Chapter Five
A carriage at the door of Lady Melforth’s Henrietta Street house confirmed what Lark had feared from the moment he woke—that Viv meant to avoid seeing him again. He readied himself to play the smitten fiancé and rang the bell.
Haxton admitted him to the house with muted cordiality just as Viv came down the stairs. She wore another silk, a vivid plaid of deep blues and reds and threads of gold. Her wide skirts rustled like a wave foaming up a rocky shore. The short dove-colored cape covered her torso. A bit of lace encircled her throat. A chocolate-colored bonnet and tan leather gloves dangled from the hand that wore his garnet ring. He saw no sign of the pistol.
“I see I haven’t kept you waiting,” he said to her. “Where are we off to today?”
“Oh,” she said, checking her steps. “The duke has given you another holiday?”
“In honor of our betrothal and to help you with your work.”
“What an accommodating employer!” She resumed her descent.
“Only because of my long service to him.”
At the foot of the stairs, she turned to don her bonnet and gloves, and he couldn’t look away. He supposed it was the novelty of feminine action that held his gaze, the settling of the silk bonnet on the smooth crown of her head, the angle of the bow under her chin, the tugging on of gloves. He and Rook had lived a male existence, except for Alice Povey, their charwoman, and Lark had never stopped to watch stout, blunt-spoken Alice make adjustments to her appearance.
At dawn, he had awakened with his throat dry and his whole side sore and aching. He had managed with difficulty to clothe his stiff limbs in his ruined gear and leave before Rook stirred. At Isaacson’s Fashion Emporium, Ezra, the proprietor’s son, admitted him through the back door and helped him purchase a new shirt, waistcoat, and coat. Lark would be willing to wager on Ezra’s talent for valeting against any gentleman’s gentleman in the city. His last stop before Lady Melforth’s had been at Number36 Babylon Street, where he’d purchased The Spanish Brothers , a novel in the two-shilling series from Nelson’s Royal Library.
When Viv turned back to him, he handed her the book. “The duke wanted you to have this,” he said.
Her gloved hands closed around the green cloth binding and gold lettering. She glanced at the title and shot him a swift look that said she would not be taken in by his acting the part of her betrothed. Lark might feel as though he’d been run over by a drayman’s cart, but at the challenge in her eyes, a swift undercurrent of excitement coursed through him. He wanted to spar with her all day.
Haxton opened the door. Outside, the coachman greeted Viv, and Lark stepped forward to let down the carriage steps, aware as he did so that perhaps a true gentleman might have left such a task to the servant. He let the doubt go. He would have to be his own sort of gentleman and brazen it out.
“Where are we going?” he asked, sitting opposite her, his first time in a well-appointed private carriage for some time. The blue velvet of the squabs stirred another faint memory.
“To old St. Pancras Church to visit a grave,” she said.
“Ah,” he said. “No need for your pistol if your quarry is already dead.” The carriage lurched into motion, and he couldn’t repress a groan.
“How is your wound?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you keep to your lodging?”
“And miss your next exploit? Whose grave are we going to visit?”
“Mary Godwin’s.” She said the name with a bit of reverence and the apparent expectation that he would know of whom she spoke, but the name meant nothing to him, except a chance that he might falter in his role and expose his ignorance.
“You’re not an admirer of Mrs. Godwin?” she asked.
“One day you’re seeking pickpockets and the next day, a dead woman’s grave? Pardon me if I don’t see the connection.”
“Not any dead woman, a gifted writer who refused to be limited by the usual constraints men impose on us.”
“Ah. Were you following in her footsteps when you visited Babylon Street and shot a helpful stranger?”
She gave him a stunned look. “Yes, how did you… Well, she never shot anyone that I know of, but she broke boundaries, and our guide encourages women to do the same. That’s ou r theme, you see.”
“No matter the risk? Does your guide advise ladies to carry a pistol?”
“We’re back to that, are we? You think women incapable of defending themselves.” He liked to see the lively sparkle in those dark eyes as she met his challenge.
“I think a sensible… person avoids near encounters with ruffians. Shouldn’t a visitor’s guide for ladies steer them away from unsavory neighborhoods?”
“Should women be limited to certain streets and shops?”
“Only if they want to keep their purses.”
She looked away, and he thought he detected a slight blush on her cheek. He wondered if she’d admit to the contents of that purse. But she came back at him with another challenge. “Do your mother or your sisters never complain about being told where they might and might not go in London?”
For a moment he had no answer. He had not yet given his fictional Mr. Larkin a family.
To hear the words your mother unsettled him when he had been thinking about his mother ever since the fire, trying to revive elusive wisps of memory that would yield some clue to her fate, her absence in his life. The one sure memory he had was of her beringed fingers turning the pages of a book as she read to him.
The carriage, well-sprung and comfortably padded as it was, rattled over some uneven ground, jarring the wound in his side. He flinched, and the fleeting sense of memory returned more strongly. He had ridden in such a carriage with his mother .
“What? What did I say?” Viv asked, stretching out a hand.
He froze, waiting for her touch, but she withdrew her hand. “Nothing. I have no sisters. My mother is…gone.”
“I beg your pardon.” She folded her hands in her lap and dropped her gaze.
“No need to apologize. You could not know.” Her ready sympathy undid him. He turned to the window. He needed a story, and he was quite used to making one up in the moment, taking his cue from the mark. Already, he’d told this girl truths about himself. He needed to be more careful.
He made himself concentrate on their direction and the distance traveled. He figured they’d gone nearly a mile before she again lifted her gaze to meet his, her expression earnest.
“I’ve been thinking. My blunder about your mother only shows the weakness of our charade. Were we truly betrothed, we would know more of each other’s… histories.”
The carriage slowed and made a turn. Through the window Lark could see a green expanse unlike his usual London haunts. “Do you expect Lady Melforth to unmask us?”
Viv shook her head. “She’s clever, you know, but her illness makes her less likely to worry over inconsistencies in our story.”
“The Strydes, on the other hand…” he said. And , he thought, the good doctor .
Viv grinned at him. “The Strydes would delight in discrediting you and seeing me gone. If they meet your duke, they will question him.”
He laughed. “The duke is definitely not a member of the Anti-Vice Society, but let them try to reach him. ”
She gave him a puzzled look.
“Don’t worry, you can tell me all about your family, and I’ll tell you about mine.”
“After we visit the church. You won’t mind if I wander and take notes. This is a working visit for me.”
“To find your story of the day?”
“Just so.”
The carriage halted, and Lark opened the door and let down the steps. They had stopped in a lane above a green embankment with a river flowing below and some boys lounging with fishing poles on its banks. He paused to get his bearings. They’d gone east and north, somewhere near Camden Town, he thought. On a rise above them stood the old church, the east section of its roof crumbling, surrounded by leaning headstones crowded near one another like a throng pressing to enter a narrow gate.
Viv put her hand in his and descended, a small act of customary feminine dependence on a man. Her feet on the ground, she let go at once and headed down a path toward the church tower. “I’ll be a while. Wander as you like.”
“You didn’t mention that the place is in ruins,” he called after her.
“It’s picturesque,” she said. She stopped to read a lichen-darkened headstone, reaching into her reticule for a moleskin notebook and a pencil.
He turned the other way, along the south side of the old church. At the moment, her keen enthusiasm for discovery grated on him. Maybe it was their conversation in the carriage, but at the graveyard gate, the old sense of abandonment had come over him, and he needed to clear his head. He had no idea how long he could keep the false betrothal going, but he meant to make the most of it. In her company he would explore that part of London he had so far avoided. He could name no wrong his mother had done him, except the wrong of being absent. He tried to shake off that reflection, winding his way among headstones with faint names, obscured by time and mossy growth, no clearer than his old resentments.
A slight breeze stirred the leaves of the trees beyond the graveyard’s boundary, the air fresh after the stink of the city’s streets. At the end of a row of larger monuments, he halted, surprised to come upon an open grave. The smell of newly turned earth assaulted his senses and a chill passed over him. He stared into the dark pit of the unfilled grave. He had not thought of his mother as dead. By his calculation she would be a woman in her fifties, younger than Alice Povey or Lady Melforth. It struck him now, facing that emptiness, that he was unjust to blame her. Maybe her absence had not been a desertion, but something else entirely. Maybe she had not chosen to leave him, but lay in a grave somewhere in London. He shuddered and lifted his gaze, but the sight that met his eyes did not help. Beyond the tended and marked graves, at the very edge of the cemetery, were low mounds over which a few blades of vegetation had sprouted, the sort of graves that drew the Resurrection men to their work.
He turned back, looking for Viv, and when he didn’t see her, his heart gave an odd skip. Then he spotted Lady Melforth’s carriage outside the church gate. Viv had not deserted him. He picked up his pace, striding the main path to the west. There she stood in the far corner in front of a large square monument surmounted with a moss-covered capstone, her skirts vivid with color and life. She was scribbling away in her notebook, and he couldn’t wait to spar with her again.
“You found the lady’s grave, I see,” he said, coming to stand beside her.
“I did.” She kept up her jotting in the little notebook.
He read the inscription on the monument.
M ARY W OLLSTONECRAFT G ODWIN
A UTHOR OF A V INDICATION OF THE R IGHTS
O F W OMAN
He noted the years of her birth and death. “How did she die? Do you know?” he asked.
“Of a complication after giving birth to her daughter Mary, the writer, Mary Shelley.” He must have looked blank because she added, “ Frankenstein? ”
“So, you’ll turn her mother’s grave into a tourist attraction?”
She turned to him, bristling at once. It was easy to provoke her. “Not at all. More like a place of pilgrimage, for women to be inspired. Being a man, you may not have noticed how few of our London monuments celebrate women, as if we were an invisible thread in the city’s history.”
He made an effort to keep his expression bland.
Then she laughed. “You,” she said, “are having me on.” And she gave him a more penetrating glance. “Is your wound troubling you? ”
He started to deny it and changed his mind. Better that she thought him weak in body than in the head. “A little,” he said.
“Then let’s get you off your feet.” She tucked her pencil and notebook into her bag.
“You found your story of the day?”
She nodded. “Now to find somewhere nearby where a lady might refresh herself.”
“There’s a tavern across the way.” He pointed to a two-storied building in the old half-timber style with a rather large sign reading T HE A DAM AND E VE .
“I’ll tell Tim Coachman to bring the carriage round.”
*
From the brightness of midday, they stepped into a dark, low-ceilinged chamber smelling of ale, beef, and smoke. Lark instinctively turned for the taproom when the host, with a white apron tied around his middle, came to greet them.
“Private room for you and yer lady, sir?” the man asked. “We have a fine ordinary, if I say so meself,” he added.
Lark halted, abruptly, and Viv slammed into him, jarring his side. He sucked in a breath, waiting for the sharp pain to subside.
“Idiot,” she said. “You’re hurting.”
Lark turned to the landlord. “Yes, to the room and the ordinary, and coffee, if you will.” He hoped he’d covered his mistake. He’d been about to blunder into the common taproom because he’d forgotten the role he was playing.
*
Viv thought The Adam and Eve’s upstairs dining parlor, quaintly pleasing. The old-fashioned room had butter-colored walls above a dark oak wainscot and a bow window that looked back across the green toward St. Pancras church. A large round table in the center of the room was set for two, and a small fire burned in the grate. If the ordinary was at all edible, she would make a note of the tavern in her account of the day.
Mr. Larkin immediately took up a position at the window facing the old churchyard.
Viv put down her bag and removed her bonnet, cape, and gloves with quick efficiency. They’d had little more than a day’s acquaintance and already she understood that he was stubborn and determined to conceal his injury. She had been trying to judge his mood since he’d met her at the Wollstonecraft grave. Something had sobered him, though perhaps it was only the wound in his side. He was dressed with the same unobtrusive elegance as before with just a hint of flash in the burgundy silk waistcoat he wore. Her Mr. Larkin did like his finery.
“How is your wound?”
He turned that blue gaze on her. “It smarts some,” he said.
“Let me look, then. Just to be sure you’ve not undone the doctor’s work.”
“The doctor’s work?” He quirked one dark brow.
She reached for his waistcoat buttons, and their hands met. The contact jolted her. Her gaze locked with his, until the intensity of it made her pull back. He really was a difficult patient.
“You must not suppose that I make a habit of undressing gentlemen,” she said.
“Just the ones you’ve shot, or the ones to whom you’re betrothed?” He continued unbuttoning the waistcoat.
“Well, you wouldn’t need nursing at all, had you not insisted on following me about London. I hardly need a protector. I’ve been managing on my own for months.”
He spread the edges of the waistcoat and tugged the lawn shirt free of his trousers, turning to present his side for her inspection. “All the more reason for me to worry as you seem indifferent to your safety.”
Viv peered at the place he’d bared in the folds of white lawn, where smooth, pale skin covered the ridge of his ribs. He was neatly made, his flesh taut and spare, nothing like the feminine softness she was used to seeing. She concentrated on the wound. His valet had not changed the dressing, and the edges of the plaster curled up around the place she’d shot him. She took a step closer, nerving herself to touch him. There was no sign of redness or swelling. With her fingertips she smoothed the plaster back into place, pressing against warm flesh and solid bone. She did not think he breathed. She needed him talking, sparring with her. She stepped back. “I suspect you worry more about the proprieties.”
“That, too, but a man can’t be indifferent to the safety of his betrothed.”
“You like saying that word, don’t you?”
“Does it bother you? ”
“For a man who passed his newly returned ring from one woman to another on the same afternoon, you seem remarkably attached to the idea of our…connection.”
“Merely doing my duty.”
“You needn’t worry. I am perfectly capable of protecting myself from danger.”
“It’s the danger to the gentlemen of London, I fear. You see I’ve worn burgundy today.” He waited until she met his gaze. “I’m sure this waistcoat can handle bloodstains.”
“You are absurd. I’m not going to shoot you again. The danger is that our betrothal will be exposed as a sham. The Strydes delight in bringing people down. Scandal is their…meat.” She stepped back to let him restore his clothes to rights. “What we need is a signal between us.”
“A signal?” He turned away.
For a moment the only sound in the room was cloth sliding against cloth. Viv swallowed, suddenly conscious of the intimacy of those little rustlings. She liked how he was constructed, how the easy elegance of his clothes revealed his form. She had not been embarrassed to examine his wound. Nursing, after all, was a woman’s province. Only now did she feel she had overstepped some boundary. She dragged her mind back to the problem of a signal. “More like a code, a word you can say, or I can say, when the other is getting us into dangerous conversational waters.”
“What do you mean?” He turned back to her, his hands working the waistcoat’s tiny buttons.
Viv’s gaze narrowed to his hands. Her brain took a little nap. She had hardly slept, trying to see a way out of their sham betrothal. Now she could not remember why it had seemed so important. When her brain woke again, he was watching her, and she remembered what she had been about to say.
“We need a signal for moments like the one when you produced your duke, like a parlor conjurer pulling a dove out of an empty hat. Shouldn’t I, as your betrothed, know about the duke, who, according to your account, provided me with a copy of The Spanish Brothers ?”
“Ah, good point.” He looked anything but worried. “You’d best tell me your story, then. Leave nothing out.”
“As you should tell yours to me.”
“Ladies first.”
Viv meant to resist him, to make him tell his story, but the landlord returned with a waiter. A little bustle ensued of setting covered dishes on the table and pouring drinks. The ordinary was a baked sole with roasted potatoes and a green pea soup. The mingled scents of still-warm loaves and freshly brewed coffee filled the little room. When the inn people withdrew, they ate in silence until Viv decided she must start the conversation.
“Very well. I’ll go first, though there’s little to tell. My father died at Waterloo on the day I was born. He was Lieutenant Richard Bradish of the 95th, and he died defending La Haye Sainte. Needless to say, his family found a living girl-child a poor substitute for a dead hero. My mother kept to her mourning couch at my grandparents’ estate until obliged to seek sympathy for her style of grieving elsewhere. We changed house often until she met an invalided navy man, Captain Frank Pennington. They married, settled in Weymouth, and quickly produced my four half-sisters. As making a low income go a long way is not my mother’s greatest strength, my sisters and I have become…resourceful.”
She watched his face for signs of judgment or pity, but he seemed to regard his fish with more interest than her story.
“What are your sisters’ names?” he asked.
It was not what she expected. “Pippa, Charlotte, Anne, and Eliza. Anne and Eliza are twins.”
“And how did you come to be in Lady Melforth’s employ?”
“Nearly two years ago, my aunt Louisa, my father’s youngest sister, took me to stay in Bath for a time as her companion. We met Lady Melforth, who had returned to England for medical treatment for her injured foot. At first, she thought the waters at Bath might serve, but soon found she required a London physician. Her relations, the Strydes, insisted that she hire a companion, and she asked my aunt if she could spare me, and I was hired. I consider myself most fortunate.”
He put down his fork and took a swallow of coffee, as if he’d not been listening at all.
“Waterloo.”
“Waterloo?” She didn’t follow.
“That must be our signal.” He lay his napkin on the table.
“What? We’re supposed to bring up Waterloo whenever there’s a risk of exposure? How are we to do that?”
“Simple. Suppose Mrs. Stryde wants to know something about your impression of the duke and you feel trapped. ”
“Yes?”
“You say the duke collects Waterloo prin ts, and I take over. Or suppose I’m confused as to which of your four sisters, Pippa or Charlotte, is keener about playing the pianoforte, and I ask—”
“—is Pippa the musician or the mad historian, always going on about Waterloo?”
He grinned at her, his eyes full of merriment. He was enjoying their situation. He was not the one who might be exposed and sacked. “It’ll work, won’t it?”
At that moment the landlord returned to ask whether they required anything else. Mr. Larkin rose instantly and excused himself to deal with the bill. As he stepped through the door, the landlady appeared to show Viv to the necessary, and she collected her things. It was all done in the most gentlemanly of ways, but he had not told her his story. Viv knew she’d been outmaneuvered.