Chapter Nineteen
B enjamin equipped Jack with a battered old cocked hat before they left, insisting his smart top hat would be out of place. Elenora had to agree with this, as even with this greasy monstrosity on his head, Jack, with his height and bearing, still looked every inch the gentleman and would stand out all too well where Benjamin was taking him. Fear that he wouldn’t be safe nearly overwhelmed her, but was overcome when she pictured Edward, terrified and alone with the rough men who’d snatched him.
Once Jack had the hat, Mrs. Sharpe prodded Benjamin out of the little sitting room, leaving Elenora, still seated near the fire, alone with Jack. Somehow, even though she’d been alone with him much of the afternoon and on the rush here, this lack of chaperonage now felt much more serious. She swallowed down her anxiety for Edward, and wondered what the situation called for her to do.
As the door closed behind Mrs. Sharpe, Jack took a few steps toward her, the expression on his face for once uncertain. He had the cocked hat tipped back at an angle that could have been called jaunty, had not the situation they were in been so serious. Despite her worries, she couldn’t help but notice how handsome he was.
On an impulse, Elenora rose to her feet as he approached her, unclasping her cold hands. She offered no resistance when he reached out and took them in his, the feel of them strangely warm and reassuring. If only he didn’t have to do this, but she knew better than to try to persuade him not to.
A frown settled on her face. If only she were a man herself, and could go with him to protect him, for she was certain above all things that he would need protection. And how odd it was to find within herself that instinct to protect someone who looked more than capable of protecting himself. And he was going in the company of a young man who knew the slums intimately. Surely he would be safe? Common sense, though, suggested he would not. She had to swallow again, as that persistent lump kept on rising to her throat no matter how hard she tried to quell it.
He drew her closer to him, his thumbs running over the backs of her hands in a disturbingly intimate gesture that once she would have shied away from. Now, she gazed up into his eyes, fighting the instinct to let her own drop to his mouth, as how much easier would that have been? How cheating. She owed it to him to look him in the eyes.
She surprised herself by what she could see. His handsome face was etched in pain, his eyes anxious, but something else lurked there too.
He licked his lips. “I’m going into danger tonight, as you well know. And I want you to know how much I appreciate your wish to aid me. I cannot take you with me, Elenora, not only because you are a woman, but also because I value you too highly. I cannot put you in the same danger as Edward.”
He valued her? She blinked a few times in confusion, unused to the notion of being valued. Did her family value her as this man, so recently a stranger, did? Perhaps only as the instrument of preventing their financial ruin. Jack could have no such ulterior motive.
“I wish I were a man, so I could come with you.” The words tumbled out.
The smallest wry smile twisted his lips. “I am heartily glad you are not.” He hesitated as though for once unsure. So unlike the man she’d been coming to know, the forthright, determined man. This was a different individual altogether. A man unsure of himself.
With difficulty, she kept her eyes on his, curious as to what he would say next, aware that he had something he very much wanted to unburden himself with.
The smallest of smiles twitched his lips. “For I could not do this if you were a man.” And he leaned toward her.
She had the briefest of moments as the realization that he intended to kiss her dawned. Not enough time to dodge, even, and present him with her cheek. And anyway, did she even want to if she could? What would a kiss from him be like?
Then his lips found hers, and the kiss, quick and hard, was over in a second. His lips were cool and out of instinct, she closed her eyes for that moment as she felt them press against her own closed ones. And then he was gone, leaning back away from her but still retaining her hands in his, eyes claiming hers.
Good heavens. Her eyes flicked wide in shock and her breathing quickened, for no one had ever kissed her before, not like that, on the lips. Her sisters had not even dared to kiss her on the cheeks. She’d made it well known to them she wouldn’t like it. Ever. And yet this had been… nice. She couldn’t, for the moment, think of another word to describe it. “Thank you.” That response felt decidedly inadequate, once said, and heat swarmed up her cheeks.
The wry smile returned. “Thank you for allowing me to do so. And when I return, with my son, I should like to kiss you again, if that would please you?”
She couldn’t find an answer. No words would come. All she could do was stare at him, quite forgetting how hard it was to look someone in the eye. And nod. Just the tiniest of nods, as she couldn’t be certain of what she wanted. Only that she’d liked him kissing her and that repeating it might spoil it.
He released her hands. “Mrs. Sharpe will keep you safe.”
The door banged shut behind him and she was alone in the tiny, cluttered sitting room.
The clock on the mantlepiece ticked so loudly it seemed to fill the small space, each tick echoing back at the next and bouncing around the papered walls.
He’d kissed her. A man, not any man, but Jack Deveril, the rake, had pressed his lips to hers. In a kiss. And she’d liked it. Her heart hammered at the restriction of her stays, thudding rhythmically hard and fast like never before, and she was still breathing fast. As though she’d been running, or more than that. Racing. Her legs suddenly weakened at the knees, and she sank down again onto the chair she’d just vacated, the heat of the fire unnoticed.
The door opened and Mrs. Sharpe bustled in. “A nice cup of tea with sugar is what you need, my dear,” were her first words. She leaned out of the still open door. “Ruth, make yourself useful and brew a pot of tea for Miss Wetherby, and bring it into the parlor.” She turned back to Elenora. “You’ve gone white as a sheet, miss. What you need is something to eat, I should think. Did you have any dinner tonight?”
Elenora could only shake her head. Was she about to disgrace herself and faint? Something she’d never done in her life, not even when she’d missed a meal at Penworthy due to some escapade. Mama had always advised her to take smelling salts with her wherever she went, but her reticule was sadly lacking in those supplies as she’d always pooh-poohed Mama’s words.
She’d never thought of herself as a girl given to fainting fits. Unlike Augusta, who indulged in them far too frequently for all of them to be genuine. She gripped the arm of the chair until her knuckles whitened and took steadying breaths. Had being kissed done this to her? Surely not? Was she as base and simple a creature as the vapid girls in Augusta’s favorite romance novels? Brought to this state by the touch of a man?
The kettle must have been hot, because the older of the two girls who’d been in the little parlor earlier soon arrived with a tray covered in a white lacy cloth and laid out for tea. When she’d set it on the round table beside one of the fireside chairs, Mrs. Sharpe dispatched her off to find bread and butter and cake. An air of distinct disappointment about her, shoulders slumped and tread leaden, the girl, who must have been Ruth, departed.
Mrs. Sharpe poured tea into two elegant china cups. “Do you take cream?”
Elenora nodded, busy trying to take unobtrusive but steadying breaths, her mind still a whirl.
Having added a generous serving of cream from a pretty china jug that matched the cups, Mrs. Sharpe handed a cup to Elenora, who took it with a trembling hand. The cup rattled so in the saucer Elenora had to set it down on the small table by her chair. Hopefully, her hostess hadn’t noticed.
Mrs. Sharpe, giving her guest a knowing glance, took the opportunity to stir several large spoonfuls of sugar into the teacup, unasked. “I can see you’ve had a shock, miss. This’ll put you to rights.”
Elenora managed a weak smile, shocked at how enfeebled circumstances had rendered her and chiding herself for not having more backbone. “Elenora. As we are to be thrown together tonight, I feel I should make you free of my name.” Why not? Mama would be shocked at her bestowing this liberty on someone of Mrs. Sharpe’s class, but who cared? Mama would be shocked at everything that had gone on this afternoon and evening, so why not shock her a bit more? Besides which, how would she ever find out this part of it?
Her hostess looked flattered at the suggested familiarity. “Why, thank you very much, miss, I mean Elenora. Martha’s my name and you’re very welcome to call me by it, especially with you being engaged to his lordship. I never thought I’d live to see the day. It’s a blessing you are. A blessing. He deserves to be happy and I’m sure you’ll make him so. You take a sip of your tea while it’s hot, Miss Elenora. The sugar’ll do you good.”
“Thank you, Martha.” Elenora sipped the hot sweet tea and did indeed immediately feel better. Odd how something so simple could have such an effect. But Mama always said tea was a pick-me-up in difficult times, and it seemed she was right. Elenora drained the teacup. “Might I trouble you for a second cup? I fear I’m quite thirsty after our hasty journey here through the streets.”
Martha’s kind brown eyes widened. “You come along the streets? In the dark? From his lordship’s house?”
Elenora nodded. “There was no time to call for his carriage, I suppose. We came as soon as we heard Edward had been snatched.” Fresh anxiety for the little boy coursed through her. “And I think Jack, Lord Broxbourne I mean, most likely didn’t want to turn up at your door in his carriage.” She managed to avoid the obvious for once—that his carriage would have looked out of place on this working class street. Or were they in the slums? Never having been in real slums, she had no idea. Although this street had appeared neat and tidy, which was not how she’d ever pictured slums.
Martha nodded, sagely. “His lordship thinks of everything.”
Ruth returned with a plate of large slabs of cake and one of thickly buttered bread, the few crumbs adhering around her mouth attesting to the fact she’d taken the opportunity to fortify herself in the kitchen. She bobbed a neat curtsy and made no effort to leave, but stood there, trying hard, perhaps, not to stare at Elenora.
“Sit down, Ruth,” Martha said. “And make yourself useful with that mending.”
Clearly delighted that she was to be allowed to remain, Ruth did as she was told and picked up her discarded sewing, but Elenora could recognize a girl making a pretense of work when she saw one, having done so herself so many times. What Ruth was really doing was being nosy.
“I’m that pleased to find his lordship’s found himself a lady,” Martha said, as she refilled Elenora’s cup a second time. “I’ve long said that’s what he needs. A mother for his little lad and brothers and sisters for him too, one day. ’Tisn’t right for a little lad to grow up with no other children around him.”
Elenora bit her lip, deciding to ignore this suggestion that she should provide Jack with children. The cake looked most inviting, and she was beginning to recover from the shock of being kissed. Martha, who must have been a mind reader, held out the plate. She took one of the large slabs of pound cake. Her favorite. “This is excellent cake. As you divined, I haven’t eaten since a small snack at noon. I’m feeling much better now, thank you, having drunk your excellent tea.”
Mrs. Sharpe took a piece of cake herself. Her figure betrayed the fact that she probably was fonder of eating cake than she should have been. “Now,” she said, settling back in her seat, “perhaps you might like to tell me all about yourself, Miss Elenora. I’m getting to be an old lady now, and I don’t get out of this house often, what with all the children in my charge. So I always likes to hear about other people, and now I know as you’re to marry our Lord Jack, I’d like to hear about you. If you don’t mind, that is.”
Elenora managed a smile. No, she didn’t mind at all, and perhaps talking would go some way to preventing her from worrying about Jack and Edward as she was doing right now. She set down her cup on the table, and dabbed her mouth with the corner of her napkin. Where to begin?
Ruth, whose ears must be fairly flapping, bent her head over her sewing, but Elenora caught her eyes slanting sideways. No doubt all of this would at some point be relayed to her friends here in Betterton Street.
Jack and Benjamin had left via the back door of the house, out into the little, stone-slabbed yard where the privy stood. Unlatching the gate, they let themselves into an alley, nowhere near so clean as the road itself, that ran behind this row of houses and the one backing onto it. A rat scuttled out of their way, and somewhere farther down a cat, who should have been chasing the rat, meowed plaintively. In the distance a dog barked, closely followed by a second, as if in answer.
“This way, milord,” Benjamin, who was holding a lantern, said.
Jack fell in behind the boy. “Best not call me that where we’re going. Jack will do just fine.” The boy nodded but said nothing, loping along like some long dog out after hares with Jack as the owner running him.
Betterton Street, despite its lower middle class pretensions, lay close by the rookeries of St Giles. Within minutes, they’d left behind the rows of neat brick houses and quiet streets which clerks and schoolteachers and office workers called home. St Giles, renowned as the most deprived area of London and from which Jack had rescued most of Mrs. Sharpe’s young charges, had changed little since Medieval times. As more people had flocked from the country into the city, it had only grown more congested. Whole families lived in single rooms with damp running down the walls, and whole buildings shared a single outdoor privy. Jack had been here before, of course, in the course of his activities in saving his orphans, but rarely in the dead of night and the cold of winter.
The stench, despite the cold, clogged his nostrils with an evil miasma of overflowing cesspits, piles of discarded rubbish and the general dirt of thousands of human beings crammed into a space better suited to hundreds. Rats scuttled everywhere, and worse things he couldn’t see.
Every time he came here, Jack was struck with how terrible a place it was and couldn’t wait to be out of it. If hell were to be found on Earth anywhere, it had to be here. Only now, this had to be where the men who’d taken Edward would have retreated to, secure in the knowledge that it would be nearly impossible for Jack to send Bow Street Runners after them. The Runners were brave, but not brave enough to enter the warren that was the rookeries of St Giles and the Devil’s Acre, down near Westminster Abbey. Jack would have to do that by himself. With Benjamin’s help, and hopefully with that of his father, who had his ear to everything that happened in the rookeries of London. If Reuben Sharpe didn’t kill him first.
Benjamin trod the filthy lanes as if born to them, which of course, he had been. When Jack had helped Martha Sharpe escape the clutches of her husband, eight years since, Benjamin had been a half grown boy of twelve, already entangled in his father’s web of crime, and it had been hard work to twist him free of it and into respectable employment at first at Smithfield Market, then later the docks. But he was strongly attached to his mother still, and had not, as far as Jack knew, reverted back to his old life. Although he’d kept in touch with his villainous father so that might well not be true.
Although the hour was not as yet late, the rickety wooden houses that grew like so much dirty fungus to either side of the lanes showed little light. Here and there a murky oil lamp hung to light their way along the foggy streets, and only the taverns on every corner seemed to show signs of occupation. Music and shouting tumbled out of their doors and into the streets, and sometimes drunken customers too. Down side streets dirtier and darker than the lanes lurked the destitute, the beggars, the prostitutes and thieves, all of them ready and waiting to fleece and rob any gentleman who might unwarily venture into their territory.
Jack kept a tight hold on his cane, glad of the pistols hidden in his coat, but either Benjamin’s presence kept them safe, or the people they passed were too lost in their own miseries to care.
Ahead loomed the shadowy bulk of Westminster Abbey, towering high above the mean streets that surrounded it. “We’re in the Devil’s Acre now,” Benjamin said over his shoulder, his voice a raspy whisper. “That’s where Pa’s based nowadays. Keep close, Jack.”
How could this fetid conglomeration of buildings, running with filth, exist a bare stone’s throw from something as glorious as Westminster Abbey? And Westminster Palace as well, along the banks of the Thames, had all of this lurking at its back whilst those in government, with their top hats and their carriages, went about their daily business all unknowing, or more likely ignoring, the immense suffering they’d turned their backs on. That people should have to live like this stuck in Jack’s craw as much as the stench of their homes did. Worse than the way the pigs were kept at Broxbourne Park. So much worse. No wonder they resorted to crime to feed themselves.
“Here we are, sir,” Benjamin said. “The One Tun.”
A dilapidated inn sign showing the dirty image of a barrel hung motionless above the street, where the buildings on either side leaned toward one another so much the sign almost touched the house opposite.
“This is where we gotta go. This is my pa’s alehouse.”
Jack nodded. Into the den of the man he’d bested eight years ago. A man who would not be happy to see him return. In fact, a man who’d promised to kill him if he ever saw him again. But that had been eight years ago…