Free The Devlin Diary by Christi Phillips

you think me too familiar.”
    “There is no harm done, Mr. Maitland. But you are quite young to be so bold.”
    “I will soon be twenty-one,” he protests.
    “And I am just turned twenty-five, and a widow.”
    They travel on in awkward silence for a few minutes before thecoach comes to a stop outside her house. “May I see you inside?” he asks.
    “It isn’t necessary.” She hears the coach driver jump down to the street. As soon as he opens the carriage door, she pushes her way out. Maitland exits after her. “It is late, Mr. Maitland,” she says. “You should go home and sleep.”
    “I don’t sleep.” His eyes search her face. “Neither do you.”
    His behavior is so impertinent that it could get him dismissed from Lord Arlington’s service, though he does not seem like the sort who is forward with all women. The young Mr. Maitland appears instead to be naively passionate, sincere, and vulnerable, so she withholds her censure. But it is late; she is tired, although not sleepy; she is feeling the effects of the poppy syrup; and she fears that her impressions are not sound. How did he guess that she does not sleep? It’s unnerving. It creates an unwanted complicity with him, as if they share a secret. But to encourage this intimacy would be unkind, for she has no intention of allowing it to go any further.
    “Good night, Mr. Maitland.” She unlocks the front door and lets herself in, waiting there until she hears the sound of the coach fade away. How small and plain her dining room and parlor look now, after Whitehall, after Mademoiselle de Keroualle’s grand apartments. Yet she can’t help breathing a sigh of relief that she is gone from there and is home, if only briefly. These quiet hours of the night are her favorite time: no carriages rattling past, no cries from the water-sellers and the fishmongers and the assorted peddlers of food, drink, and coal who patrol the streets during the day. She has spent many nights alone in her bedroom, reading her medical books and recording her daily observations, listening to the shudders and sighs of the house as it settles. She likes the sensation that the house itself is slumbering, enfolding its inhabitants within its walls. She can tell, just by listening, that they are all in their beds: Mrs. Wills, Lucy and Hester, her mother. She would love to tiptoe up the creaking stairs to her attic room and try to sleep. Instead, she glances out the front window into the empty street, listens for the “All’s well” cry of the night watchman, and picks up her medicine case once more.

Chapter Seven
    J ENNY D ORSET HAD good luck before in an alley off Fleet Lane, earning five shillings from a gent stumbling home after an evening in the White Hart Tavern. Not really a gentleman, more like a middling sort, she corrects herself. And then, because she is honest with herself even when it rankles, she admits that he wasn’t even a middling sort, just some poor bloke who’d won a few coins at cards and was too drunk to count when he put the money in her hands. But in the dark, standing up in the alley, what difference did it make, gent or bloke? No difference to her purse, at any rate. Money is money, the winter’s coming on, she’s got a new mouth to feed. As she looks for a dark niche near the tavern, she thinks of little Jack, her Jackie-boy, that tiny, red-faced, wizened little monster she grudgingly loves. Soon she finds the place she remembers, an alcove just beyond the light from the lanterns outside the White Hart. Not so out of the way that no one will walk by, but private enough that a man might be persuaded to satisfy a need before he goes home to bed. She looks up and down the alley for any sign of another petticoat or a folded fan, the wanton’s stock-in-trade. She’s the interloper here, a part-timer, and if any of the regular Fleet Lane whores find her on their turf, they’ll beat her and run her off.
    Confident that she’s alone, she settles back