Wrecker conveyed me straight to my door and even shut off the engine to jump out, come round, and hand me down like a fine lady. “Be back at half past, then?”
“That’ll do.” I pressed a couple of coins into his ham-size hand. “There’s a decent pie shop two blocks south. Tell the counterlass that I sent you, and she’ll fix you up with a special.”
I let myself in through the front door, locking it behind me. Although there were seven flats in my building, I was presently the only tenant. Over the years I’d quietly bought up the leases for the other flats, and then offered for the building. At first the former owner, a hatchet-faced pork trader named Billings, had flatly refused to sell to me. “Females can’t manage property,” he’d informed me. “You’d do better to bank your funds and find yourself a nice young man, miss.”
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 Hilclass="underline" 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.