Page 61 of The Wallflower Manifesto
Ember and Millie exchanged a befuddled glance.
“The law clerk?” Millie clarified. “Curly-haired, knock-kneed fellow?”
Dot had a small smile. “He is the one who kept Freddy in the carriage last year while I was marrying his brother. Mr. Murphy didn’t do that. Silas certainly didn’t. It was Mr. Cresson, and he did it quietly and without fuss, if you recall.”
Ember gave an acknowledging tilt of her head. “That did happen, didn’t it? Still waters, I suppose.”
“I’ll send for Mr. Cresson,” Dot continued, nodding to herself in approval of her own scheme. “He will know how to handle the loose threads here, and he can manage them without drawing any unwanted or dangerous attention.”
“They’ll need an escort to Dover,” Millie put in, her brow wrinkled. “Can Mr. Cresson do that too?”
“I suppose we’ll have to ask him,” said Dot, looking uncertain. “One thing at a time.”
When Dot walked away, Ember turned to Millie with a look of concern. “There’s only one of us here in London who knows how to lie, scheme, and trick their way across international borders.”
Millie felt herself run cold, her fingers clenching. “No.”
“We can’t do it, Millie,” Ember said, sounding tired. “He can.”
“No.”
But she felt herself sigh in defeat.
Cresson could handle the specifics, but if they were going to spirit two wanted women out of the country, they needed something a lot less reasonable and official.
They needed Freddy.
Millie did not takea cloak or a shawl or an umbrella. She declined the carriage. She walked right past the horses.
She needed the rain, something, to feel real and remind her that she was still corporeal in this insanity. It wasn’t until she reached the edge of the street where Abe’s office lived that she sighed to herself and flagged down a hackney carriage to take her those final two blocks.
“You’ll be going to Bloomsbury with another rider,” she told the driver, who didn’t seem to care at all, and she paid him from her own wages, fished out of her soaked reticule.
She stood in front of the door for a long time. She read Abe’s name on the sign over and over. She told herself she was wasting valuable minutes and to just knock already. But it still took a while.
When she finally did, it was Freddy who opened the door.
“Millicent?!” he had cried immediately, grabbing her by the forearms and pulling her inside. “Is Claire all right? My mother? What has happened?”
And then, of course, Abe had arrived, summoned from some room she couldn’t see, deep in his work, shirt-sleeves rolled up, hair askew, to stare at the scene she’d made.
She gave him a little shake of her head. She tried to be subtle.
Freddy first, she tried to say without speaking.Then you.
“The others are fine. Everyone is fine. But we need your help,” she said to Freddy, whose pale blue eyes were in panicked, perfect circles. “Dot and Ember and I, we need your help.”
“With what!” Abe had put in, only to be ignored.
“Whatever you need,” Freddy had answered immediately, startling everyone in the room, including himself.
He looked so painfully earnest that Millie thought for a moment she wasn’t even sure she recognized him. This wasn’t Dot’s erstwhile fiancé, the villain who’d stolen her sister. It was just some man who knew her somehow.
“There’s a carriage outside,” she said, “take it to Dot’s house. They need you to … well, they will explain,” she said, shaking her head, flecks of warm rainwater springing free from her sodden hair. “And thank you, in advance.”
Freddy didn’t say much after that. She watched him put on a coat and a pair of boots and couldn’t stop studying his face, looking for something, anything, familiar. When he reached for the doorknob, he turned back to her in confusion.
“Aren’t you coming?”
