Page 6 of The Dueling Duchess

As things stood, she would be paying her three partners until she was old and gray. But then what else did she have to do with her life?

Cecile strode uninterrupted through the quiet theater, heading to the tiny room she’d set up as her business office.

She had added a dressing table and screen to the room so she didn’t have to share the already cramped dressing room that all the other female performers used.

Today, since she’d just been practicing, the only thing she had to remove was the holster that held two of her pistols.

If it had been an actual performance, she would have worn heavy face paint and her provocative costume—a gown that had been designed by Barnabas Farnham.

When she’d first started working at the Fayre four years ago, Cecile had loathed the revealing dress, but now that she operated the circus, she could not deny that the way she looked—exotic, sensual, and dangerous—was important when it came to attracting wealthy, privileged men to purchase the expensive tickets to her show.

The first thing she did was clean her pistols—a lesson she’d learned from her father.

While Cecile worked, she considered a subject that had been on her mind a great deal of late: her appearance and how critical it was to her income.

Although she was still beautiful at thirty-six—why deny an obvious truth?—she was well past her prime years. Who knew how much longer she would be able to draw men to watch her?

She needed to hire an apprentice; somebody reasonably handsome to take her place when she was no longer an attraction. Finding a woman or girl who could shoot was only part of her worries. What she needed was somebody with presence and a certain . . . verve.

Shooting was something she could train almost anyone to do, with enough practice.

Cecile had grown up around guns—first those her father produced, and later the ones she herself made—but it had never been her plan to earn her living as a markswoman in a circus.

Unfortunately, the cousin who’d vowed to help establish Cecile as a gunsmith had, instead, stolen her father’s designs—designs that Cecile had painstakingly re-created from memory after losing his precious packet of papers in the storm that long-ago night—and then kicked her out of his home.

The guns her cousin Curtis Blanchard—the anglicized version of the Blanchet name—produced were substandard and it infuriated her that they bore the Blanchard name, even if few people connected Blanchard with its more famous French cousin Blanchet.

But there was little Cecile could do to stop him, although she took some enjoyment from the fact that his company had gone out of business five years ago.

Cecile frowned at her unproductive thoughts as she finished oiling the second pistol and placed it back in the lacquered box. Thinking about Curtis only made her angry and discontent. She had a different life now; while it wasn’t the one that she’d planned for herself, it was still better than she’d hoped for.

She had a successful business and a job that she did well, though she didn’t love it.

She even had a friend—something she’d not been able to claim before coming to work for the Fayre—and although Marianne no longer worked with or shared a house with Cecile, they were still as close as sisters.

Now that Marianne was gone from the Fayre, Cecile kept hoping that Josephine Brown—Cecile’s mysterious and reserved blade expert, whom everyone called Blade—might also become a good friend. But even after the dangerous months they’d spent traveling together in France last year—which just happened to coincide with Napoleon Bonaparte’s escape from Elba—Blade was as closed as an oyster when it came to who she was and where she came from.

Blade was one of the most self-sufficient and resilient people she’d ever met, but all Cecile really knew about her was that she worked as a mercenary of sorts, her skills so impressive that at least one European monarch had seen fit to hire her.

As much as she hated to admit it, she might never know Blade very well because it was virtually impossible to engage the woman in a conversation. Lord knows Cecile had plenty of secrets in her past, but she had never met a woman as reserved, mysterious, and private as Josephine Brown.

You are putting off your work, her conscience scolded as she continued to stare blankly at her desk.

Cecile sighed and turned to the ever-present stack of correspondence that was part of owning and operating a business. She worked her way methodically through the bills and letters from prospective theatrical acts.

Not until she’d almost reached the bottom of the pile did she find a copy of yesterday’s London Examiner, a thrice weekly newspaper.

Cecile had canceled her own subscription to the paper months ago. Indeed, she’d stopped reading newspapers entirely at the beginning of the New Year. One of her employees must have left this for her, thinking to do her a favor.

She glared at it, a familiar craving swirling in her belly.

Once upon a time the London Examiner had been her favorite paper for the shameful reason that it had the very best society section of all the newspapers that circulated the country.

For years and years—especially when she had lived in near exile in far-flung Massachusetts—gossip columns had been her guilty pleasure. They were a way to escape a mundane life and read about the wealthy, beautiful, and powerful men and women of the ton.

But the pleasure she’d taken in reading about the antics of the rich and glamorous had palled when she’d become acquainted with several of those glittering creatures herself last year during her weeks in France.

Even now, almost a year later and with Marianne married to one of the aristocrats they had journeyed with, Cecile could hardly believe all that excitement—dodging the armies of Europe, evading ragged militias, and foiling the opportunistic criminals who prospered during times of war—had been real.