A Little Light Mischief by Cat Sebastian

Author:Cat Sebastian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Alice must have lost her mind. Here she was, not only condoning larceny but also offering to help. Surely this was wrong. It said so in the Bible. It said so in whatever books they wrote laws in.

But try as she might, she couldn’t make herself believe that stealing from Mr. Tenpenny was wrong. With his lies, he had ruined her reputation and gotten her cast off by her family. Wasn’t the Bible filled with rules about what to do when somebody had stolen one’s oxen or chickens or whatnot? Surely having one’s life stolen out from under one’s feet counted for more than livestock.

As for laws, it turned out that she didn’t give a fig for them. They were all made up by gentlemen who didn’t have to worry about having their lives come undone because one man decided to wave his prick about.

“He wore a diamond cravat pin at dinner,” Alice said. She wanted that cravat pin. She wanted six cravat pins. She wanted to pave a road with cravat pins stolen from lying reprobates. She was an avenging angel, she was justice with her scales, she was going to steal a diamond.

“That’s a start,” Molly said, and Alice’s heart soared with the thought that there was more that could be stolen, more that could be done to set things right.

“A thousand pounds,” Alice said, thinking for the first time of the precise cost of her exile, measuring it not in shame and loneliness, but in shillings and pence. Naturally, mere money couldn’t make up for the other things she lost—her home, her family—but it was a start. It was a necessary beginning.

“I doubt it’ll fetch quite that much,” Molly said. “Unless the stone is the size of a quail egg.”

“No, I mean the amount my father owes me. My mother left a thousand pounds for my dowry.” The word dowry left a bad taste in her mouth, because there had never been any question of her marriage. She would never have abandoned her siblings to her father’s tyranny and it wasn’t as if she had ever met a gentleman who caught her fancy.

You’re more interested in bosoms.

Molly’s words echoed in her ears.

“Is it yours? I mean, would a lawyer say that thousand pounds was properly yours?”

Alice wasn’t certain. All she knew was that it was what her mother had wished and that her father had known it; whether she had made a will or properly settled the money was quite a closed book to her. “It hardly matters. I can’t afford a lawyer to look into it.”

Molly’s mouth was twisted to the side in a pensive expression. “What would you do with it?”

“With a thousand pounds?” Alice knew that she could live off the interest. She could scrape by on even less. But that wasn’t what she wanted. “I’d open a boarding house,” she said, giving voice to an idea that had been lurking at the back of her mind for the past weeks of idleness. “I’m good at keeping house, and I think I’d find it satisfying if I were paid for my troubles.

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