Page 15 of I Will Steal You the Stars
Mina looked for a long time. Reverently, she picked it up, like it might break. She smoothed the creases, before sliding the paper from the envelope. The corners rustled against the blanket as she unfolded and then tipped it into a shaft of sunlight. Her lips moved as she whispered each word. She fidgeted, and her shoulders tensed.
‘This is amazing. Your father’s offering you a chance to get to know him. And this symbol… is this his business?’ She gave voice to her whisper, excitement building with each word. ‘He’s offering you a room to live in, if you need it. And work, if you want it. When are you going to meet him?’
Enzo snatched the letter and scrunched it back under the mattress. ‘I’m not.’ He mouthed more than spoke the words, with a pointed nod at Peter.
Mina frowned, and her eyes widened in confusion. ‘Why not?’ she breathed.
‘He left me.’
‘But he explains that it was all terrible timing with your mother becoming so unwell, and no one to help, and after, he couldn’t get to you.’ Her mouth pressed into a thin line of worry. ‘If you work for him, we can leave this place. We can build a future.’
‘I am not leaving. I don’t have airs thinking I’m better than others.’
‘I don’t have airs.’ She swung herself upright and grabbed her blouse from the floor, before shoving her arms into the sleeves. ‘I have hope. Hope is not arrogance.’
He gritted his teeth to keep his frustration contained. Typical bloody Mina, always trying to shove people in directions they didn’t want to go. ‘You lot were all happy to imagine yourselves as Oliver fucking Twist, but not me. I know where I fit in the world. I know the truth. Life is shit. The best people like us can hope for is the strength to wade through it each day and pray we don’t drown.’
Mina tugged on her skirt. ‘There is nothing wrong with dreaming.’
‘There is everything wrong with dreaming!’ He’d only spoken the words at normal speech, but against her whispers and Peter’s quiet snores, he may as well have bellowed them.
Mina’s expression hardened as all her sunshine disintegrated and a harsh mix of pity and anger filled her eyes. ‘You think standing your ground makes you strong? It makes you selfish. You might be able to turn your back on a chance, but I cannot.’
Mina snatched her boots and stockings from the floor, and before he could wrap a blanket around his nakedness, the door slammed shut, and she was gone.
Across the room, Peter shuffled and rolled, the pallets creaking with the motion. ‘You went and muffed that up good and proper, didn’t you Duke?’
Chapter Eight
Such a strange coincidence.
Mina leaned against the same wall and was protected by the same shadow that had hidden her and Enzo a few days before. The marble façade of the Grosvenor Square townhouse shone bright with mid-morning sunshine, and her vision struggled with the distortion from dark to light.
When Matron had handed her the paperwork for her first placement, Mina had stared at the scrawled address for an age. What luck. What tremendous luck. In the neat dorm with its two rows of stiffly made beds, it had struck her as a sign that her life was moving into a new stage, and the most singular opportunity had been presented to her. A chance to create something. To fill a position. To beuseful. And surely, this address was the portent of a better life to come.
She laboured so hard, in the cold and without light, almost invisible as a maid of all work—at least until something went wrong, and they needed someone to blame. No matter how hard she worked, she never did enough, and the list of chores had no end. Those rare days when she moved about in the daylight,or through the ground floor, were a treasured respite from the endless scrubbing. Things would be different in the country, she had told herself. She’d pick berries for the table and walk through paddocks on Sundays. It wasn’t much, but she had faith that things would get better.
Across the road, the housemistress Clara emerged from the stairs to the lower levels. She shook out her skirts then scanned the street. Mina pulled her chin back, as if she could flatten herself enough to align with the mortar. Had Clara known? She had been the one to send her to bed that fateful night, letting her retire after fourteen hours of work, instead of the usual sixteen. With weary limbs and hands aching with chilblains, it had seemed the most tremendous kindness. Mina had collapsed into bed, and was almost asleep when the master of the house had come to see her, under the pretence of enquiring how she was settling in.
When she had upended her breakfast into her cleaning bucket, it had been Clara who had hauled her to the entrance and demanded to know why.
And Mina, always honest Mina, had confessed her condition.
And been dismissed.
And no one had helped her.
Mina peered along the street. It was harder to see from this position, but that didn’t matter. Mina had held a visage of the old house close for as long as she’d needed a memory. With its red brick walls, white sash windows, doric columns and stone steps that dipped in the middle because so many feet had walked them, the house had filled her dreams, both sleeping and waking, for all her life since she had left it. From her position, she could make out the staircase and the tall black lampposts that stood at either side. As a child, she had swung in wide circles from those posts as her mother, like Clara, stood on the pavement and scanned the street as she waited for deliveries.
Such a strange coincidence that the house where she had her first placement was directly across the way from what had been the German diplomat’s London residence. The house where she had first lived when she and her mother had come to London as part of the staff. Mina had almost no memories of the time before London, only snatches of grey life from another city that might have been Berlin or Munich or another place altogether. Before, the only calibration she had needed was her mother, and her mother held the memory of her father, and thus she had been complete. When her mother had died from miasma caught from the Thames, it was like she’d lost them both.
Back then, she’d had another name, and it had been lost to her too.
Schatz.
My treasure.
The diplomat had not been one for children, especially ones who cried as much as she had. There was no one in Germany for her to go home to, and one orphanage was much like another, so he had sponsored a month at Duke Street. Breaking with tradition, Mina had been allowed to keep her own name, although another foundling who arrived the same month had been saddled with the very Bavarian Rosenbusch. And at the gates, she’d been met by a boy about her height with dark eyes and hair that refused to lie flat.
