pressed to her cheeks. Rosalie, up to her knees in water and challenged by the mother moorhen squawking its outrage, steadily placed stones and twigs around the unwieldy nest full of open-beaked chicks until it was firmly anchored again in a cleft of the leafy island.

      ‘Oh, Rosalie! You’ve saved the babies!’ Linette had been ecstatic.

      From the top of their garden, Rosalie and Linette’s mother, not well even then, had been watching, too. As they ran back up to her, she’d hugged her girls tightly to her. ‘My brave darling Rosalie,’ she’d said in her broken English. ‘And Linette. You are both mes petits anges, my little angels!’

      That was when Rosalie had noticed the bucket and brush by the wall of the house and realised that their mother had been crying. And then she had seen the words, painted on the side of their outhouse, that her mother must have been trying to scrub away when they came running up from the river. You don’t belong here, French whore.

      Later that morning at the village school Rosalie had shown her new teacher the story she’d written about a bird in its floating nest travelling far downstream and finding a new life.

      That young teacher was Helen Fazackerley and she had read Rosalie’s story with absorbed attention. ‘This is wonderful, Rosalie,’ she had said quietly. ‘Is this something you would like to do? Travel and discover new places?’

      Rosalie had looked steadily up at her teacher. ‘If we went somewhere else, would they be kinder to my mother, Miss Fazackerley?’

      * * *

      On, on flew Rosalie’s memories, to the December of last year. A cold evening, a bitter evening, in damp, bleak London. Rosalie had by then been staying with Helen for two months, searching all the daylight hours and more for Linette; asking at the theatres, the opera houses, everywhere she could think of for her sister; following clues that too quickly went cold. Rosalie, I’m in London. I’m in trouble. Please help me.

      But it was Helen, who regularly went out at night with a group of her church friends to take soup and bread to the hungry in some of the worst districts of London, who found Linette at last.

      Rosalie had been reading little Toby his bedtime story when she’d received Helen’s message. Biddy, their good young neighbour, had come in to look after Toby, while Rosalie, with one of Biddy’s brothers, hurried to meet Helen at the address she’d give her—a rubbish-strewn attic off the Ratcliffe Highway. There, on a dank mattress beneath a broken skylight, lay her nineteen-year-old sister, her once-lovely face pinched with grief and illness, while at her side a beautiful little girl with dark curls gazed up at the newcomers, clutching a battered rag doll and whispering, ‘Mama. Mama.’

      Rosalie’s search for her sister was at an end.

      Helen had immediately taken the crying infant to her house in Clerkenwell. In the meantime Rosalie had fought hard to conceal not just her grief, but her overwhelming rage as she’d held her sister in her arms and stroked back her hair from her forehead. ‘Take me to him,’ Linette had whispered as she clutched her sister’s hand.

      ‘Who, Linette?’ Rosalie had tried so hard to keep her voice steady, though the pain in her heart had threatened to choke her.

      ‘He has a castle. A wonderful castle. Take me to him, please …’ Linette had been struggling to speak by then. Faintly she’d breathed his name—then died, moments later, in Rosalie’s arms.

      Since then, Rosalie had redoubled her efforts to find Linette’s destroyer, working her way round every London theatre, high and low. Not asking outright, for that brought danger; but pretending she was looking for a lost friend. And a few days ago, fast running out of hope, she’d visited a seedy little theatre off the Strand.

      The greasy-haired manager, Alfred Marchmont, had said curiously, ‘I remember a girl called Linette. Linette Lavalle, that was it—pretty, she was, well spoken, with fair hair …’

      For a moment she could hardly breathe. Emotion twisted her insides. At last she nodded. ‘When was she here?’

      ‘Well, she came for an audition—it would be, oh, spring three years ago; I’ve a good memory for faces and names.’ Marchmont looked at her curiously. ‘She was pretty, as I said, but she moved on after a couple of months to Dr Barnard’s.’

      Three years ago. ‘Does this Dr Barnard run a theatre, then?’

      Marchmont had hesitated. ‘He runs a stage show. Of sorts.’

      So now, at Dr Barnard’s famous Temple of Beauty, Rosalie prepared herself to endure the company of the half-drunken roués upstairs. But as soon as Dr Barnard appeared and observed her there, she would slip down to his office to see if his secret book went back to the summer of 1813, when Linette might have worked here—and met Katy’s father.

       Chapter Four

      ‘Look,