see, is Princess Amelia still alive? I seem to remember some tragedy about that dear little thing.”
Caroline bent to pick up Miss Twittingdon’s wool shawl, which had somehow found its way to the threadbare carpet, and laid it over the back of a wooden chair. “Another time, dear lady,” she said, smiling wanly as she pushed her palms against her arched back at the waist, trying to ease her aching muscles. She was so tired. But then, she was always tired. “This particular well-informed debutante is woefully late emptying the chamber pots today.”
“Dulcinea! How many times must I remind you that genteel ladies such as yourself do not speak of such base mortal necessities? Chamber pots, indeed! Don Quixote de la Mancha, that dearest and bravest of knights—a veritable saint!—would have deemed them golden chalices. Oh, dear. Should I have said that? Have I been sacrilegious?”
“I really wouldn’t know. If I understand the meaning of the word correctly as you have taught it to me, life itself is sacrilegious. Perhaps you should call me Aldonza, as in Mr. Cervantes’s book?”
“Never!” Miss Twittingdon lifted one index finger and jabbed it into the air, as if to punctuate her denial. “I may not be a man, and thus forbidden the splendiferous adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha, but I will not be denied my Dulcinea!”
“Of course you will not be denied her. Please forgive me, Aunt Leticia. I must be overtired to have forgotten my high station so far as to mention the pots. I spent most of the morning peeling potatoes in the kitchens and half the afternoon on the public side attempting to convince Mr. Jenkins of the folly inherent in his wish to bite off Mr. Easton’s left ear as he held the little fellow tight in a stranglehold.”
Miss Twittingdon shivered delicately as she leaned forward, her long, needle-sharp nose all but twitching, to hear the latest gossip. “The horror of it! And did you succeed?”
“I’m not quite sure,” Caroline told her before sinking into the chair and leaning back against the shawl, which smelled of dust and the old lady’s rose water. “Mr. Jenkins ended by biting off the bottom half of Mr. Easton’s right ear—although Mr. Easton didn’t appear to mind. But then, Mr. Easton doesn’t mind much of anything, not even his lice. Tell me, should I consider a change of ears a success?”
Leticia tipped her head to one side, pressing a finger to her thin lips. “I shall have to ponder that a moment…. No, I don’t believe so, Dulcinea. I thought you told me that Mr. Jenkins confined himself to the occasional proboscis. But truthfully, my dear, I don’t know why you bother going over to the public side at all.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially as she added in a near whisper, “A lady shouldn’t say this, I suppose, but they’re all as mad as bedlamites over there, you know. As mad as bedlamites.”
Caroline turned her head away from Miss Twittingdon who, after five years in the private side of the asylum, had yet to recognize that she, too, was an inmate and not a pampered visitor. Perhaps if she visited the public side she might begin to understand the precariousness of her position, for if her brother—“the Infernal Laurence”—ever chose to stop sending quarterly payments to the proprietors of the asylum, Leticia would soon find herself in one of those narrow, unheated cells. But then, what good would frightening such a dear, harmless old lady do?
The only wonder was why she, Caroline Monday, hadn’t been reduced to madness herself in the year she had worked as a servant of all work at the Woodwere Asylum for Lunatics and Incorrigibles. From her first day there, when one of the inmates had flung his own excrement at her, Caroline had known that her move from the Glynde orphanage had provided no great stepping stone up to a better life.
But Caroline had survived.
She had survived because the only alternative to survival was the unthinkable failure of death. Or, as Peaches had suggested, she could travel to London and join the ranks of the impure who hovered around Covent Garden hoping to make a passable living at “a fiver a flip”—at least until her teeth loosened from a bad diet, her body showed the ravages of one or more of the many venereal diseases rampant in the area, or her love of blue ruin, one of Peaches O’Hanlan’s many colorful names for gin, left her “workin’ the cribs for a penny a poke.”
Peaches hadn’t really wanted Caroline to become one of the soiled doves of Covent Garden. Caroline knew that now. She had simply intended to frighten her into realizing that a life spent as general dogsbody in an asylum full of raving maniacs was preferable to following in the footsteps of so many of the orphans who were pushed out of the foundling home to make their way as best they could.
“Will you have time for lessons this afternoon, Dulcinea?”
Caroline shook herself from her reverie and looked to the older woman, smiling as she saw the apprehension in her face. Miss Twittingdon hated to be alone and in charge of filling her own hours, for she often found them stuffed with unladylike thoughts concerning her brother, thoughts that frightened her. “And of course I do, Aunt Leticia, don’t you know,” she answered. “Don’t I do my best to make time for you every day?”
Miss Twittingdon frowned, shaking an accusatory finger in Caroline’s direction. “No, you don’t—or else I wouldn’t be hearing snippets of heathen Irishisms slipping back into your voice. We do not begin our sentences with ‘and’ and then tack a ‘don’t you know’ on the end of them. Both are appalling examples of Irish cant. To speak so is a sure sign of low breeding. You will remember that, won’t you? You must! Or how will you be able to show yourself to your best next Season when you make your come-out?”
Caroline rolled her eyes. She had been listening to this insane business of her come-out ever since first meeting Miss Twittingdon, who had immediately demanded that Caroline address her as “Aunt.” She hadn’t been very impressed with the notion at the beginning and complied with the daily lessons only because Miss Twittingdon seemed to have an endless supply of sugar comfits in a painted tin she hid under her bed.
But over time she had grown fond of the woman and enamored of the lessons and the books her “aunt” read to her as well. Not that improving her speech, memorizing simple history lessons, and learning the correct way to attack a turbot with knife and fork—and Caroline had never so much as seen a turbot—were of much use to her here at Woodwere.
But Leticia Twittingdon’s room was warm in the winter and there was always a fresh pitcher of water for Caroline to use to wash herself, and there was something vaguely comforting about having someone to call “Aunt,” so that it now seemed natural for Caroline to listen to Leticia’s grand plans for her “niece” without stopping to wonder at the futility of the thing.
Or even of the pain Leticia Twittingdon’s grand schemes for Caroline’s future caused, late at night, when Caroline lay on her thin cot in the attic, knowing in her heart of hearts that Caroline Monday, unlike Dick Whittington’s cat, would never look at a king.
“Caroline! Caroline! Come quickly! There are people here to see you. Downstairs, in old Woodwere’s office. Have you done something wrong? Did you filch another orange while you were in the village? Woodwere may keep Boxer and the other attendants away from you, but even he can’t pluck you from a jail cell.”
Caroline watched as Leticia uncrossed her legs and rose to her full height to stare across the carpeted floor at the doorway, where Frederick Haswit, a remarkably homely dwarf standing no more than three feet high, was jumping up and down on his stubby legs in a veritable frenzy of apprehension. “Is that any way to enter a lady’s chamber, sirrah?” she asked, arching one thin eyebrow. “Really, Ferdie, the disintegration of manners instigated in this modern age by hey-go-mad gentlemen such as you is appalling. Simply appalling! Furthermore, there is no Caroline here,
