Chapter Nine
I n the morning, Lark met Viv in front of Lady Melforth’s house. London stood gray and solid under a pale blue sky except where a few fearless blades of grass had sprung up between the paving stones. The prolonged spell without rain had dried the usual muck of the streets, and passing vehicles stirred up dust. “No carriage?” he asked. “Where are we off to today then?”
“Shopping.” She pulled on her gloves. “No woman is at home in a city until she knows where to find the things she needs for her household or her work.”
Lark thought that only Viv would mention work in that way, as something a woman would inevitably have. They were a short walk from three great shopping streets. “What things did you have in mind?”
“Everything from linens to pressed paper,” she said. “So, if you have any manly objection to choosing textures and patterns, you may leave me to it.” She set off toward Cavendish Square.
As they passed the plain brick St. Peter’s Church, he let her outpace him. He admired the tilt of her chocolate silk hat above the intertwined coils of her hair, and the set of her dove-colored cape on her shoulders. Today, printed blue cotton skirts rustled with her quick stride. She was everything neat and contained. In a vivid flash he saw her at her dressing table that dark, honey-colored hair spilling down, hair pins scattered on the carpet, a silk wrapper loose around her. He corrected the vision at once. Viv’s pins would be in a little porcelain dish. The blue silk wrapper would be properly tied at her waist.
He guessed that in her head she was leagues ahead of him, peering in shop windows, opening doors, examining goods for sale. “Your method is wrong, you know,” he said.
She glanced back at him without slowing. “My method? What do you mean wrong?”
“If you always have an objective on your walks, how will you discover anything?”
She halted and turned, a look of strained patience on her face. He knew that look. He was sure that his own face wore it when he explained some obvious point that Rook refused to understand. “You enjoy provoking me, don’t you?” she said.
He shrugged. It was a new pleasure, an unexpected one. He couldn’t deny it.
“Do you have another method to suggest?” she asked.
“I do.” He caught up with her, and they started walking again, until she turned the corner at Holles Street. Abruptly, she stopped and whacked him with her bag, which, he noted, was not weighted with stones.
He laughed. “Do you want to hear my method?”
“Tell me.”
Lark was in no hurry. At Oxford Street he took her arm in his and turned them west. The long street, lined with hundreds of shops of every sort, dipped and rose toward the distant corner where in centuries past the Tyburn gallows had stood.
She pulled back in his hold, offering him a questioning look. “I was thinking of Regent Street. Oxford Street…is…”
“Vulgar, gaudy, beneath your dignity?”
“There are pickpockets, aren’t there?”
“Undoubtedly, but there are beadles to chase them away. You won’t need your pistol.”
She shot him a quick glare. “I know that.”
“Trust me, for shopping pleasure, Oxford Street is what you want.” He tugged her into motion again. “Regent Street jacks up its prices to convince buyers of the quality of its goods, and Bond Street pretends not to engage in trade at all, but merely to confer the mantle of fashion on the select few.”
He waited. He’d got her thinking, revising her plan. He counted on Oxford Street itself to draw her with the sheer energy of so many Londoners in motion. In the jammed roadway, the rattle and rumble of individual sets of wheels merged into a single roar. On the pavement the bustling crowd streamed and eddied, snagged by shop windows full of goods.
Once again old memories stirred. Years before when Lark returned to London from Dav’s country estate, Oxford Street, for all its bargains, had been above his touch. He and Rook had not been in the city a month before they’d sold the clothes Dav had given them to get their first room. Without those fine clothes, they had been out of place on Oxford Street, chased away, whenever they lingered, by shopkeepers’ clerks and beadles. Lark shook off the memories. He was no longer that boy. One of the benefits of their charade was that Lark could move freely among the most fastidious of shoppers even on Bond Street.
“First, slow down,” he told Viv. “You want to notice details. You want to become part of the scene.” Oxford Street was definitely a scene.
“Part of the scene? I’m an observer, a chronicler.”
“You say you want women to move freely about London without being targets.”
Viv nodded.
“So, they have to belong to the scene. They’ve got to be unhurried. It takes practice.”
He slowed their pace to a stroll. Her skirts barely whispered. He liked having a hold of her arm. It made them a pair. They passed a window with a hundred pairs of shoes laid out like a splendid banquet, the merchant confident that the demand of London was great enough for even a shoe seller to make a fortune.
“You know,” she said at a third window, “grazing cows in a field move faster than we’re moving.”
“Start noticing details.”
“You think I’m not good at noticing details?”
He held his gloved hand in front of her eyes. “How many flower sellers are pushing their barrows our way?”
She was silent, her lips sealed in a tight line. He resisted the impulse to brush his thumb over those lips. This was her concentration mouth. He liked her mouth in all her moods. “Three,” she said, a triumphant note in her voice. “There are two fellows with daffodils, and one with violets. And there’s a man in an odd green suit with a cart full of tortoises lying on a bed of grass. Did I miss anything? ”
He took his hand away. “Just a knife grinder.”
She laughed and let him lead her onward. They swerved around a crowd pressed to the window of a silversmith’s shop.
“Now you’re ready for step two.”
“And what is that?”
“You pick, at random, something you’re likely to find in the scene to guide your steps.”
“That sounds like an objective to me.”
“Not at all.”
“Enlighten me then.”
“Pick a number, a low number.”
“Three.” No hesitation from his Viv.
“Now I’ll pick a category of objects, say arched doorways, men in silk hats, or wild animals. After the third one, we take the next turn, whichever side of the street it’s on.”
“That’s simply wandering.”
He tilted his head her way, speaking confidentially. “It’s letting the city take you to places you didn’t know existed.”
“If I pick wild animals,” she said, challenging him as usual, “what happens to your game?”
He stopped, pulled her to the edge of the pavement, and pointed to the top of a building. A pair of beavers carved in stone faced the pointed center of the roof.
“No fair. You knew they were there.”
“I’ve played the game before. See that lion up ahead, on his stout stone column. We’ll turn there.”
“Very well, for the sake of the game,” she said.
At the lion, they turned into a narrow passage, and immediately left the crowd behind. On either side were neat dwellings, and at the end, a grand stone house with columns and pilasters surmounted by a tympanum where an ancient warrior in helmet and tunic grappled with a winged opponent.
In the little byway, Lark had no need to slow Viv. She was clearly charmed. They ambled to the end of the cul-de-sac to look up through bare branches at the imposing mansion.
She reached for her notebook. “Do you know anything about it? Who owns it? How old it is?”
“It’s for sale,” he said. “It’s not too old, maybe fifty years. A man built it for his bride, and she left him for another man.”
“You made that up.”
“I didn’t. The selling agent told me about it.”
Her brow furrowed. “Do you talk to selling agents for the duke?”
He’d slipped, forgetting for a moment that Edward Larkin was a mere secretary to a rich man. “If he asks me. I do read the papers and get curious. Buildings have histories, you know. Are you ready to shop?”
She held his gaze, letting him know that she was weighing his words, noting the inconsistencies in that little self-revelation. Her keen attention was a heady mix of wanting her to truly see him, Lark, the man he was under the gentlemanly attire and fearing that she would. He kept his expression bland. At last, she spoke. “Let me make a few more notes.”
He nodded, released from scrutiny. She wrote rapidly for a few minutes while he considered how to get her mind back on shopping. When she put away the little notebook, he offered his arm again.
“There are at least a dozen hosiers on the street, a straw bonnet maker, a corset and stay merchant, and one who sells brushes and combs. There’s a shop for ladies’ shoes and one for fancy French paper. What’s your preference?”
“French paper,” she said. “Have we stopped our wandering game?”
“Only while you purchase paper.”
*
Viv put away her notebook and accepted Mr. Larkin’s arm. They retraced their steps to the stone lion on Oxford Street. Once again, he puzzled her. What he did for the duke changed with each of their conversations. For a rich man’s secretary, he was knowing and haughty, and he probably rivaled his employer in finery. The little inconsistencies in his account of his employment reminded her of the earlier thought she’d had that he was perhaps an actor. But that couldn’t be right either because he seemed almost to own the city.
At the corner, Oxford Street’s incessant discordant rhythm recalled her to her task, which had nothing to do with the mysterious nature of her betrothed. Delivery van drivers urged their horses onward, angling this way and that, as they maneuvered past their fellows. The pavement pulsed with the staccato movement of passersby surging forward and stopping for shop windows. Oxford Street drew female shoppers with their billowing skirts taking up the walkway, but the atmosphere was far from that of Bath’s genteel, ladylike Milsom Street where Viv had shopped with her aunt.
Mr. Larkin was right that Viv had been relying on what she already knew of shopping. She had not been open to discoveries. Her plan to find and name a few reputable merchants for the readers of their guide looked like folly in the face of the sheer number of shops.
And it struck her as odd that no one appeared actually to buy anything. “Why does no one enter the shops?”
“Ah,” he said. “Looking is part of the game. Each shop preens a little, showing off its goods, asking you to linger and admire. It’s supposed to be pleasurable.”
“Pleasurable?”
They approached the corner of Holles Street. “How many shops did you wish to see?” he asked. “This is a nice stretch, a stationer, a tea dealer, and a chemist.”
He steered her to the window of the tea dealer. Through the glass, orderly rows of black and green canisters each more than a foot high lined open mahogany shelves. There was an artistic flare to the contrast between the neat jars, with their vaguely foreign markings and hand-lettered labels, and a porcelain tea set in blue and white laid out on a white cloth-covered table as if ready for a lady to pour. The shop window told a little story of goods coming from the distant East to grace an English table.
Viv had not thought of shopping as pleasure before her time in Bath. In Weymouth, she or one of her sisters would be dispatched by their mother to procure a needed item, urged to hurry, and directed to one of the shabbier shops away from the Esplanade where merchants catered to fashionable visitors. She supposed that those experiences had defined her idea of shopping.
She turned to him. “How can anyone choose? Generally, I’ve not had much patience for shopping. One wants a thing…”
“Tooth powder, soap, shoes?”
“Exactly, and one does not need or want a hundred pairs of shoes to choose from.”
He nodded gravely, but she detected a gleam in his eyes. “You want to enter a shop, look right, look left, make your purchase, and go. That’s your method?”
“Don’t mock. Someone needs to make sense of all this. A woman can’t spend all day wandering as you put it. One simply wants merchandise of a decent quality at a price that’s not too dear.”
“No more wandering then.” He turned from the window to look down the street. “What sort of shops do you want to see? And how many?”
Viv followed his gaze. On both sides of the wide thoroughfare, signs advertised goods of every sort. She could not possibly visit or catalogue all the shops she saw. The piece she had planned to write for the guide wouldn’t work. A few shops would have to give her the flavor of Oxford Street. “I will concentrate on shops that cater to women.”
“Milliners? Ladies’ shoe sellers? Hosiery and glove merchants?”
This time Viv tugged him into motion, turning them east. “Yes. All those, and a few more, but the main aim of this outing is to find out where a woman can shop without interference.”
“Without men annoying her, you mean.”
“Yes! I’m sure you, as a gentleman, can walk the length of Oxford Street without some woman following you or pestering you to talk with her and treating you as if you…” She let the thought trail off. She wasn’t going to explain it to him. She was too aware of his person. His mere presence stirred her in ways she did not wish to name.
“As if I what?”
“Knew things.”
“Oh, things . As it happens, I do know things .”
She risked a glance at him. He kept his gaze straight ahead. “Yes, but no one thinks the less of you for knowing them. No one imagines that you aren’t a gentleman, or that your person is an item for sale.”
“Are you proposing to walk the length of the street alone to discover whether some man thinks you know things ?” He sounded as if he thought her mad.
“Not necessary.” She pulled out her notebook again. “I just need to get a sense of the place to know what women shoppers will face. Give me the names of a few shops.”
“Which way are you going?”
She pointed east.
“Try the Pantheon Bazaar, then.”
She stopped. She had heard of the bazaar. Bazaars had become a sort of phenomenon in London, a place for merchants to sell their wares under one roof, while the organizer of the bazaar provided amenities like tea rooms and exhibits, dressing rooms and performances. The concept had its proponents and detractors. She would see for herself. “I will. Thank you.”
He frowned. “If any man bothers you…”
“No matter. I’ll handle it. Don’t follow me.” She set off.
“Don’t shoot anyone.”
She sent him another swift glare over her shoulder. He stood with his hand pressed to his side.
“I’ll give my ribs a rest,” he said. “Meet me at the West End dining rooms in an hour, Viv, or I will come looking for you.”