Cinderella Six Feet Under(113)

Mercy.

The coach joggled along. Ophelia looked out at the stretching brown fields and rows of bare trees, and wondered exactly how she was going to pry herself out of this one.





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   Beauty, Beast, and Belladonna

   Coming February 2016 from Berkley Prime Crime!





1




Beware of allowing yourself to be prejudiced by appearances.

—Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, “Beauty and the Beast” (1756)

The day had arrived. Miss Ophelia Flax’s last day in Paris, her last day in Artemis Stunt’s gilt-edged apartment choked with woody perfumes and cigarette haze. Ophelia had chosen December 12, 1867, at eleven o’clock in the morning as the precise time when she would make a clean breast of it. And now it was half past ten.

Ophelia swept aside brocade curtains and shoved a window open. Rain spattered her face. She leaned out and squinted up the street. Boulevard Saint-Michel was a valley of stone buildings with iron balconies and steep slate roofs. Beyond rumbling carriages and bobbling umbrellas, a horse-drawn omnibus splashed closer.

“Time to go,” she said, and latched the window shut. She turned. “Good-bye, Henrietta. You will write to me—telegraph me, even—if Prue changes her mind about the convent?”

“Of course, darling.” Henrietta Bright sat at the vanity table, still in her frothy dressing gown. “But where shall I send a letter?” She gazed at herself in the looking glass, shrugging a half-bare shoulder. Reassuring herself, no doubt, that at forty-odd years of age she was still just as dazzling as the New York theater critics used to say.

“I’ll let the clerk at Howard DeLuxe’s Varieties know my forwarding address,” Ophelia said. “Once I have one.” She pulled on cheap cotton gloves with twice-darned fingertips.

“What will you do in New England?” Henrietta asked. “Besides get buried under snowdrifts and Puritans? I’ve been to Boston. The entire city is like a mortuary. No drinking on Sundays, either.” She sipped her glass of poison-green cordial. “Although all that knuckle-rapping does make the gentlemen more generous with actresses like us when they get the chance.”

“Actresses like us?” Ophelia went to her carpetbag, which sat packed and ready on the opulent bed that might’ve suited the Princess on the Pea. Ladies born and raised on New Hampshire farmsteads did not sleep in such beds. Not without prickles of guilt, at least. “I’m no longer an actress, Henrietta. Neither are you.” And they were never the same kind of actress. Or so Ophelia fervently wished to believe.

“No? Then what precisely do you call tricking the Count de Griffe into believing you are a wealthy soap heiress from Cleveland, Ohio? Sunday school lessons?”

“I had to do it.” Ophelia dug in her carpetbag and pulled out a bonnet with crusty patches of glue where ribbon flowers once had been. She clamped it on her head. “I’m calling upon the Count de Griffe at eleven o’clock, on my way to the steamship ticket office. I told you. He scarpered to England so soon after his proposal, I never had a chance to confess. Today I’m going to tell him everything.”

“It’s horribly selfish of you not to wait two more weeks, Ophelia—two measly weeks!”

Not this old song and dance again. “Wait two more weeks so that you might accompany me to the hunting party at Griffe’s chateau? Stand around and twiddle my thumbs for two whole weeks while you hornswoggle some poor old gent into marrying you?”

“Not hornswoggle, darling. Seduce. And Mr. Larsen isn’t a poor gentleman. He’s as rich as Midas. Artemis confirmed as much.”

“You know what I meant. Helpless.”

“Mr. Larsen is a widower, yes.” Henrietta smiled. “Deliciously helpless.”

“I must go now, Henrietta. Best of luck to you.”

“I’m certain Artemis would loan you her carriage—oh, wait. Principled Miss Ophelia Flax must forge her own path. Miss Ophelia Flax never accepts handouts or—”

“Artemis has been ever so kind, allowing me to stay here the last three weeks, and I couldn’t impose any more.” Artemis Stunt was Henrietta’s friend, a wealthy lady authoress. “I’ll miss my omnibus.” Ophelia pawed through the carpetbag, past her battered theatrical case and a patched petticoat, and drew out a small box. The box, shiny black with painted roses, had been a twenty-sixth birthday gift from Henrietta last week. It was richer than the rest of Ophelia’s possessions by miles, but it served a purpose: a place to hide her little nest egg.