Tarnished by Karina Cooper

Author:Karina Cooper
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2012-06-26T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

There was no newspaper in the morning.

I sat down, feeling oddly thick. As if I hadn’t slept at all. As if I’d woken with my bedclothes stuffed into my skull. I’d done neither, although the state of my nightmares was increasing. I had slept, but fitfully, and with visions of fires and body parts raining down around me.

I’d imagined the earl as a white-winged angel again, and this time, it was his judgment I’d been forced to endure.

In short, it had been a long, bloody night.

Bleary, I clutched my teacup at the table and ignored Fanny’s overwhelming delight as she recounted the evening for Mrs. Booth.

In the cold light of day, I wasn’t ready to examine anything but my paper.

“Where is the London Times?”

Fanny leveled a look at me that suggested this wasn’t the appropriate response to her trilling excitement. “How on earth can you be so cool about this?” she demanded.

“About what?” I braced my elbows on the table. Lasted all of a breath before the weight of combined disapproval from both matrons coaxed me into removing them. “It was just one ball. And a disastrous one, at that.”

The door swung open, foreshadowing Booth’s uneven cadence as he carried in the breakfast tray. The housekeeper threw up her hands. “Just a ball,” she repeated. “Just a ball!”

“Cherry,” Fanny said, too calmly for it to be anything more than carefully maintained control in the face of my obstinacy. “You were escorted to one of Lady Rutledge’s soirees by none other than the Earl Compton. That is more than just a ball.”

“Is it?” All right, so it was. Maybe. But I was feeling spiky, and so I set my teacup down. “I flustered him, you know.”

“Cherry!”

I shrugged. “Apparently, the earl doesn’t much care for his younger brother.”

She waved that away. “He’s a younger son, and hardly worthy of attention,” she sniffed. “I gather he prefers to remain nothing more than a wastrel. He’s lost quite a bit at the gaming table, they say.”

They. It always came down to they, didn’t it?

“So Lord Piers is an inveterate gambler,” I mused.

“That is not our business, Cherry.”

I wondered if I could garner any more information from below. Surely, a young lord caught in the net of the gaming hells would leave a trail.

Wait, what was I thinking? Wander on down to become good friends with the earl’s gambling brother? I must have been out of my head. I caught myself before Fanny’s infectious excitement fanned any more of these useless thoughts. It didn’t matter. We’d see what would happen when and if the earl came by again. Brushing the entire conversation aside with a flick of my hand, I repeated, “Where is my paper?”

“It didn’t arrive,” Fanny said quickly.

Too quickly.

I narrowed my eyes at her. “It never fails—”

“Your pardon, miss, but your periodical was only just delivered,” Booth interrupted smoothly. Features impassive—ignoring both my chaperone and his disapproving wife with equal aplomb—he laid the folded paper down beside my tray.

Fanny’s mouth sealed, and she busied herself with arranging the toast and eggs laid out on her plate.

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