Ways to Be Wicked Read Online Free PDF Page A

looked more closely. He’d tucked a pistol in his sleeve, had cupped the barrel of it in his fingers, prepared to slide it out and use it. Somehow she had no doubt he knew precisely
how
to use it.
    And every other man in that clearing had seemed prepared to allow the highwaymen to have their way with them.
    He was armed in too many ways, it seemed, Mr. Shaughnessy—with those looks, and a charm that won and disarmed too easily, and clothing that was just a little too fine and a little too deliberately new, and with a hidden pistol, with dangerous friends. If a man was thusly prepared for danger, he could only be dangerous in some way himself.
    But she
should
have choked down more food. She didn’t know where she’d next acquire another meal, and even if she didn’t feel hungry now, she was human, and her body, accustomed to rigorous activity, would no doubt eventually expect a good meal and begin demanding it with growls and aches.
    In her trunk there were things she could sell if necessary, a few pieces of fine clothing, gloves and shoes, she supposed. She wouldn’t know where or how to sell them, but she would discover how to do it if she needed to. She had always done what she needed to do.
    She wondered whether anyone in England would find a use for ballet slippers.
    When the mail coach finally lurched to its stop at its London destination, all the passengers hurriedly dispersed into the arms of waiting loved ones or into other coaches as quickly as ants fleeing a magnifying glass, without turning back. Shedding the dread of their earlier experience, and filled with a tale to tell. Sylvie imagined she would be the topic of conversation over dinner tables throughout London tonight.
    The thought made her feel just a little lonely. But only a little. She truly didn’t know what it was like to sit at a table with a large family and talk of the day, and it was difficult to miss what one has never truly known.
    Though it had never been difficult to imagine it. Or, on occasion, to long for the things she’d imagined, when the life she shared with Claude, who was kind, was so small and careful and often fearful, as money had always been scarce.
    She had memories of being shuttled away in the dead of night in a coach, bundled with other little girls. A strange man, a kind man with a kind voice, had attempted to soothe and hush them. She remembered she’d been crying. And then she had thought she should not cry so that she could hold the hands of the little girls with her, to keep them from crying and from being afraid.
    And so she had stopped crying.
    She had seldom cried since that evening.
    My sisters,
she thought.
They were my sisters.
They must have been. And yet the memory of that evening, and all that had passed before it, and the people in them, had become indistinct, wearing away in patches, it seemed, until she had begun to believe she had dreamed them.
    And Claude had never done anything to discourage the idea. Sylvie could scarcely remember now how it had happened, but she had gone to live with Claude. And Claude had told her only that there had been an accident, and that her mother would not be coming home. She never mentioned sisters, which had made it easier to believe the other girls might have been just a dream.
    Sylvie put her hand over her heart. She had suspended the miniature of her mother from a ribbon, and it hung there beneath her dress now, where it was both protected and, in a way, protection, a talisman. And soon, hopefully, it would be proof to Susannah, Lady Grantham, that they indeed shared a mother.
    Sylvie stood next to her own trunk in the inn yard now, a little island of dark clothing amidst a swarm of people going purposely about their business.
So this is London.
    To be fair, one could tell very little of the city from the yards of coaching inns, she knew. It rather looked like any large city, cobblestones and storefronts; when she craned her head, she could see the tall masts of ships at