the street was his cousin, however distant, had unsettled her at first. Feodor Kulzhinsky—their last names were different and so were their natures. She had come to trust Marko himself in the intervening weeks, torturing him quite pleasantly with genteel conversation. Still, she suspected that Marko had known how much she wanted him all the same.
“May I get up?” Georgina asked, startling Severin out of her reverie. “I am tired of sitting and posing like this. Allow me a minute to be myself.”
Severin laughed. “Certainly,” she replied, but she nonetheless observed the way Georgina walked as she moved about the room. The long-legged girl naturally had a long stride. Severin would have to teach her to place her steps as carefully and as prettily as everything else the girl had been instructed to do.
“I suppose you will tell me how this is done next,” Georgina said.
“You are right,” Severin replied.
“And you must do exactly as she says, my darling daughter.”
“Yes, Mama.”
The countess gave Georgina a disbelieving look. “Are you quite well, my dear? You are too well-behaved at the moment. It is unlike you. Always so mischievous, rummaging through my costume trunks and nicking my things—you only just stopped doing that. And reciting my lines all the while.”
Georgina nodded and did a pirouette. “I still love to deck myself out in tattered finery. But I suppose I will never go on the boards like you. Are those days over, Mama?”
“Indeed yes,” Mary said with great satisfaction. “Thanks to Coyle. It is lovely to have an earl for a husband. We shall never have to worry about another provincial tour or where our next meal is coming from.”
“The reciting did you good,” Severin said to Georgina. “You have a lovely voice and that will be to your advantage.” The way Georgina spoke reminded Severin very much of her half-sister Jehane, in fact. Jehane’s voice was a sensual purr that men found irresistible, her light accent only making matters worse for susceptible male hearts.
Avoiding the piano but bumping into the settee, Georgina stopped at a small oil painting of an odalisque, examining the languid pose of the petal-skinned beauty wrapped up in sumptuous fabric that was not fashioned into a dress. “How lovely she is.”
Severin only nodded, not inclined to reveal that her mother’s servant had modeled for the painting years ago. It had been a particular favorite of her father’s. To English eyes, the painting was only a fantasy, done during a vogue for such things. But the woman in it was real enough to Severin, although she had never seen her mother looking like that. She kept the painting for sentimental reasons, even if Oriental splendor was not currently in fashion in London, along with all of her mother’s possessions, from perfume bottles to furniture.
At the moment, Georgina was promenading up and down the center of a Persian design meant to represent a hidden garden.
“Turn your feet out just a little,” Severin said.
Georgina did, humming to herself. Her mother applauded.
“Very good,” Severin said.
Later, in her own chamber, she sat at a desk inlaid with geometric designs in ebony and mother-of-pearl, writing out a bill for Georgina’s coming sessions. Mary was next to her, settled in a comfortable armchair.
“Wherever did you get that desk?”
“It was shipped from Tashkent with the rest of our things. It used to be in my mother’s room. She valued it highly.”
“That’s why I’ve never seen it. A mysterious female, your mother. No one caught more than a glimpse of her either, not while you and Jehane were girls, according to my sources. Not ever.”
Mary had an unfortunate tendency to pry, especially when she had a glass of whisky in her hand. She took a large swallow and coughed.
“Would you like some water?” Severin asked.
“No, thank you. What was your mother’s name again?”
“Giselle.”
“How very exotic. From Persia, wasn’t she?”
“No. She was French, but raised in Constantinople. Her servant was Persian. There seems to be some confusion on the matter. I cannot imagine who would spread such tales.”
Mary narrowed her eyes. Severin braced herself for the inevitable rude inquiry. “Oh. Aren’t those women raised to do nothing but obey and be beautiful and bear children?” She gulped the last of the whisky. “And someone said that your father bought and paid for her. In gold. Is that true?”
“Who told you that?”
“Don’t be cagey, Severin. Aren’t we friends?”
“Of course.” Severin concentrated on Mary’s bill, adding an extra charge of several guineas for nothing at all.
“Then tell me everything.”
Severin lay her pen down in the slot on the inkwell and blotted the bill meticulously.
“Please?”
She sighed as she handed Mary the slip of paper. “My father traveled a great deal. He was not the only Englishman who acquired a wife abroad and a servant or two into the bargain.”
He’d traded in silks for several companies based in London and Samarkand, and lived like a pasha in Tashkent, to the north.
“Indeed not,” Mary said eagerly. “There’s a fellow who has five beautiful houris under lock and key in his Mayfair house. A factor in the East India Company, he is. And I heard that he keeps a harem in Calcutta too.”
Her father had not been that ambitious. He had started out with a traditional wife, European, and kept a harem of one: Ruksana, her mother’s maid, who died giving birth to another daughter, Jehane. Growing up innocent of how others lived, the two girls thought nothing of their domestic arrangements in Samarkand and, later, Tashkent, until they’d moved to England. They had not been told they were half-sisters for a very long time.
They were as close as twins, and could finish each other’s thoughts before the words that expressed them were spoken. Only when they had left Tashkent to resettle in London, and were permitted the greater liberty of English girls, did they discover that their previous domestic arrangements were regarded as unusual. Even scandalous. Her father’s wealth and eccentricity begged questions wherever they lived.
Severin could not deny that her mother’s servant had been bought and paid for.
Her mother, Giselle, hid herself away from the outside world wherever they lived, an unhappy wife. That her maid had become her rival for her lord and master must have galled her deeply, but Severin had been a baby at the time. Her mother had never mentioned it until the last week of her life.
“The Persian servant was brave to come to London, all the same.”
Dig, dig, dig. Mary was not likely to stop. Severin made no response. She didn’t have to explain that Ruksana was no longer alive.
“Veiled, I expect. I had a costume like that once,” Mary prattled. “Had a devil of a time trying to see out.”
Severin only nodded. She did remember the long voyage over land and sea, and their arrival at the vast and gloomy warehouses of the East India docks. Her father had handled it all. Her mother had been too withdrawn and too miserable to demand much of anything from him by that point.
In some ways Giselle had not been that different from her luckless servant. She obeyed her husband in everything and followed him, accepting her lot as destiny. At least Severin’s father had made over the house he bought in London into an exotic hybrid of East and West, like his wife’s native city of Constantinople. From the outside the house looked like any other. Though he left Giselle well provided for before his untimely death, his daughters did not mourn him overmuch. Grieving, homesick,