Branson sent her eyes heavenward with a sigh of long-suffering but did not stop the woman. There was great freedom, it seemed, in being thought mad. “Don’t encourage them,” Branson commanded with a finger point my way, then she spun, striding around the great hissing laundry vats toward the exit.

Nurse Duffy stared openly in my direction from a few tubs over as she carried several stacked baskets of pins, no smile gracing her pallid face. She made no secret of her wariness as she looked me over, stopping before me. “I did warn you about the lost tower, didn’t I? Not to go there?”

My fingers gripped that bucket handle. “Quite thoroughly.”

Another glance up and down. “Why are you here, really? What sort of trouble are you trying to cause?”

“I’m here to work and earn my pay, same as you.”

Her eyes were wide and bright. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”

My starched collar felt too tight, her face too close.

Clara giggled behind the nurse, and Duffy turned on her, a glare toward both of us. The nurse spun and stalked away. Clara laughed harder, a release of pressurized tension, which earned her a resounding thwack from a wet towel.

“You old codger. Can’t you keep still?” This came from Kat, a bitter old broomstick of a woman on my left, who had, according to Clara, been sent here by friends when she’d collapsed at the steel mill in Leeds. Poor woman had worked nearly fourteen hours a day—after helping her father dip and hang candles to sell. She’d been used up the way a rag-and-bone man eked every bit of life out of limp old cloth, then turned it inside out for more. I’d begun putting faces with some of the stories and recognizing the women as Clara pointed them out. “Did you play in front of people? Great crowds?” Kat asked.

I shot a glance at Nurse Duffy’s back, only one laundry vat away, but she wasn’t listening. With great clouds of steam enveloping us, I turned toward Kat, keeping my voice low. “I never noticed who was watching when I played, I suppose.” Vague, but truthful. “And it was different every time. Always wonderful, though.” I had been clinging to my anonymity like a shield, but I was an anomaly to these women, most of whom never had the money to set foot inside a theater. Symphonies were as foreign to them as silks and hot water pumps.

“Were your gowns quite lovely? Did you have your hair done up and oiled?”

I shot another glance at Duffy.

“Oh, don’t fret over that one. She’s sore at everyone prettier than her. It’s on account of her betrothed leaving her years ago, just so he could take up with someone else. She writes him letters. Every night. Although I don’t think she posts them.”