Chapter Text
“Miss Clayton?”
Dani wakes with a start at the small hand shaking her shoulder – a small, cold hand. She sits up and reaches to turn on her bedside lamp, the dim yellow light revealing two small figures stood beside her bed, clad in pajamas and dressing gowns and shivering .
“Miles? Flora?” Her young children gaze at her miserably. “It’s–” She glances at her digital clock. “Four in the morning. What are you guys doing up?”
Miles looks to the floor as if in shame, and she’s bracing herself to find out what trouble the siblings have caused this time when Flora’s despondent little voice perks up. “The heating went off again.”
Oh. That would be why they’re shivering, then. Now that Dani thinks about it, the air does feel rather chilly. Again. For the third time in two months.
“I’m so sorry, guys. I really thought it was fixed this time.” She pulls back the covers and pats the empty side of the bed invitingly. “C’mon. Time for a sleepover.”
The children are more than eager to snuggle into her side for warmth. Even Miles, the more reserved and stoic of the two, rushes into the middle so that he is sandwiched between Dani and his sister. Dani smiles fondly and drapes an arm over them both, holding them close.
"Good night, kids."
"Good night, Miss Clayton," they mumble sleepily in unison. Dani's heart clenches a little at that; after over two months in her care, and almost three years having her as their au pair, she had hoped that maybe they would feel comfortable enough to call her 'Mom,' or perhaps even just 'Dani.' But their parents have just died – a few months is nowhere near long enough for anyone to move past that, least of all a couple of young children. They need time.
They also need a furnace that doesn't constantly give up and die on them whenever it feels like it.
The next morning, Dani has checked herself and the children into their usual cheap hotel until she can get a repairman sorted out. She has one of the staff show the children to their room while she uses the payphone in the lobby to talk to their neglectful (to put it very lightly) uncle.
"I need more money, Mr Wingrave," she explains, not caring if she's begging. "It's not – I can't – what you're sending, it's not enough. I can't afford to keep getting the furnace fixed all the time; I can barely afford this hotel."
Henry Wingrave is silent for a moment – probably to down his seventeenth glass of bourbon of the day, Dani thinks bitterly. Then, quietly, he asks, " Have you found another job yet, Miss Clayton? "
Dani bristles at that, her stomach dropping with something akin to guilt. "I – well, I've been looking, but – teaching jobs, there aren't many, you know? And I don't really want to just–"
Henry cuts her off with a long-suffering sigh. " Get a bloody job, Miss Clayton. If it still isn't enough, then I will send you more money. In the meantime, do stop calling me unless it's an emergency. I'm terribly busy. "
Before Dani can respond, the call cuts off with a click and the droning tone of the telephone fills her ears. In shock, all she can do is put the phone back and slide to the floor hopelessly.
Though, she shouldn't be shocked at all. Not really. Henry Wingrave had been all too eager to shove his niece and nephew into her arms the first chance he got after their parents had passed. And before that–
"A boarding school?" Dani shoots out of her seat and storms over to the man's desk in rage. "They're your brother's kids and you want to send them away to a boarding school?"
In her fury, she doesn't notice the minute flinch Henry gives at the mention of his brother. Instead, all she notices is the irritatingly sardonic glare he gives her afterwards. "If you're not taken with the plans I have for them, why don't you take them yourself?"
She's silent for a few seconds as she considers, and he smirks, seeming to think he's won, before she says, "All right, then."
The poor man almost chokes on his whiskey. "Excuse me?"
"I said, all right, then. I'll take them. What do I need to do? Legally, I mean."
He just watches her, dumbfounded, seeming to wait for her to change her mind or tell him she's just joking. She holds his gaze, immovable. Then, he clears his throat and sits up. "Right, yes, of course–"
He had helped her through the entire process: the adoption papers, helping them move back to her old home in Iowa, an agreement that he would send them money each week – how much money, exactly, he had not specified. Dani had been dumb enough to assume that, with all his wealth, it would be more than enough for them all to live off of comfortably. When she'd received her first check, she had called him up, thinking there must have been some kind of mistake. One of my most trusted employees has robbed me dry, he'd said, Peter Quint, he'd said, over a quarter of a million, he'd said, I can't possibly afford to send you more than this right now, he'd said – now, please don't call me again unless it's an emergency, I'm terribly busy, he'd said.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” The concerned voice of the hotel receptionist rips her from the memory. No, she wants to say, I’m too poor to take care of my kids and their rich uncle is being as much help as a headache.
Instead, she stands, plasters on a smile and says, “Yeah, I’m okay, thank you,” before shifting her purse over her shoulder and marching out of the hotel into the street.
Today, she’s decided, Dani Clayton is going to get a fucking job.
So, job-hunting still isn’t as easy as she’d hoped.
She’s hunched over the rickety desk in her hotel room, red Sharpie in hand, combing through the classified ads in a newspaper for anything just to earn enough money for herself and the kids before she can get a teaching job.
She must have called up every jobseeker in town at this point – only to be met with, sorry, but the job’s already been taken or what experience did you say you have? or to be hung up on the second they heard her voice.
At this rate, she may have to give up on good old-fashioned work and let Edmund know that she’s in town and needs help. And if not Edmund then, God forbid, her mother. She does not want to see either of their reactions when they find out that she now has two children when she was so adamant that she did not want to have Edmund’s – part of the whole reason she called off the engagement.
Just as she’s about to scrunch up the newspaper and throw it into the trash, she spots another ad she’s somehow missed, much smaller than the others, tucked away into the corner. It reads:
ADULT FEMALE ART MODEL WANTED FOR SCULPTOR. FULLY CLOTHED. FLEXIBLE RATES AND TIMES. WILL PAY $40 UPFRONT FOR FIRST SESSION. 363 EAST 17TH STREET. ASK FOR JAMIE.
No telephone number is included. Everything about the ad screams ‘sketchy.’ But… well. Forty dollars is forty dollars; forty dollars which Dani desperately needs. And if the guy (Dani assumes, anyway, from the masculine-sounding name and the fact that the ad specifically asks for adult women) turns out to be a total creep, she can just take her forty dollars and continue seeking work elsewhere.
It’s a risk, but it’s a risk she’s willing to take – has to take.
“Have you found a job, Miss Clayton?” Miles’ curious voice rings out from where he and Flora are watching cartoons on the couch. Dani flashes them a smile which feels a little more genuine than they usually are as of late.
“Yeah, actually. I think I have.”