The Devil to Pay Read Free

good thing Camelia didn’t write her own material.
    “Bastard! Pig!”
    Devellyn just collapsed onto the floor, Camelia still clinging to his neck.
     
    Sidonie Saint-Godard was a woman of independent means, with far too much of the adjective, and just enough of the noun to pay the bills. At first, her independence had fit like a new shoe with a perilously high heel; something one teetered about awkwardly on, in the faint hope one would not trip and fall face-first into the carpet of polite society. Then she’d returned to London, her birthplace, and found that the shoe soon began to pinch. For unlike France, female independence in England came buckled and beribboned with a whole new set of shoulds and oughts.
    It had taken her one full year of mourning before Sidonie had realized the solution was to kick off her shoes altogether and run barefoot through life. Now, at the great age of twenty-nine, she was sprinting for all she was worth. And when she died, she told her brother George, she wanted her gravestone inscribed with the epitaph A LIFE FULLY LIVED. It was what she planned to do, for life, she well knew, was uncertain, and despite old saws to the contrary, both the good and the bad often died young. Sidonie wasn’t even sure which category she fell into. Good? Bad? A little of both?
    Like many a wellborn French girl, Sidonie had gone from her mother’s sheltering roof to the high, strong walls of the convent school. There, however, she’d suffered one of her more wicked moments. She’d run away with a handsome man who’d possessed neither roof nor walls—not in any conventional sense. Instead, Pierre Saint-Godard had possessed a fine new merchantman, fitted out with a two-room captain’s suite and a bank of tidy windows from which one might view the world as it floated past.
    But Sidonie had soon seen enough of the world. She had sold the ship, packed up her clothes and her cat, and moved to London. Now she lived in a tidy town house in Bedford Place, surrounded by the equally tidy homes of merchants, bankers, and almost-but-not-quite gentry. And at present, she was taking in the fine view from her upstairs window. One door down, on the opposite side of Bedford Place, a removal van had drawn up, and two men were loading trunks and crates into it with nervous alacrity.
    “How many mistresses does that make now, Julia?” Sidonie asked, leaning over her companion’s head and peering through the draperies.
    Julia counted on her fingers. “The pale blonde in December made seven,” she said. “So this would make eight.”
    “And this is but March!” Sidonie kept toweling the damp from her long black hair. “I should like to know who he is, to treat these poor women so cavalierly. It’s as if he thinks they’re old coats, to be thrown out when the elbows wear!”
    Julia straightened up from the window. “No time for that now, dearie,” she warned, pushing Sidonie toward the fire. “You’ll be late as it is. Sit, and let me comb that mess of hair dry, else you’ll catch your death going down to the Strand.”
    Dutifully, Sidonie pulled up a stool. Thomas, her cat, jumped at once into her lap. “But it really is vile behavior, Julia,” she said, slicking one hand down the sleek black tabby. “You know it is. Perhaps the crossing sweep can tell us his name? I shall ask.”
    “Aye, perhaps,” said Julia absently as she drew the brush down. “Do you know, my dear, you’ve hair just like your mother’s?”
    “Do you think so?” asked Sidonie a little hopefully. “Claire had such lovely hair.”
    “Left me green with envy,” Julia confessed. “And to think, me on the stage with this mouse brown straw! If we were seen together—which we often were—she cast me in the shade.”
    “But you had a wonderful career, Julia! You were famous. The toast of Drury Lane, were you not?”
    “Oh, for a time,” she answered. “But that’s long past.”
    Sidonie fell silent. She knew it had been years