Hugh turned back to Maisie. She was talkative and vivacious, with a lilting voice that had a trace of the accent of northeast England, where Tobias Pilaster's warehouses had been. Her expression was endlessly fascinating as she smiled, frowned, pouted, wrinkled her turned-up nose and rolled her eyes. She had fair eyelashes, he noticed, and there was a sprinkling of freckles on her nose. She was an unconventional beauty but no one would deny she was the prettiest woman in the room.
Hugh was obsessed by the thought that, since she was here at the Argyll Rooms, she was presumably willing to kiss, cuddle and perhaps even Go All The Way tonight with one of the men around the table. Hugh daydreamed about a sexual encounter with almost every girl he met--he was ashamed of how much and how often he thought about it--but normally it could only happen after courtship, engagement and marriage. Whereas Maisie might do it tonight!
She caught his eye again, and he had that embarrassing feeling that Rachel Bodwin sometimes gave him, that she knew what he was thinking. He searched around desperately for something to say, and finally blurted out: "Have you always lived in London, Miss Robinson?"
"Only for three days," she said.
It might be mundane, he thought, but at least they were talking. "So recently!" he said. "Where were you before?"
"Traveling," she said, and turned away to speak to Solly.
"Ah," Hugh said. That seemed to put an end to the conversation, and he felt disappointed. Maisie acted almost as if she had a grudge against him.
But April took pity on him and explained. "Maisie's been with a circus for four years."
"Heavens! Doing what?"
Maisie turned around again. "Bareback horse-riding," she said. "Standing on the horses, jumping from one to another, all those tricks."
April added: "In tights, of course."
The thought of Maisie in tights was unbearably tantalizing. Hugh crossed his legs and said: "How did you get into that line of work?"
She hesitated, then seemed to make up her mind about something. She turned around in her chair to face Hugh directly, and a dangerous glint came into her eyes. "It was like this," she said. "My father worked for Tobias Pilaster and Co. Your father cheated my father out of a week's wages. At that time my mother was sick. Without that money, either I would starve or she would die. So I ran away from home. I was eleven years old at the time."
