Page 30 of Schemes & Scandals

I’m spending the evening alone. Gray is paying a house call to a family too illustrious to make funeral arrangements in an undertaker’s office. While I’m technically his assistant, I can’t yet pass as a Victorian well enough to be sure I won’t say or do something wrong in front of grieving families. It’s easy to explain away my peccadilloes in everyday life. Dealing with the grief-stricken is another level, one where I want my manners to be perfect.

Isla is out on a social call. She has two sorts of social engagements. One is lunches and teas and such with women whose company she genuinely enjoys. The other is duty, all the various charitable endeavors that women like Isla are expected to engage in.

Those charitable endeavors would seem like a happy duty for Isla, who is genuinely interested in the plight of the poor. Unfortunately, in those settings, she’s one of the very fewgenuinelyinterested women.

We’re at a time of shifting views on the poor and charity. My father used to teach this with Dickens in particular, showing how Dickens’s own views shifted over the course of his career. He moved from heartily endorsing charity from the rich to questioning whether it can evernotbe condescending, while advocating for other solutions. That’s the dilemma Isla faces—she wants to use her privilege to help, but is it ever possible to do that, however sincerely, without condescension?

With both of them gone, I am alone and reminded that, since I have decided to stay in this world, I really need to make a full life for myself here, including hobbies. Normally, I would see whether Alice wanted to play cards, but she’s with Mrs. Wallace, and I don’t dare intrude.

Alice and Mrs. Wallace are enjoying a free evening with both Isla and Gray away. Our bosses might be very low maintenance, but as long as they’re in the house, the staff is on alert, ready at the sound of footsteps to see whether anything is needed. With both Gray and Isla gone, Alice and Mrs. Wallace can truly relax.

My other option is to pop out to the stables for a chat with Simon, which is always time well spent. He was Catriona’s only real friend, and while I can’t fill that role, I very much enjoy his company. However, he is with Gray, who can’t be seen paying visits to clients on foot.

That leaves me with reading, which would usually be fine, but reading reminds me of Dickens, which reminds me that I met a dead man two days ago.

I’m struggling with that more than I would have expected. Last month, I watched my terminally ill grandmother die, but it’s not the same. I met a man who believes himself to be healthy, who is on his last tour before settling into semiretirement. I listened to a man enthuse about a book he will never finish writing. It has unsettled me more than I expected, and I realize some of my earlier pique with Gray might be misdirected emotional fallout from that.

When I first came to this world, I’d felt lonely in a way I didn’t even truly recognize as loneliness.

Now Gray, Isla, and McCreadie all know my secret, and with that, I have friends I can be myself around. Yet I have given them a secrettheymust keep, and I don’t want to add to that with the uncomfortable sort of prognostication that comes with realizing someone is going to die.

But keeping that secret lets the loneliness creep in again, along with the fear that I’m always going to be an outsider, however much they welcome me. There will always be knowledge—uncomfortable knowledge—that I can’t share.

So when Jack swings into the library, I may greet her a wee bit more effusively than normal.

“Bored, are you?” she says, tugging at her trousers as if she just finished changing into her male garb.

I shrug. “A bit out of sorts. What are you up to tonight?”

“And can you join? That is your real question.”

Another shrug as I play it cool. “Depends on what it is and whether you want company.”

“From the look you gave when I walked in, unless I plan to spend the night digging through rubbish, you’ll think it sounds splendid.”

“You can find a lot of interesting things in the rubbish.”

She laughs. “The situation is desperate, then. Well, I came to see whether you’d care to call on a print shop. To learn whether anyone might be offering letters of an intimate nature for paid public consumption?”

“Ah. Thatdoessound more interesting than picking through rubbish.”

“We can stop for a pint afterwards,” she says. “You can be my lady friend for the evening.”

“Which means you’ll be paying for the pint? Excellent.”

ChapterThirteen

Jack is the sort of person who lets you feel as if you know them, but once you stop to think about it, you realize you don’t know a damn thing. She’s chatty and open, and gives the impression that she likes you, and that you could be friends... or at least friendly acquaintances. But she has perfected the art of talking a great deal without giving away one iota of truly personal information.

I don’t know how old she is, where she grew up, what sort of life she’s had, what her plans for the future are or her pains of the past. She could come from poverty or royalty. She could have two husbands and a child growing up with relatives. She seems like someone who has waltzed through life, spinning too deftly for anything to leave a scar. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s a persona she adopts, like the masculine one she’s inhabiting as we cross the mound into the Old Town.

I am fascinated by Jack, and I’m also learning from her, even if she never realizes it. How she acts is how I must act toward most of the world... including her. My past isn’t something I can discuss, both because it took place over a century from now and because I’m inhabiting the body of someone who already has a past. What if I tell Simon that my parents were loving and incredibly supportive, only to have him remember that Catriona’s were cold or abusive?

I’ve never been a private person. Hell, meet me at a party and you’d walk away an hour later knowing my favorite color, the name of my childhood cat, and that I broke my arm in third grade, climbing a tree. Yes, I broke it climbing a tree, not falling from it, which is a certain kind of special.

On the walk, Jack chatters away. She tells me something funny Alice said and how Mrs. Wallace gave her shit for whistling, which she relates in a perfect imitation of the housekeeper. She points out a Princes Street shop that kicked her out last year when she’d been browsing “intimate ladies’ apparel” while forgetting she was still dressed masculine. Once we’re in the Old Town, she points out a close and tells me a friend swears it’s haunted by one of Burke and Hare’s victims. All very entertaining and companionable, and not revealing one scrap of personal insight.

“Did you grow up in Edinburgh?” I say, mostly just to amuse myself because I know how she’ll answer.

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