LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      A tavern on the outskirts of London—April 1855

      Pavia Honeysett needed a man and she had her sights set on that one in the corner, the one in the navy-and-gold uniform with his back to the wall, perhaps out of a soldier’s habit, his eyes fixed on his ale, but she could tell even at a distance he wasn’t seeing it. His thoughts were far from here.

      She studied him from behind the taproom’s kitchen door, amid the chatter of the other dancing girls who would be performing tonight. She took in the breadth of his shoulders, the straightness of his jaw. In a boisterous taproom, eagerly awaiting the night’s entertainment, he remained apart from the group in all ways: in bearing, in appearance, his clean-shaven jaw and golden hair a sharp contrast to the rough-hewn, home-spun male camaraderie around him. He was alone and he was perfect. It had taken her three nights of dancing in the taverns from Yorkshire to London just to find him. Now she only had to reel him in.

      Pavia adjusted the gossamer fabric of her dancing veils one last time and swallowed hard. Now that the moment had come, she was nervous. She reminded herself she should feel lucky, not anxious. This was what she wanted—a chance to claim her own freedom. She’d planned for it since the moment the summons to London had arrived at Mrs Finlay’s Academy for Excellent Girls. She’d spent her pin money bribing the Academy grooms for the names of likely taverns where she could dance. This one, the Tiger’s Tooth, on the outskirts of the city, was supposed to be her best chance. It hosted nightly dancing entertainments featuring girls of all sorts of backgrounds from all parts of the British Empire. It had been easy to blend into the colourful milieu of dancers gathered in the kitchen waiting their turns to perform.

      Applause erupted from the taproom for a dancer who claimed to be Persian. Pavia doubted the authenticity of that claim, but not the girl’s appeal. Men would not care with breasts like that. Pavia looked down at her own more modest ‘charms’ and hoped they’d be enough. One more girl to go and then it would be her turn. Unless... Unless she lost her nerve and slipped out the back door.

      No, she wouldn’t think such things. It had to be tonight, or it would be too late. Tomorrow, she would be in London and under her father’s thumb, a pawn to be used in her father’s bid for social advancement. Pavia’s pulse began to race anxiously with all that meant. She was to be a virgin sacrifice in marriage to the Earl of Wenderly, a man old enough to be her grandfather. Both the men were rich, although her father liked to point out that he was richer by far, but Wenderly had a title and her father, for all the tea in China, quite literally, did not. Her father might be Oliver Honeysett, founding partner of Honeysett and Crooks, the largest importers of English tea, outstripping even the legendary Twinings Company, but he was still a Cit, still nouveau riche, one of the nabobs who’d made his fortune in India. In short, a man who’d worked for his money, a man who could rise no higher in the world without a title and it galled him.

      She was to be his way into those lofty ranks of the peerage, the guarantee that if he did not possess a title, by God his grandchildren would. They would be the sons and daughters of an earl. But she didn’t want to marry Wenderly. She wanted something different for her life. She wanted adventure, to see the world, to live among her mother’s people again in India where she could be wanted for herself. The colour of her skin mattered not at all in the palace of her uncle, the Rajah of Sohra. Here in England, it was the only thing that mattered, the one thing men were willing to overlook in exchange for her father’s money or, in Wenderly’s case, her virginity. Wenderly was desperate for it, in fact, and that worried her a great deal, especially coupled as it was with the rumours whispered about him behind lace fans at deportment class. It was common knowledge among the girls at Mrs Finlay’s Academy who were scheduled to come out that no decent woman would have him. Then eyes would slide her way and the girls would nod to one another knowingly. No decent English girl, that was. But the Indian girl would do nicely. The implication was clear. In their minds, to be Indian in England was to be indecent.

      Maybe she was being a bit indecent tonight. Pavia shook her filmy veils loose for fullness and laughed softly to herself at the irony. Tonight those English ladies would be right. She meant to lose that virginity Wenderly seemed to prize so much. In exchange, she would gain her freedom and that was worth any price. It was not a decision she’d taken lightly, but rather a decision she’d been forced to after pleading and begging and appealing to her father’s sense of reason failed to produce results. He was set on the match. Not even her mother could sway him. So now Pavia was taking matters into her own hands.

      If life had taught her one thing so far, it was that there were no happy ever afters being handed out by handsome princes. If a girl wanted a happy ever after she had to make it for herself, seize it if she had to, invent it out of whole cloth if she must. If she didn’t, someone else, namely her father, would. Then, it would be his happy ending at her expense. That was untenable. Under no circumstance was her happy ever after the purvey of another, especially not a man. Not her father and certainly not the man he’d selected for her to marry. That’s what had happened to her mother—she had been married off to an Englishman and forced to live in an alien culture that had no sympathy for her. Pavia vowed silently once more that such an ending would not be for her.

      She fastened the last veil across her face, leaving only her eyes visible as she marked the location of her target. He was the best choice she’d had in the three nights of her journey to London. In the other places her entourage had stopped, the men had been too rough. She might be acting rashly, but she was not without her own cautions. She didn’t want to end up battered, or with a disease, or, worst of all, with a child. At least she could control the latter. She had vinegar sponges waiting back at her own rooms in another inn. The quality of her candidate, however, was not nearly as controllable. Pavia sighed. When she’d designed this plan, she hadn’t realised how complicated it would be. She’d simply wanted to relieve herself of a ridiculously over-valued English inconvenience.

      She considered her candidate one last time as the previous dancer finished. Would he be a decent lover? Would it hurt? The girls at school said it did, but they only had hearsay to go on. The women in her uncle’s palace, where sexuality was not nearly as taboo as it was here in England, had told other, more pleasurable stories. Whom did she believe? Perhaps it depended on the lover. This man in the corner looked as if he possessed some honour, but not too much, not enough to make him ask questions, or to make him stay, just enough to keep him from taking extraordinary advantage of her. The way he stared at that ale suggested he was someone who had his own demons to worry about. It also suggested that perhaps the hardest part would be persuading him to take what she was offering.

      Pavia bit her lip, considering the option of failure for the first time. In all her imaginings she’d not thought of what would happen if she missed her mark. There was no time to think about that now. She’d fail for certain if she stood here all night. The girl behind her gave her a little nudge. It was her turn. She slipped a pair of tiny cymbals on to her thumbs and forefingers and opened the door. She gave a nod to the fiddler, who moved into a slow tune. It wasn’t Indian, to be sure. Irish, perhaps? She didn’t care, as long as it had a sinuous, haunting

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