Letty stared at her new friend, the Roman bust, for a long, wide-eyed moment. That was it! The answer to all her problems.
Immeasurably cheered, Letty gave the startled head of Cicero an impulsive hug, not even wincing as his stone nose mashed into her ribs. It was quite the best idea she had had in a long time, an idea as brilliant as the shiny pink ribbons on her slippers.
If she could only manage to find the door…
A goblin with a saw was scraping away at Letty's head. She could hear the rhythmic scratch of it, directly against her skull. Screech, scratch, screech, scratch. She begged it to stop, but it only laughed and started rocking her back and forth, faster and faster, until Letty knew she was going to be ill, but she couldn't allow the demon the satisfaction of it. Her gorge rose and the room swayed and Letty moaned, burying her face into something that crackled and scratched. Letty paused, frowning in her sleep. A pillow. There was a hard surface beneath her, and a blanket scratching the underside of her chin. Letty's breath went out in a long sigh of pure relief. She was sleeping, of course, dreaming, in her own bed, and any moment now the maid was going to come to tell her she had overslept and hurry her downstairs to breakfast. Only the thought of breakfast made Letty's stomach lurch, and for all that she pressed herself as close as she could to the bed, the room persisted in swaying slowly from side to side, again and again, in a rhythmic rocking motion.
Letty's curiously swollen fingers began an exploratory expedition along the edge of the sheet. The weave was coarse, the edges frayed. Letty ran her fuzzy tongue over her chapped lips, not liking what she was feeling. She couldn't remember having been ill. She didn't remember much of anything at all, and the attempt made her head hurt. With a monumental effort, she pried open her crusted eyes. All she could see was a stretch of wooden wall, unpainted, unpapered, and marred with knots and wormholes.
Letty pressed her eyes shut again, fighting another wave of intense nausea, complicated by a pain that began somewhere behind her temples and marched relentlessly across the breadth of her forehead, like an entire troop of soldiers with a maliciously firm tread, all banging regimental drums.
With a little whimper, Letty pressed one tight fist to her forehead in a futile attempt to make the battalions stop marching.
"You've been sleeping forever," announced a cheerful voice, drilling against Letty's head like a hammer against tin.
Letty could only groan.
"You don't suffer from mal de mer, do you?" continued the relentless voice. "Because if you do, the voyage is going to be dreadfully dull."
"Voyage?" croaked Letty, wondering if she could still be dreaming, and, if so, how she could feel herself hurt so. Her very skin felt sore.
A weight plopped down next to her, causing the thin mattress to shift and settle. Letty swallowed hard as another wave of nausea surged against the back of her throat. Very slowly and carefully, Letty rolled from her side onto her back.
"You are seasick, aren't you?" demanded the girl, because by now, Letty had managed to crack open her swollen eyelids, and could see that her tormentor was a girl with black hair that bobbed about her face in unfashionably long ringlets. She looked unfortunately corporeal for a figment of Letty's imagination.
"I don't know," said Letty honestly. "I've never been to sea."
The girl laughed and sprang up off the side of Letty's bed, and Letty revised her opinion of her companion's putative age. For all the childishness of her bouncing ringlets, her face lacked the roundness of youth.
"Oh, I do like you! I thought I would, but you went to sleep as soon as you arrived last night, so it was impossible to be sure."
"Last night," Letty repeated fuzzily. Her throat felt raw and strange, and her voice didn't sound like her own. "Please," she asked, around the drums in her head, "is there any water?"
Her companion smiled brightly enough at her to make Letty's bloodshot eyes ache, flipped her dark curls over her shoulder, and announced, "I imagine there must be. I'll be back in a trice!"
Letty let her head sink painfully back to the pillow, closing her aching eyes, weakly grateful to be left alone. Unfortunately, she was now entirely convinced that she had to be awake. She felt too awful not to be awake. She hadn't felt this awful since…well, never. Was there still plague in the world? If there was, Letty had caught it. The room swayed again, and Letty's stomach swayed with it. Whatever she had was clearly the prelude to a lingering and painful death.
Letty touched a tentative hand to her head, marveling that even the muscles in her arm hurt. The skin of her forehead felt cool and dry to the touch. Not ill, then, but…An unaccustomed glimmer on her finger caught her attention, a band of gold mounted with a greasy-looking green stone.
Married. Good Lord, she was married.
Letty swallowed hard over another surge of nausea as memories began returning, disjointed memories of the endless walk down the aisle, the groomsman's impudent eyes on her modest bodice, the shuttered look on her husband's face as he had turned away from her in a crowded ballroom. After that, it all grew distinctly fuzzier. Letty passed her furry tongue over her chapped lips and tried to remember. Lady Henrietta had been there, hadn't she? And Mr. Dorrington. Letty remembered the dancing points of candle flames in a dark room—even the image of light remembered made her wince—and Mr. Dorrington pressing a glass into her hand, calling her Lady Pinchingdale, and saying something about a horse. A horse? None of it made any sense. There was something else, something crucial. Pink ribbons…it had something to do with pink ribbons.
Pink ribbons and a midnight flight from the house. Oh, goodness. Letty clasped both hands over her mouth. Her trunk had still been packed, and she had ordered a footman to bring it downstairs, blithely informing him that she and Lord Pinchingdale were going on honeymoon, and urging him to tell his friends, all his friends, especially if any of those friends happened to be in service in the Ponsonby household. Letty winced at the memory. Oh, dear, she hadn't really, had she? But she had, she really had. Why would she remember something like that if it hadn't happened? And there was her trunk, lashed to the wall to keep it from skidding.
Letty let out a little moan that had nothing to do with the pain in her head.
It would have been less upsetting to have been kidnapped. At least then she wouldn't feel quite so irredeemably idiotic.
"Oh, you poor dear!" The black-haired girl waltzed back in, letting the door slam behind her with a reverberating bang that set off an entire cannonade in Letty's skull. Letty was willing to forgive her that for the life-giving ewer she held in one hand. A bucket dangled from the other.
"The nice man suggested I bring this as well," reported the girl, swinging the bucket so enthusiastically that Letty instinctively flinched. "Just in case." She dropped the bucket, setting off a new avalanche of cranial pain, and poured from the ewer into a glass that looked like it had seen better days.
Letty was in no mood to be picky. Taking the glass, she ventured, "Have we…met?"
"Oh, what an addlepate I am!" The girl looked like she was about to bounce on the bed again, but, mercifully, she checked herself and stuck out a hand instead. "I'm Emily Gilchrist."
"I'm Laetitia Als—" Letty broke off. She wasn't anymore, though, was she? She was Laetitia Pinchingdale now. But that wouldn't do, either, to announce to the world that she had run off without her husband. As if she hadn't caused enough scandal already! "Laetitia Alsdale. I'm Laetitia Alsdale," she finished, on a desperate impulse.