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Chapter Four

Clara was feeling more feelings that she had felt in a good month, maybe two. Perhaps all year.

Her life was about to change.

She was full of worry for her friend Sybil—and anticipation, nerves, determination. No one would ever guess it, of course, in her gray gown and navy-blue cloak and with her too-pale hair tied tightly back away from her face. Her calm, polite expression. She looked as unassuming as she always did. Inside, she was turning cartwheels, the way she had done in the park as a child before her mother scolded her for being unseemly.

Finally, she was well on her way to being truly unseemly.

She was worried for Sybil, of course. Something had obviously gone wrong, but then, these things always went wrong in one way or another. And Matilda was right—there was no one better suited to taking care of herself than Sybil. She was in danger, no question. But they still had time to get her out of it.

Unease flickered through Clara, a spill of ink on a pristine white tablecloth.

What if she weren’t up to the task? There was no telling what the marquis would do to keep that much land and its profits. What if she failed Sybil? And Heloise?

She could not. Would not.

She hadn’t offered flummery before just to get herself sent to the marquis’s estate. She really was Sybil’s best chance—both to find out where she had gone but also to complete her mission. She knew Priya had already sent some of her other spies out to help find the ladies, just in case Sybil really had made it out onto the road somewhere away from the estate.

The marquis would be Clara’s main concern. He was not to be trifled with. But he could be taken down, and she meant to be the one to do it. She would use her spinster camouflage to do the work of a real Spinster. Finally.

And there would be no need to climb down the side of his house.

Probably.

Even that did not bother her. She had been strengthening her arms and had scored the soles of her dancing slippers for better grip. Just in case.

Anticipation—downright excitement—thrummed through her. She hadn’t felt the like in such a long time. She loved writing her stories, loved the covert nature of it. Loved that she was part of the Spinster Society in any capacity. But something just for her? A challenge? An opportunity to step outside the rigid lines she had drawn around herself?

She needed it the way she needed air. She was suffocating in her own life.

No longer.

She had to fight an uncharacteristic grin as she entered the Golden Griffin Bookshop. It was the kind of grin usually reserved for a new story or one of the schemes she and the proprietor, a Miss Kitty Caldecott, employed to get her stories to her publishers and payment back to her. Kitty was one of the very few people who knew who the Nightingale truly was. Clara’s publisher and solicitor were the only others.

Kitty kept her secret. After all, the proceeds from being the only purveyor of the Nightingale’s work paid her rent. Not to mention that Clara herself would rather buy books than anything else: food, sweets, diamonds. Anything. A great deal of her profits went right back into Kitty’s shop.

The Golden Griffin was not particularly large, but it had more charm than any other bookshop in London. The walls were painted a moody, loch-gray blue, accented with gold trim and gilded chandeliers. Gold griffins prowled over the ceiling.

They carried the usual: poetry by Byron, travelogues, historical treatises. But where they truly excelled was in their collection of novels, mostly written by ladies, and other works such as those by Mary Wollstonecraft. Not to mention the naughtier books. Every time a pinched, starchy lady of the ton decried the declining moral standards of the shop, Kitty added another griffin. Clara had helped her paint the last one at midnight by candlelight over the crumbs of lemon cake. It was one of her fondest memories.

She did not have many close friends—or any, truth be told. She kept herself too aloof for that, and even the other Cinderellas, whom she had met every summer at her godfather’s house, were usually a small army of their own. Clara’s mother would not let her climb trees as they did, or dig for treasures in the dirt, or steal the raspberry tarts her godfather provided with the exact purpose of being stolen.

But she had her books and her ink stains and a freckled, red-haired bookseller with a stash of gold paint under her desk.

And now, a mission.

Kitty raised an eyebrow as she poked her head out from behind a shelf. Her bright green dress made her hair glow. “You are positively grinning, Lady Clara. How shocking. Unseemly, one might say.”

Clara paused, looked over her shoulder.

“Shop’s empty,” Kitty said cheerfully. “You can allow yourself a facial expression.”

Clara grimaced.

“Not that one.”

She laughed.