Cinderella Six Feet Under(78)

Her eyes stared up at him with their melting darkness (never mind the faux crow’s feet). Her chest, beneath all that padding, rose and fell. Gabriel’s chest rose and fell, too. Her lips, too wide to be considered truly beautiful and yet, suddenly fiercely beautiful to him, parted—

“My toe,” Miss Flax whispered. “Oh golly, he crunched my toe.”

“Oh. Yes. Rather. Your toe?” Gabriel returned her to a perpendicular position. “Are you quite all right?”

“Not exactly.” She tried to put her weight on her right foot and winced. “He did it on purpose!” She glared up the street in the direction the velocipede had gone. Nothing but a steady stream of traffic and the hissing clatter of dozens of wheels and hooves against wet stones. “Did you get a good look at him?”

“He wore a mask and a bowler, and—well, on that velocipede, his entire appearance was really quite farcical.” Not as farcical, of course, as Gabriel himself felt at that juncture. He ran a finger under his collar.

“Might it have been a lady?” Miss Flax asked.

“A lady? On a velocipede? In a bowler hat?” The cyclist had had a slight build.

“Miss Smythe—you remember, the friend of the Misses Malbert—is supposedly mad for velocipedes. I was told she owns two of them.”

Gabriel handed Miss Flax up into the carriage. “But why, for pity’s sake, would Miss Smythe attempt to mow you down in that fashion? And how might she have known where to find you?” He glanced at the driver, and then said to Miss Flax, “Where are we going next?”

“To see Madame Babin about Mr. Grant’s watercolor paintings.” Miss Flax checked on the turtle, still hiding in its shell. She bent to touch her foot and winced again.

Gabriel directed the driver and climbed up into the carriage. They wedged into the stream of traffic.

“I’m awfully sorry, Professor, but I’ve got to take a look at my foot.” Miss Flax began to unlace her boot.

Gabriel looked away. If the sight of a lady in a padded matron’s disguise unlacing a boot that appeared to have gone through the wars seemed fetching to a chap, well, what precisely did that say about him?

He feared that he knew the answer.

*

Although it felt distressingly intimate to do so in front of the professor, Ophelia shimmied off her boot. The little toe of her right foot had already swollen to the size of a grape. She had no doubt that beneath the black woolen stocking it was also the purplish hue of a grape, too. And it hurt like the dickens, with that noisy, throbby kind of pain.

“That looks frightful, Miss Flax. We ought to go directly to see a doctor. I am certain they will send for one at my hotel if—”

“No, no, it’s nothing.” Ophelia was acutely aware of the large hole in her stocking. She tried to stuff her foot back into the boot. No go. Too swollen. She loosened the laces, and tried again. This time she got it in—barely. Splendiferous. Now her feet—or at least one of them—were even bigger. “I didn’t mention it before, because it didn’t seem too important, but this morning I saw Miss Smythe out in the garden, speaking with the coachman, Henri. I couldn’t hear, because I saw them from my window and they were outside by the carriage house, but they seemed . . . familiar.”

“Arguing?”

“Not exactly.”

Penrose ahemed. “Embracing?”

“No. But it seemed sort of secretive and urgent. Miss Smythe said they were merely conversing about a lost glove and I put it out of my mind but now I wonder . . . what if it was Miss Smythe on that velocipede? She could have followed us to Madame Fayette’s if she’d set her mind to it. She could be following us still.”

“On a velocipede?”

“The traffic is certainly moving slowly enough.”

“I don’t wish to alarm you, Miss Flax, but whoever the cyclist was, he—or she—was carrying a gun.”

*

The funny thing about a nunnery was, it didn’t matter if you were pretty or plain, bony or plump, or even if you had a burn scar across your cheek as big as a hand. Which, as a matter of fact, someone in the Pensionnat Sainte Estelle did have, and it was a pity, too, because that dark-haired novice would’ve been a right looker without that scar.

Except.

Prue dropped her gaze down to the damp dirt of the garden plot and hurried up ripping out more dead plants. Except being a looker didn’t matter. Shouldn’t matter. She had figured that out already, and she’d only been hunkered down in the nunnery for—what was it?—three hours? It felt like longer. The nunnery was so quiet and cool, and everything smelled like beeswax and clean laundry. Time seemed gentler.