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THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL run by the Sisters of Charity was well beyond the city proper, and so Jack rented a surrey. He stopped first at the hospital to pick up Sister Mary Augustin, who was coming along to provide an introduction, and then on Waverly Place for Anna, only to be told she wasn’t in. Instead, Mrs. Lee handed him a note:
Mezzanotte—
Please call for me at Cap’s, the house at the northwest corner of 36th Street and Park Place. I will be ready to leave when you arrive.
Savard
He asked Mrs. Lee straight out. “Is Cap poorly?”
She frowned so completely that it seemed as though the corners of her mouth might meet on her chin. “Why would you say something like that? It’s just an engagement party for Sophie and Cap.”
Now she was craning her head around him and smiling, waving at Sister Mary Augustin, who waved back cheerfully.
She put the frown back on for him. “Go on now, she’ll be waiting for you. Young people, stumbling over their own feet.” She was laughing to herself as she closed the door.
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CAP LIVED ON Park Place, a wide avenue divided down the middle by islands of greenery and trees. Old money, for the most part, and families far longer established than the magnates who built their mansions on upper Fifth Avenue. The house itself was very large, a formidable limestone and marble square with tall windows on all three floors. Elegant, almost regal in its lines.
As Jack brought the surrey to a stop the door opened and Anna came out, flew down the short flight of stairs, and almost leapt up without waiting for assistance, settling beside Sister Mary Augustin when the spot next to Jack was just as empty.
He was too busy threading his way back into traffic to ask her for explanations, and he was irritated, too, because she would know that and was making him wait anyway.
It took five full blocks for the traffic to thin out and the team to settle down, and then he turned to look at her. She was looking at him too and smiling. It was the kind of smile he didn’t see very often from her, wide and open and unreserved.
“What?”
She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders all at once. “Cap and Sophie announced their engagement, and at least some of his family sent notes to wish them well.”
“And why wouldn’t they?” Sister Mary Augustin wanted to know.
Anna’s expression shifted into something more familiar: thoughtful concern, calculation. Jack turned his attention back to the team, but he was listening.
“It’s a complicated story,” Anna said to Mary Augustin. “And really it’s too fine a day to bother with unhappy details.”
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IT STRUCK JACK that two women could hardly look less alike. Sister Mary Augustin in her white bonnet and habit, so pale that he could see a network of veins in her temples, and Anna dressed as she always was for work, very proper and severe.
She wore a dark skirt and jacket and under that, a white shirtwaist with a short standing collar that accentuated the line of her jaw. There was a cameo pinned at the throat, but otherwise she wore no jewelry at all. And still, if he closed his eyes he could still see Anna turning to catch a silk scarf in the light of a dozen lanterns; long-necked and bare-armed, smiling at the footman. A pearl comb in her coiled dark hair.
Until he met Anna Jack had never given much thought to fashion, beyond the awareness that it was a ruling force in the lives of many women and enslaved some of them as surely as chains. Anna cared about her appearance, but that was evident only if a man looked closely and saw the details. He only knew what to look for because of his sisters, who talked of little else—not in the way of young girls wishing for finery, but as women who had made a profession out of producing beautiful things.
Anna’s kidskin gloves were embroidered at the cuff, the buttons on her jacket were finely carved mother-of-pearl and jet, and every pleat or fold was pressed to a sharp edge. Today she had forsaken her usual bonnet for a simple felt hat with a rim that rolled up over one ear. Its only decoration was a small bunch of silk flowers—a few fat white rosebuds, a twig of deep red berries, and a spray of ivy.