Chapter Ten
L ark watched her go with her chocolate silk bonnet and purposeful stride. When she reached the first crossing, it required a fair bit of resolution to turn the other way. He told himself that no real harm could come to her. There were men who might misread her singleness as vulnerability or an invitation, and he had seen a few pretenders to fashion who might approach her. But he hadn’t spotted anyone on the game.
Oxford Street was familiar territory to him now. In the months since the fire, he had established himself as a regular in places like the West End Dining Room by the habit of stopping in for coffee and a roll and reading the papers. Still, he caught himself in front of a silk warehouse window, lost to his surroundings. His mind followed Viv. He pictured himself in the upper gallery of the Pantheon, looking out for her, watching to catch her reaction to the place.
He laughed at himself. He had tried to teach her something of his street-wise way of moving in London, but here he was, forgetting basic lessons in wariness that he’d learned as a boy under Dav. At least he was not fool enough to pull out his watch to check the time. The day was mild, and an hour was not so long.
He stuck to his promise. He strolled west, crossing and turning east again only when he reached the end of Oxford Street. He was looking ahead down the walkway, hoping to spot her approaching him, when at Shepherd’s Street, a body slammed against his, sending him reeling into the shadows of the byway, careening against a brick wall. His ribs screamed, and his hat went flying. He caught himself against the wall and turned to face his assailant.
From the middle of the lane, Rook glared at him, chest heaving, heavy fists balled at his sides. He was dressed as Lark had never seen him, in a brown wool sack coat and black tie, like a clerk in an office, his hair cut, his beard trimmed, and above all not reeking. In the shadows Rook looked almost respectable, as if he’d quit the game, but his angry bewildered face told another story. There was no one else about.
“What are ye playing at?” Rook demanded. “Ye think yer better’n me. Ye think ye can go places I can’t.”
Lark straightened. Any chance that his new appearance signaled a change in Rook crumbled like a snuffed candlewick. Sharp needles of pain pricked Lark’s injured side. “I told you I don’t do clicks. I’m about to go for coffee. Join me.”
Rook shook his head. “I saw you with her, with the mark. Wot’s yer new game?”
“No game,” he said, and a preposterous idea popped into his head. I am going to marry her. It had to be wrong. The wall opposite was plastered with posters, advertising the great spectacles in London’s theaters— The Fall of Pompeii , Tom and Jerry , Madame Vestris’ Tableaux Vivant . The grandiose posters mocked the idea that his engagement was real. He was having a lark, like his name, playing at being betrothed.
Rook thrust his face forward. “Yer no gentleman. Ye don’t belong here. This isn’t our pitch.” Rook shoved Lark against the wall. “I’m yer partner, not some bird ye just met.”
Lark steadied himself. Under the anger, he heard the cry of betrayal. In the bewildered face, he saw hurt. “We can be partners again if you want. Let’s go to Dav. He’ll help us start a new enterprise.”
Rook’s lip curled. “Enterprise? Yer daft. We do prigs and clicks. We don’t know ’ow to do naught else.”
Lark didn’t answer. He didn’t say that he did know. He knew quite well how to invest small sums that paid off handsomely, and then larger sums, how to play a long game, how to keep money in the bank, instead of in a hole under the floorboards. Rook had never been interested in Lark’s ideas about making money from money.
“Ye don’t belong with ’er. Her kind is not our kind. Ye think she’s better than Liza? Ye think there’s something different under those fancy blue skirts of ’ers?”
Lark threw a punch, trained, accurate, measured. It connected with Rook’s nose and snapped his head back. Rook’s hand flew to his face. He stood stunned for a moment, his brow furrowed, his brain clearly slow to comprehend what Lark had done. With the back of his hand, Rook wiped the blood away.
“’Liza’s better than you think she is,” Lark told him.
The remark launched Rook at him. Lark countered the flurry of punches, random but heavy with anger, until one fist connected with the wound in his side. His consciousness dimmed, his knees gave, and he fell back against the bricks and caught himself.
Rook dropped his fists and stepped back. “Ye can’t quit on me for some toffy-nosed skirt. I won’t let you.”
“Quit with me, if you want to be partners again.” Lark knew as he said it that Rook would never take the offer. Rook had found his place in London. He was who he was. He did not search as Lark did for a lost self he was meant to be.
“I warn ye. Keep shut of ’er, or… or… I’ll tell ’er who ye really are.” Rook shook a fist and turned away.
The attack was over. Lark leaned back against the wall, his ribs rising and falling like bellows pumping air, his side throbbing with each gusty breath. He reached for his handkerchief and ran it over his face. The linen caught a small bit of blood from the inside of his lip. He pushed himself from the wall. A rush of energy flooded him, but he knew it would pass. He brushed himself off and straightened his tie. His hat lay on the stones a few feet away.
He took the necessary steps, one at a time, and then laughed at himself. He could not bend down for the hat. He put his hand against the bricks and bent his knees until he could just reach the hat. He dusted it off, straightened, and set it back on his head. He stepped back into Oxford Street, a few doors from the dining room. He did not see Rook, but he wanted to make sure that Rook did not find Viv. Rook was not likely to hurt her, but he would make good on his threat to expose Lark.
At the Pantheon, the porter let him in without a second look. He passed from the entrance porch through the vestibule with its sculpture display, and up a flight of steps, through the galleries to the upper story. The wound in his side objected to the stairs, but he gritted his teeth and kept going until he could look down on the crowded main floor below.
A throng of ladies and gentlemen moved through aisles created by the island-like counters with their array of goods. Gentlemen’s black hats and ladies’ fashionable balloon-like sleeves made a shifting pattern below, like a dance. Relief rose up in him when he spotted Viv’s plain dark bonnet. She moved from millinery to lace to gloves, and he realized she was being followed, not by Rook, but by a twig of a man in a pair of lavender gloves. From his gallery vantage point, Lark could not tell whether Viv noticed the fellow at all. At a fourth counter, she at last made a purchase.
Unexpectedly, she looked up. He was not quick enough. She spotted him.
*
Viv marched up the steps to the Pantheon’s upper gallery, fueled by a spurt of hot anger. She had been thinking how helpful he’d been and how grateful she was that he’d led her to Oxford Street. Now that he had broken his promise not to follow her, her distrust of him returned.
He stood, one hand on the rail, looking the picture of gentlemanly ease, nothing exaggerated in his dress, unlike the excess in many of the men around her in the bazaar. As she drew near, she realized that his easy elegance was an illusion. His face had a drawn look, and something was wrong with his mouth. She suspected that he needed to hold onto the rail. “We were to meet at the West End rooms.”
“We can go together,” he said. “You must want to put some thoughts in your notebook.”
“You promised not to follow me.”
“I spotted a fellow in lavender gloves dogging your steps…”
“Oh him. I saw him. A pickpocket, do you think?” She kept her tone light, but she wondered whether his wound was bothering him. There was a stiffness to his posture as if he had made some fragile truce with pain.
“Not in lavender gloves.” He laughed, and winced. “Did he attempt to speak with you?”
“No. I thought he was someone’s footman. He had that look of waiting for direction.”
“It’s a poor footman who neglects his own mistress to follow a stranger. Shall we go?”
“Something’s happened to you.” With one gloved finger she touched the corner of his mouth. She drew her finger back. There was a tiny dot of blood on the tip.
He gave her a tight smile. “I met a fellow who didn’t like my hat. He knocked it off me. I had to set him straight.”
“In Oxford Street? Didn’t you say that that sort of thing didn’t happen here?”
“It was unexpected,” he said.
She tried to read his expression and knew that he was concealing whatever had really happened. “He hit you.”
“But he lacked science.” He straightened away from the rail, but it looked to Viv as if the move cost him some effort.
“Science?” She didn’t know the term .
“Skill, training.”
“And you are a judge of that sort of thing?” She moved to his side to take his arm.
“As it happens, it is one of the things the duke insisted we learn.”
Viv thought we was an interesting word, but she did not press him. “So, all in a day’s work for a duke’s secretary, a bit of leisure and some violent amusement?”
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“I’m just trying to understand who you are.”
“You know who I am. I’m your betrothed, and your partner in these London expeditions.”
“Perhaps,” she said. “I do thank you for directing me to Oxford Street. I have lots to write about what I saw today. But first, if you can manage, I think we’d better get you sitting down.”
“If you insist. I’m curious. What did you buy?”
“Ribbons for my sisters. To trim their hats, a bargain.”
*
After the decorative exuberance of the Pantheon Bazaar, Viv found the West End coffee room sober. A clock hung on one wall and hat rail ran around the room above the dark wooden partitions of the booths. The scents of coffee, warm bread, and faint tobacco mingled. Most of the guests were single gentlemen immersed in their newspapers. But at one of the tables in the center of the room, a lady and her daughter, who looked to be the age of Viv’s youngest sisters, the twins, Eliza and Anne, held a quiet conversation with the child’s elderly nurse. Viv wanted to applaud the lady’s serene assurance. From somewhere in the back of the premises came the clatter of pots and murmurings of the staff. A prompt waitress smiled at Mr. Larkin in a familiar way and showed them to a booth. He hung his hat on the rail, and Viv removed her bonnet, cape, and gloves. She pulled out her notebook and pencil. “I should make my notes,” she explained.
He took up the Morning Chronicle . “You write. I’ll read.”
She wrote rapidly, trying to capture her impressions. The street was changing; shopping itself was changing. A shift was happening, so that the merely practical business of finding necessities was giving way to a form of seduction. Goods were displayed in playful abundance. In the bazaar, women with their wide skirts moved between the counters like ships navigating narrow straits, stacks of little luxuries making irresistible siren calls as they passed.
Viv considered what she should say to readers. Whatever the rules of female movement on the street, the shops were meant to give women pleasure and stir their senses. In the Pantheon a counter girl urged Viv to see the ladies dressing room area. Few public places considered a woman’s need for a few minutes to put herself to rights after shopping. The story she wanted to tell was the story of the smart female shopper, who could steer her way through such enticements without getting caught staring, or dreaming of things beyond the capacity of her purse, and who was not so lost that she failed to attend to the perils of unwanted male attention.
Viv had encountered the sort of man to avoid. He had fallen into step with her, observed that she was alone, and insinuated that her singleness meant she was inviting male company. She wished for an umbrella with which to whack him. He looked something like a jacket-wearing turnip. She leveled a critical look at his striped trousers and embroidered green waistcoat, and suggested that he find a new tailor. He abandoned all semblance of gentlemanly behavior and called her a bad name. Now she needed a name for him. Perhaps, Wickersham .
She put down her pen and shook her writing hand. Mr. Larkin lowered his newspaper and watched her. She reached for her coffee, and found it cold. She had plainly lost track of time, but he hadn’t interrupted. “How long have you been waiting for me to stop?”
He signaled their waitress to bring a fresh cup. “I had my newspaper to occupy me.”
The waitress replaced Viv’s old coffee with a quickness and eagerness to please that brought to mind an unwelcome memory of Viv’s stepfather. Captain Pennington never lingered over his coffee and paper without demanding a dozen little attentions from her mother and sisters. They were always on the jump to bring him another slice of toast, more jam, his pipe, and a penknife he used to work at his fingernails. Then, after all their efforts, he would shove back his chair, scraping the floorboards, and announce that he was going out for coffee.
She took up the fresh cup of coffee and glanced at Mr. Larkin over the rim. He had none of her stepfather’s restless impatience, and he was good at not drawing attention to himself.
“What?” he asked .
She put down her coffee. “Your lip is swelling, I think.”
A fleeting expression crossed his face that she could not read. She expected him to touch the lip, but he didn’t. He was keeping whatever had really happened to himself.
She took another sip of coffee. She had called him Winkworth in the little sketch she’d written of their meeting, but the name didn’t suit him. With most of the people she put in her stories, she seized upon some element of the person’s looks or dress that lent itself to caricature, a prominent feature, an outlandish bit of clothing, a mannerism or affectation. Her pretend fiancé was assured and self-contained. She hadn’t found any obvious vanity in him except perhaps in his claim to know London particularly well. And that might be the result of his history, but when she thought about his story it all seemed too convenient, too like a fairy tale—the absent family, the undemanding job, the implausible past in which he’d been orphaned and then educated and provided for by a duke.
She turned her notebook around and slid it across the table. He’d had a chance to study her without her notice. She wanted a similar chance. “Will you give it a glance?”
His dark brows went up. He pushed his coffee away and drew the little notebook closer. “You’re sure?”
She nodded. “Did I get it right, do you think?”
“You want my opinion?”
“You’ll give it whether I want it or not.” That drew a smile.
He turned the pages, his eyes lowered to her notebook. Over the rim of her coffee cup, she studied him. He moved about London with extraordinary freedom. He had changed her way of going about her researches. She had set out to find the stories that each street had to tell, but he made her realize that she was writing from an observer’s perspective and not as one who was part of the scene itself. That seemed to be his particular quality. He was part of London, at ease there. He was a people watcher like her. He had spotted the man in lavender gloves, but while she had seen the gloves as a mere affectation, he had understood that a pickpocket would not call attention to his hands with purple gloves.
It was fanciful to think, but she wondered at the sequence of events that led to their odd partnership. She fully believed there to be elements of design in the marvelous workings of the universe, but she did not imagine that the grand scheme of things had been arranged to give her the chance to write her stories with a promise of publication. Every step of the way from her aunt Louisa’s invitation to accompany her to Bath and to meeting Lady Melforth in the Pump Room to the Strydes’ insistence on Lady Melforth’s hiring a companion for her stay in London was a forward momentum in Viv’s life utterly unlike her Weymouth days. Meeting Mr. Larkin in Babylon Street seemed no more remarkable than the rest of the story. It had all worked to Viv’s advantage. Now she wondered what steps had led him to that meeting and what he was getting out of their bargain.
He looked up at last, his hand resting on the notebook. “You don’t think female shoppers wish to be seduced?”
“I don’t. No one wants to be…worked upon, to be buying who knows what because of the setting or the sheer abundance of goods. One wants to be in charge, making one’s decisions based on one’s actual needs and one’s purse. ”
He straightened a little and pressed his free hand to his wounded side.
“Did your assailant hit you in the ribs?” she asked.
“We were talking about seduction,” he said.
“We are talking about shopping, sensible shopping, about knowing one’s needs and one’s means and making purchases accordingly.”
“You’ve never been seduced in Weymouth?”
“In Weymouth?”
“When the sky is blue and white clouds drift by and the sun sparkles on the sea and warms your face and the air is fresh? Can you tell me that on such a day, you’ve never closed up your book, put away your pen, and walked nowhere, anywhere, just to be part of the day?”
“Of course, I love—” She stopped and looked conscious of falling into his trap.
He stood and extended a hand to help her up. “Then you’ve been seduced,” he said.
“And you,” she said, “have reopened that wound.”