Mistress Firebrand by Donna Thorland Read Free Book Online Page B

opening her eyes and the room was already warm, and the maid who cooked and cleaned for them was kneeling in front of the hearth toasting cakes and boiling water for tea.
    A maid like Margaret was a luxury they could scarcely afford, but Aunt Fanny had always insisted upon it. “If you make up the fires and cook and cleanand bake and wash, you will never have any time for anything else. That is the real advantage men have over women. Even in the meanest of households a man is free from domestic work to pursue his aspirations, and so must we be.”
    As Jenny
had
become, the day her aunt had turned up in New Brunswick with six boxes of gowns, wigs, costumes, paints, and papers and a nearly exhausted purse, on the run from her creditors in London—with an unexplained tragedy in her past and a plan to remake her fortune in America.
    Jenny stretched—her neck was sore from falling asleep on the daybed—and surveyed the room, discovering her aunt seated at the table in front of the window, looking sleek and stylish in a simple chocolate silk gown with a jaunty black faille belt and paste buckle. Her hair was gathered loosely around her face and powdered a chic gray that set off her striking eyes.
    She was writing, as usual, her pen scratching briskly across the paper. Jenny struggled to shake off sleep as Frances signed, folded, and sealed a letter and handed it off to Margaret with a coin. “Take this to Black Sam Fraunces’ tavern and put it into Davey’s hands, and no other’s.”
    That struck Jenny as odd. Fanny didn’t write letters. She was always working on poems or a novel or her memoirs—her diligence inspired Jenny—but she carried on no regular correspondence. Jenny waited until the maid had gone and asked, “Who did you write to?”
    “A friend in Boston.”
    “I didn’t know you had any friends in Boston.”
    “I don’t,” Frances admitted. “She’s only visiting.”
    It would have been rude to ask what she had written about, ruder still to say:
But you never write to anyone
. Fanny had once told her, “Every woman has her secrets. The richness of her life can be accurately measured by how dangerous those secrets are.” Aunt Frances’ secrets had to be kept in a locked box.
    Jenny had never kept secrets. Not about anything important, anyway. Her invitation to Burgoyne had been the first. She had hidden that from Bobby, and it had gotten her into an argument with him, rewarded her with a sleepless night and an aggravating crick in the neck.
    She did not think she wanted a particularly rich life in that sense.
    “I needed to talk to you last night,” said Jenny.
    “Yes, I gathered,” said Frances Leighton. “For an actress, you’re awfully transparent offstage.”
    “I’m not much of an actress,” Jenny said. There was no way she would have earned a place in the company fresh from New Brunswick if she had not been Frances Leighton’s niece. Her skills had improved some since then, but she was not the veteran her aunt was, and she had not been raised up in the theater like Bobby Hallam.
    “Comedy is not your strong suit, though you write it well enough, and might yet develop such skills. But you have real promise at tragic roles, or so I was reliably informed by several gentlemen last night.”
    “So you don’t remember what happened, do you?”
    “It was not my best exit—I remember that much.”
    “Your episodes are getting worse,” said Jenny. They were growing more frequent, and longer.
    Aunt Frances shrugged. “Sic transit gloria mundi,”she said. “If my memory fails entirely, I will have my memoirs.” She indicated the manuscript before her. “And you can read the scandalous bits back to me and I can enjoy them all over again.”
    “I do not think you would make light of these spells if they were not serious,” said Jenny.
    Aunt Fanny sighed. “Perception is a blessing and curse. Like talent. Your life might be simpler if you didn’t have either, or if you had never