The Iron Duke Read Free

and Mina was suddenly thankful that buggers didn’t suffer from pregnancy sickness. Her friend had a weak stomach even when she wasn’t with child.
    “Mina, you swore! For one night, we were to have no talk of corpses.”
    “I did not say a corpse.” Though she had meant one. But it hardly mattered; there was little difference. “The teeth are rotting out of the heads of the living, too.”
    “Shhh.” Felicity smothered her laugh and glanced around to make sure no one had overheard. “You look to find the worst in everyone, Mina.”
    “I would not be very good at my job if I didn’t.” The worst in everyone was what led them to murder.
    “You like to look for the worst in bounders. But they cannot be blamed for their ancestors abandoning us, just as we cannot be blamed for buying the Horde’s sugar and teas. It seems to me, the fault can be laid on both sides of the ocean . . . and laid to rest.”
    No, the bounders hadn’t abandoned England—and if that were the only grievance Mina had against them, she could have laid her resentment to rest. But neither could she explain her resentment; Felicity thought too well of them, and she was too fascinated by the New World.
    The bounders were part of that fascination—and they were part of the New World, no matter that they referred to themselves as Englishmen, and were called Brits by everyone except those born on the British Isles.
    Damn them all, they probably didn’t even realize there was a difference between England and Britain.
    No matter what the bounders thought they were, they weren’t like Mina’s family or Felicity’s—or like those in the lower classes who’d been altered and enslaved for labor. Bounders hadn’t been born under Horde rule. And Mina resented that when they’d returned, they’d carried with them the assumption that they better knew how to live than the buggers did. This ball, for all that it celebrated victory over the Horde, reflected everything bounders thought society should be: They’d had their Season in Manhattan City and were determined for the tradition to continue in London, though most of the peers born here couldn’t dream of holding their own ball. And although the ball provided a pleasant diversion, buggers had more important things to occupy their minds and their time—such as whether they could afford their next meal, and working to earn it.
    The bounders had no such worries. They’d returned, their heads filled only with grand ideas and good intentions, and they meant to force them onto the rest of England.
    But their intentions did not mean they’d returned for the benefit of their former countrymen. Not at all. A good situation within Manhattan City was impossible to find, they’d run out of room on the long Prince George Island, and the Dutch would not relinquish any territory in the mainland. So the aristocrats returned to claim their estates and their Parliament seats, the merchants to buy what the aristocrats didn’t own, and all of them to look down their noses at the poor buggers who’d been raised beneath the heel of the Horde.
    Or to be horrified by them. Mina’s gaze sought her mother. Even in a crowd, she was easy to locate—a small woman with white-blond hair, wearing crimson satin. Spectacles with smoked lenses dominated her narrow face. Wide brass bracelets shaped like kraken circled her gloved arms, and she was demonstrating the clockwork release mechanism to three other ladies—all bounders. When her mother twisted the kraken’s bulbous head, the tentacles wrapped around her wrist sprang open. The ladies clapped, obviously delighted, and though Mina couldn’t hear what they said, she guessed they were asking her mother where she’d purchased the unique bracelets. Such clockwork devices were prized as both novelties and jewelry—and expensive. Mina doubted her mother told them the bracelets were of her own design and made in their freezing attic workshop.
    In any case, the novelty of