Kiss Me, Your Grace by Allyson Jeleyne

Author:Allyson Jeleyne
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2019-02-14T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“What do you think of ‘dog-rescuers’?”

They walked the length of Albany Street, which was now deserted. Although the danger of the marketplace was behind them, he and Miss Haselden still held hands. They couldn’t seem to let one another go.

Edward blinked down at her. “What?”

She smiled. “Haselden & St. Lawrence, dog-rescuers.”

Ah yes, their pretend endeavor. If only they could set up in one of these empty shop fronts and spend their evenings saving London’s lost dogs. “I like it.”

He liked her. He’d go along with any excuse to see her, to hold her hand and walk by her side.

“We shall have a sign painted and hung above the door,” Miss Haselden dreamed. “We’ll be known to everybody as the very last word in dog-rescuing.”

Edward laughed. “I wager we’ll be the only word in dog-rescuing.”

“All the better, then.” She laughed, too.

“Yes, we’ll corner the market.”

She looked up, confused. “Cumberland Market?”

“No—the market. To ‘corner the market’ means to control the stock and thus the price of something, driving all others out of business, or…backing competitors into a corner.”

“Know much about that, do you?”

“Not a bit. I leave business matters to my agents.”

She smiled, balancing a wriggling Clover in her arms. “Well, we shall have to learn if we are going into trade. Sign-work is very dear, you know. I shan’t have my money squandered.”

The trio turned onto Miss Haselden’s alley and continued walking. They could see her house at the end of the passage. Soon, their midnight journey would come to an end.

“What an evening,” she said, sighing. “Ragmen and urchins, vinegar-works and market squares. That awful dog-pedlar… I feel as if I stepped into a Dickens novel.”

It had been a strange experience. “Are you an admirer of the author?”

“Of course! I respect Mr. Dickens for showing the darker side of life rather than choosing to focus solely on polite society. Don’t you think so, Your Grace?”

He had managed to thumb through a few stories in rare moments of leisure. More often than not, the poor and downtrodden were the heroes of their stories, while the wealthy, powerful, outwardly respectable characters often proved to be the villains.

For the duke, Mr. Dickens’ assessment of his class hit a bit too close to home.

“He is a…brave fellow.”

“Indeed! Brave to write about children in novels for grown-ups. Brave to choose women as subjects—an illegitimate woman, in the case of Esther Summerson—which many readers do not care to learn about.” Miss Haselden laughed. “Really, it is a wonder he is successful at all.”

“A testament to his talents, I suppose.”

She nodded. “Have you read his weekly, Household Words? He features many authors who share a similar view of the world. I have just finished ‘Cranford’, by Mrs. Gaskell. I do so love to read the opinions of other women. Male writers—even Mr. Dickens—often get us wrong.”

“I’ve never met a fellow who truly understood your sex.”

“It is ignorance, then? I always suspected the misrepresentation to be deliberate.”

He turned to her. “How so?”

“Well, if men write about women,

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