Delly raised her eyebrows. “Eight householded daughters, is it? Sounds—lovely.” Loud is what she’d been thinking.
“Oh, it is,” Mrs. Totham said, gently beaming. “When I was a young girl, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to have children exactly as my school friends did, but I used to dream about growing up and being householded by a handsome man with a big mustache and living with all of our householded children in a house with lace curtains at the window. My own dear mother was the best woman on earth—God grant her easeful relivings!—and I wanted to be just like her. And now I have a wonderful husband, and eight wonderful daughters, so all of my dreams came to pass, almost exactly as I imagined them, until my poor Mr. Totham’s trouble with his health.”
“Oh,” Delly said, trying and failing to prevent a sense of wistfulness from falling upon her. Just the thought of having a mam who’d wanted her there. She did her best to keep conversing, as that was the sort of thing she’d heard that nice respectable ladies did. “And did you become a nec—body scientist just for the sake of finding work?”
“Oh, no,” Mrs. Totham said. “Gracious me. It’s a craft that takes many years to develop any skill in. I began to study body science when I was still a young woman. My mother brought me to a local body scientist when I was a girl in order to address some delicate matters regarding my person, and I was so impressed by her abilities to explain the issues that had so troubled me and soothe my worries that I resolved to take up the study myself so that I could attend to such personal problems on my own in future. And then, of course, it was very useful to me when I became a mother and could easily address all of the usual bumps and bruises.”
“Oh,” Delly said again. That word seemed to be turning into the extent of her fucking conversational abilities. A mam who’d be able to really and actually kiss away the bumps and goddamn bruises of childhood. “You sound like the sort of mother any girl’d be lucky to have, Mrs. Totham.” She snuck a peek at Ermintrude, just to see if the lass was as impressed by her own circumstances as Delly was, and caught the lass mid–eye roll, pupils cast boldly heavenward. Then Ermintrude caught Delly’s glance, and the eye roll crystalized into a very distinct glare.
Delly slipped her a wink, which seemed to soften the lass’s fury a mite, or at least confuse her enough to smooth the glare into a small smile. Delly decided right then that she ought to speak to this girl alone, later. Not as a prospect, for tit’s sake—Delly had barely wanted anything to do with girls of seventeen when she was a girl of that age her own self—but by way of making sure she had allies in all corners for the next two weeks. If Delly had ever learned anything from a childhood of sleeping in whatever poorhouse would take her, it was that you’d best endeavor to make yourself agreeable to all and truly known to none, lest you have your belongings all stolen and your confidences broken before you made it to breakfast.
The topic of conversation turned to gossip then—turned out that Mrs. Totham was a keen observer of both interesting birds and the society papers—and they passed the time with that for a span until the pretty house cat and the high-quality woman with the braids walked in. Delly, of course, didn’t remember a damn one of their names, so she spent a few minutes smiling politely and trying her best to listen in on their conversation to see if they might see fit to say their own names aloud. They didn’t. Delly was resigning herself to never addressing either of them directly for the next two weeks when Miss Cynallum came breezing through the room in a crisp green riding habit and said, “Hello again, all! Would anyone mind dreadfully if I went around asking everyone’s names again? I’ve got a mind like an absolute sieve.”
No one expressed any objections out loud, at the very least, so Cynallum went around asking everyone’s name again. The beautiful quality woman with the braided hair was Bawa Usad, and the pretty pussycat was Abstentia Dok. Then Miss Cynallum came around to Delly and favored her with a big bright grin. “You’re Miss Wells,” she said. “I remember you.”
“And you’re Miss Cynallum,” Delly said, tilting her head up to look at her. “I remember you back.”
“You may call me Winn,” Miss Cynallum said. “If you’d like to, that is. I won’t try to make you call me something that you wouldn’t like to call me. Unless you’d like to call me something that wasn’t my name, I suppose, which wouldn’t really be regulation hammerball, what?” Then she stopped and looked pained.
Delly let her smile go wider. She was no kind of beauty, she knew, but she had good thick hair and a decent set of tits, and when presented to an audience generously inclined toward thickly behaired and generously betitted gulls, she’d been told that she could charm the fleas out of a mattress. Miss Winn here struck Delly as a more generous audience than most. Delly said, “Then I guess you can call me Delly, Winn.”
Winn, to her credit, didn’t stammer this time. She just smiled, and the two of them were spared from having their moment of flirtatious success running aground on the rocky shoals of continued conversation by the entrance of a stranger into the room.
She was tall and slender, but everything else about her was a mystery: she wore an enormous round hat with a thick white veil that obscured her face entirely. A seclusionary veil, that’s what it was: Delly’d never seen one in the very cloth before. It all looked pretty bathtub brewed to Delly, but considering how often Delly herself had gone out into the world with great flapping holes in her dress, she thought that she probably didn’t have much room for lobbing critiques. Especially critiques aimed at her betters, which Delly figured this girl must be. She figured that even harder when she saw Misses Usad and Dok dip into little curtsies as the stranger walked through the room. Delly nearly hit the ground trying to give a deeper one. A girl like Delly couldn’t grovel too much around quality types, as a rule. Out of the corner of her eye she caught Winn contenting herself with a small inclination of her head, which astounded Delly into practically toppling over onto the floor. What the hell kind of a prospect was Winn? That accent said she had a clan name, sure, and being part troll probably meant she came from a family with money, but only giving a nod to a woman a bunch of high-quality women were curtsying to meant more than just a respectable clan. It meant something closer to the headmanship.
Fuck Delly’s eyes straight out of her head, was this ever a prospect.
“They’re all here now, Miss Wexin,” Miss Dok said.
“Thank you, Abstentia,” said Miss Wexin. Her voice, at least, sounded like the voice of a lady who might need a whole passel of ladies to protect her from brigands. A soft, high, butter-dipped sort of voice. A voice with cream and sugar in it. “And thank you, ladies. I will be brief. My family has hired you to protect me for the next two weeks because we have very good reason to believe that attempts may be made on my life by persons who, for reasons unknown, wish to prevent my marriage. Several such attempts have already been made, and I am afraid that my attackers may only grow more violent as the wedding date approaches. If any one of you is not prepared to face danger within the next two weeks, please speak now and you will be freed of your contractual obligations.”