Page 30 of A Deal with the Devil

“Bah. You have three more copies.”

As they bickered fondly and Miss Peridot promised Miss Hastings that her life was about to change forever, Lady Susanna’s husband came to collect his wife just before fisticuffs threatened to break out between the others over who was more fierce, Lord Buchanan or Lord Drake.

Kitty sat back in her chair, feeling hopeful for the first time that day. Let the Temple of Muses keep its treatises and tracts and biographies of well-traveled men. She would choose this every time.

Naughty books and naughty ladies.

She was still not quite ready to go home and face her aunt by the time the salon had dispersed, and so she dragged the box of gold paint and brushes out to the pavement. The side wall could use another griffin to join the one she had painted with her grandfather’s enormous and affronted mustache. After her visit from the vicar and his indignant wife, she deserved another griffin.

Perhaps it was a silly tradition, but it made her feel better. Heartened. Marking the battles she refused to lose and the sense of humor she refused to sacrifice to sad people with no sense of whimsy and an abhorrent lack of tolerance. She could whine and worry and nurse her wounds, or she could paint a griffin.

She chose the griffin, as always.

She also liked to keep the shop surreptitiously open late at least one night of the week. Those who needed help came to know what it meant when she lit that particular candle in that particular window. Safety. Secrecy. A referral to the Spinster Society or the house just outside Covent Garden. A place to hide, if only for an hour.

She was proud of her little shop and the community that had gathered around it, however furtively. She would not see it fall to placards and moldy potatoes thrown from carriages. She knew what it felt like to be without options. After her father lost his fortune as suddenly as he made it, and before her grandmother passed the shop to her, Kitty had spent too many sleepless nights trying to find a way to protect her sister. To hide her from the creditors, to feed her more than once a day. To fend off Evie’s first marriage proposal at the age of fifteen.

She’d hidden Evie in the back cupboard of the shop and then hidden all of her father’s snuffboxes (which he believed were lucky) for good measure until he refused the offer.

She’d painted her first griffin that day, on the floor in front of the cupboard. Her grandmother had taken one long, hard, searching look at her and then promptly announced she was moving to the seaside and Kitty was in charge.

Kitty propped her small ladder against the wall, smiling. That first month had been a whirlwind of ten-page letters (crosshatched twice and nearly impossible to decipher) sent almost daily to her from her grandmother, full of advice and threats. Kitty had kept them all, even though she had spent more time at the shop than at home and already knew every corner of the business.

She added gold paint in a thick layer, trying not to dwell on the last time she had done this. Clara had helped her, and they drank too much truly awful wine and stale cake the shop next door could not sell and shouted about books until the very early hours of the morning.

Tonight, it was her and the griffin, who was slightly cross-eyed. For some reason, all of her griffins turned out slightly cross-eyed.

Her, the griffin, and a young man running in her direction.

His coat was askew, there was a bruise on his face and blood on his collar points. He was panting, trying to keep running but not having much success. From her vantage point, Kitty saw the three other men chasing him, shouting. One of them waved a bottle of port. They had the air of indulged firstborn sons.

“Duck into the alley,” Kitty said to the gentleman they were chasing, even though his buttons were gold and he’d likely never set foot in an alley in his entire life. “Back door of the bookshop is open.”

He glanced at her, sweat and blood staining his intricate cravat. He wheezed something that might have been “thank you” before stumbling into the alley.

“Where did he go?” the first of his pursuers shouted. None of the other pedestrians did much except for getting out of their way. When the Mayfair lords came looking for trouble, the rest of the neighborhood knew to turn a blind eye and hope they were not the next target. No one here could afford to go up against an enraged duke or a bored marquis’s son.

“Can’t be far, the ponce.”

“I don’t care who his brother is; we’re dumping him in the Thames. I knew he frequented that molly house.”

They were drunk, wealthy, privileged. Cruel.

All of her least favorite things.

They thundered toward her. Her ladder shook, not the sturdiest at the best of times. Pity.

It took barely a nudge for the pot of gold paint to tumble off the step. Right onto their heads.

The howling was exquisite.

She climbed down to a safer height in case they came for her, and then gasped. Rather theatrically, if she had to be honest. She did not think she had much of a career waiting for her on Drury Lane. She was, however, very accustomed to facing off against bullies, as a woman who was both overlooked and besieged. Somehow at the same time.

Also as a spinster.

She widened her eyes and teetered dangerously. “Oh!”

Gold paint dripped off a patrician nose. Landed on a polished boot that cost more than half her circulating library stock put together. Was spat onto the pavement.