Cinderella Six Feet Under(114)

The omnibus fare, she well knew from her month in Paris, was thirty centimes. She opened the box. Her lungs emptied like a bellows. A slip of paper curled around the ruby ring Griffe had given her. But her money—all of the hard-won money she’d scraped together working as a lady’s maid in Germany a few months back—was gone. Gone.

She swung towards Henrietta. “Where did you hide it?”

“Hide what?”

“My money!”

“Scowling like that will only give you wrinkles.”

“I haven’t even got enough for the omnibus fare now.” Ophelia’s plans suddenly seemed vaporously fragile. “Now isn’t the time for jests, Henrietta. I must get to Griffe’s house so I might go to the steamship ticket office before it closes, and then on to the train station. The Cherbourg–New York ship leaves only once a fortnight.”

“Why don’t you simply keep that ring? You’ll be in the middle of the Atlantic before he even knows you’ve gone. If it’s a farm you want, why, that ring will pay for five farms and two hundred cows.”

Ophelia wasn’t the smelling-salts kind of lady, but her fingers shook as she replaced the box’s lid. “Never. I would never steal this ring—”

“He gave it to you, darling. It wouldn’t be stealing.”

“—and I will never, ever become . . .” Ophelia pressed her lips together.

“Become like me, darling?”

If Ophelia fleeced rich fellows to pay her way instead of working like honest folks, then she couldn’t live with herself. What would become of her? Would she find herself at forty in dressing gowns at midday with absinthe on her breath?

“You must realize I didn’t take your money, Ophelia. I’ve got my sights set rather higher than your pitiful little field-mouse hoard. But I see how unhappy you are, so I’ll make you an offer.”

Ophelia knew the animal glint in Henrietta’s whiskey-colored eyes. “You wish to pay to accompany me to Griffe’s hunting party so that you might pursue Mr. Larsen. Is that it?”

“Clever girl! You ought to set yourself up in a tent with a crystal ball. Yes. I’ll pay you whatever it was the servants stole—and I’ve no doubt it was one of those horrid Spanish maids that Artemis hired who pinched your money. Only keep up the Cleveland soap heiress ruse for two weeks longer, Ophelia, until I hook that Norwegian fish.”

Ophelia pictured the green fields and white-painted buildings of rural New England, and her throat ached with frustration. The trouble was, it was awfully difficult to forge your own path when you were always flat broke. “Pay me double or nothing,” she said.

“Deal. Forthwith will be so pleased.”

“Forthwith?” Ophelia frowned. “Forthwith Golden, conjurer of the stage? Do you mean to say he’ll be tagging along with us?”

“Mm.” Henrietta leaned close to the mirror and picked something from her teeth with her little fingernail. “He’s ever so keen for a jaunt in the country, and he adores blasting at beasts with guns.”

Saints preserve us.

*

Ophelia meant to cling to her purpose like a barnacle to a rock. It wasn’t easy. Simply gritting her teeth and enduring the next two weeks was not really her way. But Henrietta had her up a stump.

First, there had been the two-day flurry of activity in Artemis Stunt’s apartment, getting a wardrobe ready for Ophelia to play the part of a fashionable heiress at a hunting party. Artemis was over fifty years of age but, luckily, was a bohemian with youthful tastes in clothing. She was also tall, beanstalkish, and large-footed, just like Ophelia, and very enthusiastic about the entire deception. “It would make a marvelous novelette, I think,” she said to Ophelia. But this was exactly what Ophelia wished to avoid: behaving like a ninny in a novelette.

And now, this interminable journey.

“Where are we now?” asked Henrietta, bundled in furs and staring dully out the coach window. “The sixth tier of hell?”

Ophelia consulted the Baedeker on her knees, open to a map of the Périgord region. “Almost there.”

“There being the French version of the Middle of Nowhere,” Forthwith Golden said, propping his boots on the opposite seat next to Henrietta. “Why do these Europeans insist upon living in these godforsaken pockets? What’s wrong with Paris, anyway?”

“You said you missed the country air.” Henrietta shoved his boots off the seat.