Page 33 of Hazard a Guest
“Yes!” Ember’s eyes widened. “How do you know about that, you little vixen? How English are you, exactly?”
“Too English for the boys at synagogue,” said Hannah wryly, “not English enough for the boys anywhere else.”
“Ach,” said Ember with distaste. “Men.”
“Men,” agreed Hannah Lazarus. “Shame about how appealing they are, isn’t it?”
Ember laughed. Had she been that obvious? “Oh, yes,” she agreed. “That’s the rub, isn’t it, at least for women like us.”
“Women like us,” Hannah repeated a little dreamily, taking out her night rail and sitting down to braid her hair. “Do you think I’m like you? Truly?”
“Do you want to be?” Ember replied, watching this innocent young thing with fascinated horror. “Why?”
Hannah looked at her through the mirror with a sleepy smile. “I think you’re marvelous.” She sighed. “No one tells you that you aren’t enough, do they? They don’t make you feel ugly or void of charm. When you got here, Lord Penrose didn’t call you a pretty little Jewess.”
Ember almost choked at the candor.
“He called me Freddy’s mistress!” she blurted out. “Because I was, once. I used to be!”
That at least made the other girl hesitate. “Were you really?” she marveled. “What was it like?”
“Hannah!”
The girl smiled again, perhaps a little mischievously this time. “Passionate, isn’t it? Those types of affairs? I’ve always assumed so. Not matters of practicality or duty, just … just want?”
“It was actually entirely a matter of practicality and duty,” Ember replied, feeling something awaken inside her that sounded and felt alarmingly like her mam lecturing her before the harvest fair. “It wasn’t passionate at all!”
“I would be passionate,” Hannah Lazarus said with a sigh, “for a man who looked like Lord Bentley.”
Ember scoffed, throwing herself onto the floor and padding over to her own particulars. “Pretty men are just as dangerous as the rest,” she told the younger woman. “More so. Just ask Freddy’s poor wife.”
“His very rich wife, you mean?” Hannah replied calmly. “Millie’s sister?”
Ember frowned, a little noise of frustration rising in her throat that reallydidsound like her mam escaping from inside her gullet. She hesitated, horrified by it.
“I don’t just like the pretty ones,” Hannah confessed wistfully, standing and flopping onto the bed, her braid bouncing. “I like them all. The short ones. The tall ones. The little ones. The big ones. Ohh! Did you see that Mr. Beck? My goodness!”
“No!” Ember hit her limit, spinning around. “No!”
Hannah fluttered her lashes, seemingly enjoying getting a rise out of her. “No, you didn’t see him, or …?”
“No,” Ember repeated sternly. “Now come help me unlace my dress before you give me gray hairs.”
“All right,” said the gentle little Miss Lazarus, sliding from the bed and hopping to helpful attention, as though she hadn’t just revealed what a little menace she was under it all. “You sound like someone’s mother, you know.”
“I know,” Ember said unhappily. “God help me, I sound like mine own.”
CHAPTER 12
Joe hadn’t been at breakfast. Nobody much had been.
Maybe, Ember had reasoned as she carried her plate of fruit and sausage back to her room, he hadn’t wanted to risk the food here after last night. That would be sensible, and he seemed a sensible kind of man.
Ember herself was not sensible. Not much, anyway.
She passed Lord Penrose on her way back, who peered at her plate, broke into a wide smile, and announced, “No scurvy for you, eh, Miss Donnelly?!”
It was the first time he had spoken to her with anything other than dismissal, and that alone gave her a moment of pause, but by the time she turned to reply to him, he was already very far down the hall, skipping along like an eager schoolboy on his way to matins.
