Page 51

Goodrum’s House of Pleasure

O livia fumed at the enforced inactivity whilst enduring yet another endless session of soaking her hands in rose-scented milk.

Her patroness, the Duchess of Chelmsford, sat in the corner of her office at Goodrum’s House of Pleasure, supposedly absorbed in a book, but with an eagle eye on Olivia’s twitching.

“Stubble it, gel.” Her Grace pushed her reading glasses to perch on the top of her head, the better to glare at her young protege.

“Those reddened, rough hands of yours need to slide like silk itself into your new buttery, soft gloves. Which requires copious soaking of those laundry-ravaged hands before your come-out ball two weeks hence.”

“Are you really reading that book?” Olivia interrupted the lecture she’d heard numerous times before.

“What? Douglas’s Treatise on Naval Gunnery ? Of course, for the third time, if it’s any of your business - lots of good ideas in here.” She tapped the page with an elegantly manicured finger.

Olivia made a face and stuck out her tongue. “Ewww…how can you read something that boring?”

“What would you have me read? A truly yawn-inducing book, like endless descriptions of young, inane women falling madly in love with monstrous older men whilst wandering the halls of drafty abbeys?”

Olivia had the good grace to glance away to hide the flush in her cheeks.

Her employer, actually business partner, she had to remind herself, must have been alerted to the pile of Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels in her bedchamber at the top level of Goodrum’s House of Pleasure. Damn those gossipy housemaids.

“Some of us would rather escape into fantasy than deal with the reality of…that.” She pointed to the heavy tome Eleanor Goodrum Whitcombe, Duchess of Chelmsford, currently balanced on her lap.

“After weeks at the helm of The Lady Muirgen , I have to do the same thing, no matter how much I try to protect my hands whilst I’m at sea.”

“Why? Why do you subject yourself to…to all this?” Olivia pointed to the elegantly attired and manicured duchess.

“Because I love Percy, and my moving through the drawing rooms of Mayfair looking like a Barbary pirate would hurt him.”

Olivia shook her head in silence.

“Just wait.” Her Grace leveled a knowing stare at Olivia. “One of these fine days you’ll meet a man who will turn your world upside down. You’ll do things to please him you cannot possibly imagine at this moment. You’ll sacrifice your very sanity for the privilege of seeing him smile.”

Olivia opened her mouth to protest, only to be interrupted by an imperious look from her benefactor.

“Just you wait.”

L ater that night, Olivia looked both ways down the hallway outside her cozy rooms at Goodrum’s before breathing a sigh of relief. Everyone was sound asleep on the servants’ level, except for the guards who periodically swept through every hallway at Goodrum’s, day and night.

When she turned and beckoned to someone inside her room, two men slipped out, carrying her few personal belongings, disguised in the empty hat boxes she’d retrieved from her huge wardrobe already stored within her chambers in the Duke of Chelmsford’s elegant mansion on Berkley Square.

She went over her mental checklist again, reassuring herself that her profitable laundry venture, run from the depths of Goodrum’s, was in good hands.

Her brother Dickie scolded their old friend, Will, who’d uttered a loud whisper of an oath after jamming his toe against her wardrobe in the dark.

Whilst she and Dickie wore black to make sure they weren’t spotted moving her things into the mansion on Berkley Square, poor Will was dressed in the garish brass-buttoned blue-tailcoat jacket, trousers and top hat of the new Peelers police force.

For some unfathomable reason, the beleaguered Peelers were required to wear the damned uniforms the whole damned day…

and they had to work seven days a week, remaining available at all hours of the day and night.

Fortunately, Will had been assigned to Division C, which was a short walk to the east of Goodrum’s.

She had to stop thinking in what Her Grace referred to as “vulgar pejoratives.” Otherwise, she might spit out the word “damned” in polite conversation. The duchess had also forced her to work with a tutor to learn proper diction.

When Olivia stopped suddenly at the top of the back staircase because she was certain she’d heard something, Will slammed into her back with the pile of boxes he was balancing that impeded his vision, not to mention the dark.

“ What are you doing?” she demanded in a loud whisper.

“What don’t you two understand about ‘careful’ and ‘quiet’?

” One of the tightly covered boxes Will carried careened down the first set of stairs and thudded to a stop at the landing.

Within minutes, Captain El’s chief guard, Obadiah, poked his head around the corner and glared at the three of them before bending over to help retrieve the fallen box.

He beckoned sharply for them to follow him out to the darkened carriage awaiting them in the alley in front of the mews behind Goodrum’s.

Once they were settled inside and headed west toward Berkley Square, Olivia leaned back with a sigh.

When she looked at Will and her brother, she couldn’t help but remember their early days when they’d all made their homes in the rookeries.

Will, a tall, broad-shouldered man, now twenty, had resembled more of a malnourished scarecrow back then.

And her brother Dickie…cleverest spy in the Dials…

had filled out and grown into his lanky frame at barely sixteen.

Will, the oldest of the three, because of his size and strength, had easily found a job as a drover, carting vegetables from Surrey to Covent Garden’s market.

After years of hard work, he’d abruptly shown up at her laundry at Goodrum’s one day, grinning nonsensically in a garish Peelers uniform.

Her stomach had dropped like a heavy stone into a pond out of fear for him, but she’d pretended enthusiasm for his new occupation which she was privately certain would not end well.

She’d lived a hard life from the time she was a child of three and had been abandoned on a street corner in Seven Dials by whoever had been caring for her.

She often wondered if she’d ever had a mother who’d loved her, but whenever that thought had intruded into her busy life, she’d roughly shoved it to the side.

She’d spent a number of years being trained and used as a pickpocket because of her innocent looks.

About the time she’d turned eleven, the procurers who roamed the streets and alleys of Seven Dials had tried several times to lure her into a life of prostitution.

She’d been hiding and doing whatever she could to steal or earn enough food to eat by day and hiding beneath piles of refuse by night to escape when she’d met Dickie.

He’d taken her home to his mother, and that very night she’d become his sister as if they’d shared actual blood.

From that time forward, she was under his protection.

When he’d been taken into care by Lady Camilla Bowles Attington Carrington Whitby and her nephew, Lord Carrington-Bowles, surgeon to the poor of the Dials, he’d insisted Olivia be protected alongside him as his beloved sister.

Olivia had gone to work at Goodrum’s House of Pleasure as a laundress.

Before a year had passed, she’d researched the best ways to care for the clothing of the rich, and had taught the tricks she’d learned to the rest of the staff at Goodrum’s House of Pleasure.

The owner of the establishment, Captain El, now the Duchess of Chelmsford, had appreciated Olivia’s gift for managing people and pleasing clients.

She’d made her manager of her laundry, and since that time they’d made a fortune pleasing the rich and particular denizens of Mayfair.

There were certain lords, whilst in residence at their country estates, who’d deliver their linen shirts by mail coach to Goodrum’s door for Olivia’s ministrations.

Tonight, she’d turn her back on all she’d known and sneak into the Chelmsford mansion. She’d walk through the back servants’ entrance as plain Olivia Jones. In the morning light she’d become Lady Olivia Whitcombe, niece of His Grace, Perseus Whitcombe, Duke of Chelmsford.

A hand reached out in the coach’s darkness and covered hers. Another hand soon followed, pressing softly atop her brother’s. “This is what I’ve always wanted for you, Olivia,” Dickie muttered low.

The third companion echoed her brother’s declaration.

“You deserve a fine gentleman as husband and the safety of a forever home, Olivia.” Will’s disembodied voice trembled across the vastness of the Goodrum’s carriage and startled her.

Nothing frightened Will. They’d faced down vicious thieves, gang leaders, and worse over the years.

What the hell was he wavering about now?

He sounded more like a small, lost boy than Will Beckford, London’s newest, and toughest, Peeler who patrolled some of the wickedest neighborhoods of the rookeries.