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The first thing Nini did, always, was open the windows.
It did not matter that the panes were tall as cathedral doors and framed in carved mahogany imported from somewhere Lady Athena pronounced with an accent. It did not matter that the curtains were velvet the colour of crushed plums and lined with silk so fine that should she choose to sell them Nini would make more than her yearly wage. Nini would unlatch the brass hooks and push the windows open a measured inch, just enough for the London air to creep in and remind the room it was attached to the outskirts of a city.
The air that morning tasted faintly of coal smoke and damp stone. Somewhere far below, wheels rattled over cobbles. A hawker called out about oranges, the vowels drawn long. Nini listened, and for a moment imagined they were calling to her, and she had the money to pay.
Behind her, Myki lay sprawled across a bed that might have comfortably housed a minor duchess and her children all at once. The bedposts were carved with vines and little winged figures, their faces solemn and knowing. The canopy above was embroidered with silver thread, catching the thin winter light so that it shimmered faintly, as though the ceiling were considering becoming sky.
“Myki,” Nini said softly, as one might address a cat who believes itself sovereign. “Your ladyship.”
A muffled groan answered her, theatrical in its depth. “You sound like my mother. Careful, you may summon her.”
“Lady Athena will come of her own accord,” Nini replied, closing the window just enough to avoid scandalous draughts. “She requires no summoning.”
Myki rolled onto her back. Her hair, unpinned from the night before, spilled dark across the linen. It was the sort of dark that drank light rather than reflecting it, and it made her skin look pale as porcelain even before powder touched it. She blinked up at the canopy and then at Nini, who felt her heart stutter at the sight.
“What day is it?” she asked.
“Thursday.”
“Which Thursday?”
“The one upon which you dine with your mother and three men your mother has described as ‘eminently suitable.’”
Myki closed her eyes again. “Bury me beneath the bed. Tell them I eloped with a violinist or something of the like.”
“You cannot elope with a violinist,” Nini said, crossing to the wardrobe. “Lady Athena has already promised you to someone with a title longer than the Thames.”
“Titles are dreadfully dull and mean dreadfully little.”
“So I have observed.”
Nini opened the wardrobe doors, and the scent of cedar and lavender sachets drifted into the room. Inside hung a procession of gowns arranged by colour and season, each one a small architecture of silk and satin and beadwork. There were dresses for calling hours, for promenades in Hyde Park, for musicales, for private suppers, for public suppers, for mourning, for half-mourning, for the suggestion that one may perhaps be mourning soon. There were gowns whose sleeves were puffed like clouds and others cut so narrow they seemed to require the wearer to think thin thoughts.
The Dion household did not repeat an outfit in the presence of society.
“Which?” Nini asked, though she already knew.
“Blue,” Myki said at once. “The deep one.”
Nini lifted the gown from its place. It was a deep sapphire silk from Lyon, Lady Athena had once said with reverence, as though invoking a saint. When Nini carried it to the dressing screen, the skirt whispered against the carpet. Even the sound of it was expensive.
“Up,” she said.
Myki sat up slowly, then swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her bare feet touched the rug, which had been woven in Persia and shipped across oceans for the sake of cushioning her steps. She stretched like someone accustomed to being watched, even when she was alone.
“Do you think,” Myki said, studying her hands as though they might answer, “that if I simply refused, the world would alter itself out of courtesy?”
“Refused what?”
“All of it.”
Nini began to unfasten the ties of Myki’s nightdress. “The world has never altered itself out of courtesy to anyone I have met.”
“It might,” Myki insisted lightly, though there was a crease between her brows. “If I performed well enough.”
“You are to perform tonight,” Nini reminded her. “Only not the sort you prefer.”
Myki’s laugh was sharp, then quickly softened. “You mean I am to sit at a table and be witty but not too witty, clever but not in a way that threatens, accomplished but not in a way that competes.”
“Yes.”
“And if I should sing?”
“Only if requested, and then not too long.”
Myki’s shoulders slumped as Nini eased the nightdress over her head. For a moment she stood in her shift, thin cotton clinging to her in the cool air. There was something unguarded about her then, something younger than the polished creature society expected.
“I do not wish to sing only when requested,” she said quietly.
Nini reached for the corset.
The corset was a marvel of engineering, though it would never be described as such in the presence of polite company. It was constructed of whalebone and sturdy cotton, reinforced with silk panels, designed to sculpt the body into a shape considered both natural and impossible. Nini had examined it once when it required mending, tracing the channels where the boning slid, the careful stitching that distributed pressure so the wearer might breathe, though only barely.
She laced it with practiced hands.
“Breathe in,” she murmured.
Myki inhaled. Nini pulled the laces, feeling the resistance, calculating tension without conscious thought. There was a satisfaction in it, in the way each tug altered structure. If she had been born a son of a tradesman or the daughter of a watchmaker, perhaps someone might have called it aptitude. As it was, it was simply competence. She tied off the ends and stepped back. The corset had done its work; Myki’s waist appeared narrower, her posture corrected into a regal line.
“Do you think,” Myki asked, “that if I were born elsewhere, I might have been an actress?”
“Elsewhere where?”
“Anywhere not here.”
Nini smoothed the fabric over Myki’s hips. “You are Lady Athena’s daughter.”
“Adopted,” Myki corrected lightly.
“Nonetheless.”
Adopted, yes. Brought into the Dion household at seven, all dark eyes and sharp elbows, plucked from some quieter branch of the world and set among marble floors and gilded frames. Lady Athena had never permitted gossip about it to flourish. Myki was hers; that was the beginning and end of the matter.
Nini fetched the jewellery box. It was carved from rosewood and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Inside lay necklaces and bracelets like coiled serpents, each one glittering with stones mined from continents Myki would never see without chaperone
“Which?” Nini asked again.
“The diamonds,” Myki said, though her tone was absent. “If I must look like a fortune, I may as well blind them.”
Nini selected the necklace, lifting it carefully. The diamonds were set in a delicate lattice of silver, each stone catching light and fracturing it. When she fastened it around Myki’s throat, it rested just above the hollow at the base of her neck.
For a moment, Nini’s fingers lingered there.
Myki’s skin was warm. Alive. The pulse beneath it steady and unhurried.
“Too tight?” Nini asked, stepping back at once.
“No,” Myki said. Her voice had changed slightly, though Nini could not have said how.
They moved to the dressing table. Nini began the ritual of arranging Myki’s hair, parting it with a comb of ivory, twisting and pinning it into a style both fashionable and precise. A few deliberate curls were coaxed to frame her face.
Nini reached for the powder, dusting it lightly over Myki’s skin. Outside, the city continued its relentless motion. Somewhere, a carriage clattered past. Somewhere else, a theatre was being swept in preparation for rehearsal.
“I could run away,” Myki said suddenly.
“You could not,” Nini replied, more sharply than intended.
Myki arched a brow. “You sound certain.”
“I am. You are no longer a child, Myki, and I am certain you no longer entertain such childish fantasies.”
Myki did not look away. “You are right. I am not a child,” Myki said quietly. “That is precisely the difficulty.”
The room seemed smaller suddenly. Nini busied her hands with the final curl, smoothing it into place, though it required no smoothing.
“You have obligations,” Nini said. The words were correct. They were safe. “Lady Athena has ensured you lack for nothing.”
Myki smiled faintly at her own reflection. “I lack for quite a lot.”
Nini’s fingers paused in Myki’s hair. She did not ask what. She knew. Below them, somewhere in the grand belly of the house, silver would be laid out in precise alignment. Footmen would adjust candles to the exact height required to flatter without revealing. The Dion crest, embroidered into napkins and pressed into wax seals, would gleam beneath gaslight.
“You think it childish,” Myki went on, softer now, “to wish to choose something for myself.”
“I think it dangerous,” Nini said.
Myki turned then, slowly, so that they were no longer facing the mirror but one another. The diamonds at her throat caught the winter light and threw it back in shards.
“And you?” Myki asked. “Do you not wish to choose?”
Nini swallowed sharply, pausing a moment. “I am not afforded such luxuries,” she said at last.
Myki stepped closer. “Neither am I,” she replied.
It was absurd, of course. Myki, swathed in silk worth more than Nini’s lifetime wages, claiming deprivation. And yet Nini saw the truth of it in the slight tightening of her jaw, in the way her breath moved shallow beneath the corset’s hold.
“You could marry,” Nini said carefully. “You could have comfort.”
“I already have comfort,” Myki snapped, then immediately softened. “Forgive me. I do not mean to be ungrateful. But comfort is not the same as… as…” She faltered.
“Joy?” Nini supplied.
“Yes.” Myki reached out, almost absent-mindedly, it seemed, and touched Nini’s wrist. It was a light touch, the sort one might mistake for accidental. Yet neither of them pretended it was. “You think me foolish,” Myki said.
“No,” Nini replied, and felt the truth of it pulse in her throat. “I think you are brave.”
Myki’s fingers tightened fractionally. Silence gathered. It had been doing so for months, no, years, this current beneath their ordinary exchanges. It was there in the way Myki sought Nini’s eyes in crowded rooms; in the way Nini knew the precise tilt of Myki’s moods before anyone else noticed.
They had never named it. To name it would be to acknowledge the danger.
“You must not speak so,” Nini said at last, withdrawing her hand gently. “If anyone were to hear…”
“No one is here.”
“That does not make it safe.”
Myki’s expression shifted, something raw flashing across it. “Do you imagine I do not understand that?”
The diamonds trembled slightly at her throat with the force of her breath.
“I know precisely what I am,” she continued, voice low. “A daughter bought and polished. A prize to be displayed. I know what is expected of me. I know what is permitted.”
“And this,” Nini whispered, before she could stop herself. “Is this permitted?”
Myki grew silent. It was not the sulking quiet she performed for her mother, nor the airy pause she used to make men lean closer, eager to catch whatever wit would follow. It was something stripped of theatre. Her hand was still placed gently upon Nini's wrist. Her thumb moved once, a small stroke over the thin bone there, so light it might have been read as impatience.
A lady might touch her maid to correct a seam, to indicate a stain, to receive assistance. No one would think twice of it. Nini shifted, just enough to make the contact appear incidental. She reached past Myki to straighten a hairpin.
“You must not look at me like that,” she murmured. “You must refrain from growing careless because they underestimate you,” Nini said.
“I would never grow careless where you are concerned.”
The sincerity in it startled her more than any declaration.
To deflect it, Nini stepped back and folded her hands primly. “Turn.”
Myki obeyed at once, presenting her back for inspection. The laces of the gown lay smooth, the seam straight. Nini traced the line of it with one finger, ostensibly checking for flaws. Her touch travelled down Myki’s spine.
“You always did slouch so terribly.” Her voice was gentle, holding years of shared memory. The door to the bedchamber opened a fraction, then closed again. A polite knock followed, one of the younger maids, no doubt, ensuring Myki was prepared.
“Enter,” Nini called, stepping aside.
Ciara, a tall, wispy maid that Nini was quite fond of slipped in, curtsied, and announced that Lady Athena requested her daughter’s presence in the drawing room. Her eyes darted once, quickly, between them, nothing more than curiosity. It still made Nini’s heart jump.
“Tell her I come at once,” Myki said, voice composed.
Ciara withdrew. When the door clicked shut, the air thickened again.
“See?” Myki murmured. “Not one person believes us to be anything more than mistress and maid.”
“Do not tempt fate.”
“I am tempted by other things.”
Nini shot her a warning look.
Myki laughed softly. “Very well. I shall behave. But you must grant me one indulgence.”
“What?”
Myki stepped forward and, with impeccable casualness, adjusted the collar of Nini’s plain dress. Her fingers brushed the hollow of Nini’s throat.
“You should not look so severe,” she said lightly. “It alarms the gentlemen.”
“I have no wish to soothe them.”
“Then do not look at them at all.”
“As you command, my lady.”
Myki’s hand lingered a moment too long. Nini’s heart thudded.
“Go,” Nini whispered. “Before I forget myself.”
“You never forget yourself,” Myki said. “You are the most determinedly yourself person I have ever known.”
Then Myki was gone.