Chapter Thirty-Five
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
T HERE WERE COUNTLESS THINGS TO DO BEFORE T HE E MPIRE’S grand opening on Saturday. Thomas’s task list numbered in the dozens of pages—interviews to give and inspections to conduct and large, ribbon-cutting scissors to polish to a mirror-shine.
But ever since meeting Miss Evelyn Cross, Thomas fancied himself something of a tightrope walker, balancing his work on one side and his life with her on the other. As the pressures around the grand opening mounted and he faced the very real possibility of finally having that which he’d worked his entire life to gain, that balance tipped dangerously, threatening to topple him.
The problem, though, wasn’t the toppling.
The problem was that he didn’t care. He wanted to let the rope slip from beneath his feet, wanted to feel that stomach-flipping thrill of flying.
He liked her. He loved her. And it was those simple facts that changed everything.
That’s why Thomas had agreed to this silly expedition of theirs. She was doing what she did best: putting physical pleasures between them when things got too difficult. But he didn’t care. Not today. Not after that spectacle Alban had pulled with Constance and the press this morning.
He craved the pleasure of Evelyn’s company. And he would have it. What was the point, after all, of acquiring so much power if he were not allowed to indulge occasionally his basest whims?
Traveling through Manhattan at this time of day was never a simple business. Motorcars, carriages, horse-mounted gentlemen, walking ladies and apple men and truant children all fought for dominance of the street, meaning that Thomas had indulged Evelyn almost a full hour of carriage-hidden fumbling by the time their team of horses crept to its final halt.
The street to which she’d brought him couldn’t have been abandoned—nowhere in Manhattan was properly abandoned . There were simply too many people for that. However, it certainly looked that way at first glance.
Like so many streets in this city of theirs, the building facades stretched up toward Heaven and then, by concrete steps, descended past the sidewalks toward Hell. Evelyn chose the second path, practically hopping down toward a basement door painted with the words ALFONSO MORETTI’S ITALIAN SWEET SHOPPE .
The curtains on the windows were drawn. From the street, Thomas could see no signs of life from within.
“All of Manhattan’s wonders right at our fingertips and you’ve brought me to a basement ?”
“It’s not just a basement. It’s a racket. Typically, rackets are run by lousy social reformers, but this? This is one of the good ones.”
Nothing left to be done, Thomas followed her. “I thought we might take tea at a fine hotel or explore a museum. I hear there’s a fantastic whale skeleton on display at—”
“You’d rather look at whale skeletons than go spieling with me?”
He hadn’t a clue what spieling was. Not that it mattered. He knew he would do anything so long as it meant more time with her. So long as it replaced her false smiles and desperate hands with something real.
Evelyn knocked three times on the basement door. When three knocks answered back, she swung it open with practiced grace.
It didn’t look like any Italian Sweet Shoppe he’d ever seen. Probably because it wasn’t. It was an illegal, unsanctioned dance hall—the kind that regularly got raided for indecency by Evelyn’s dear friends in the municipal police.
By the dim electric lighting supplemented by a mismatch of candelabras haphazardly screwed into the walls, Thomas could just make out some of the room’s more noticeable features. A slapdash of furniture that now sagged under years of use. Along one wall, a bar had been constructed out of discarded shipping containers, the wood grain splashed with seawater and the packing labels from a dozen different countries. A heavyset bartender with a thick, scraggy beard—the eponymous Alfonso Moretti, Thomas could only assume—slung drinks into cheap tin mugs as a band played for dancers on a bare floor in the center of the room. All around, chairs and small tables had been set up I-style for the patrons, who alternated between low chatter and ecstatic dancing.
The crowd, too, was a strange one. Or it would have been if not for Thomas’s recent vaudeville education in all things bizarre. Men and women, men and men, women and women, triumvirates and groupings and everything and everyone in between. Mixed races, mixed classes, mixed faiths, mixed languages—they all found their way to this place.
Still, that wasn’t what made Thomas pause in the doorway. The strangers were harmless, after all. It was a flaw of his own that worried him.
“I’m not much for dancing.”
Evelyn slipped her hand into his. Warm. Reassuring. Sweet. “Good thing you’re with an expert. I’ll teach you.”
However, they barely made it two steps inside before a table of familiar faces waved them down.
Jules Moreau. His … partner? … Akio. And Beatrice Matterly. A trio whose excitement at seeing their friend vanished when they realized she wasn’t alone. She was alone with him .
“Well,” Beatrice said first, smiling tightly, “look who it is.”
“Ah, great minds think alike, don’t they?” Evelyn replied, leaning against a chip-paint wall. “Bea, shouldn’t you be home supervising the residents?”
“If everyone else is taking a day off, I don’t see why I shouldn’t.” Bea’s attention shifted to Thomas, then back to Evelyn. “I’ll have a glass of wine, if you would.”
Jules slipped Akio some pocket change before Thomas could even offer. “Darling, will you treat us to a round, please?”
It was only a harried moment later, when Thomas was alone with Jules Moreau and Beatrice Matterly, that he realized he’d just been hustled. Evelyn must not have been aware of it, as she chattered with Akio all the way to the bar, but Thomas, on the other hand, spotted the grift instantly.
He had nowhere to run. He was now at the very particular mercies of Evelyn Cross’s two best friends.
Who both looked beyond unenthused at his presence.
It didn’t take three guesses to understand why.
He cleared his throat. “I take it you’ve read the afternoon edition.”
Beatrice sniffed. “I don’t need any further excuse to dislike you.”
“But yes,” Jules interjected. “We’ve read it.”
Ah. This was a talking-to . “I suppose I should have seen this coming.”
“A man like you doesn’t have friends,” Bea said. “You’ve made that very clear. It doesn’t surprise me that you wouldn’t anticipate what friends might do for one another.”
The dig stung.
“And what is it that you’re here to do?”
“Help make this decision easy for you,” Beatrice replied, her face taut with deferred emotion.
“What decision?”
“To leave her.”
“Leave her?” Thomas balked. “Why would I do such a thing?”
Beatrice tossed her head. “Because you’re going to eventually. We’ve seen this story before, and Evelyn has gone out of her way to avoid being its main character. But here we are. In the middle of history repeating itself as farce.”
“I’m not going to leave Evelyn. I love her.”
The ease of that statement clearly caught his interrogators off guard. A moment of silence prevailed, broken up only by the wail of a mournful horn from the band across the room.
“You absolute fool,” Bea said. “You fell in love with her?”
“You ask that question as though it’s particularly difficult,” Thomas replied. “It was quite easy, in fact. Denying myself for so long was the difficult bit.”
Jules reached out across the table and took Thomas’s hand, a consoling, almost maternal gesture. “Friend—may I call you friend?”
Friend. Thomas wasn’t sure he’d had one of those since he was eleven years old. “If you like.”
“Friend, you are, without a doubt, the biggest imbecile on the planet, and if the matter didn’t concern our dear Evelyn, I might even adore you for it. However, as it is, it appears that Evelyn has profoundly broken her vow never to fall in love—”
Thomas’s entire universe snagged on that accidental confession. Warmth flooded his entire being.
“She loves me?”
Jules’s jaw dropped. “She hasn’t told you as much?”
“You just informed me that she couldn’t love,” Thomas said. “Why would she inform me of something everyone thinks is impossible?”
“A simple no would have sufficed,” Bea grumbled.
“No, then. She has not told me she loves me. Has she told you?”
“She doesn’t have to tell us.” Bea brushed imaginary dust from her gown. “Again, you don’t grasp what friendship entails, do you?”
“If our feelings are in such accord, then I fail to see why I’m being interrogated here. Do you want my credentials? Should I show you my accounts and assure you I’ll care for her the rest of our living days? Shall I read from the love letter in my pocket?”
Thomas might as well have just been crowned King of the World. He’d hoped—even suspected—that Evelyn loved him, but to have it close to confirmed opened up an entire galaxy of possibility.
Damn Alban. Damn the papers. Evelyn Cross loved him.
Beatrice didn’t share his optimism. In fact, she seemed hell-bent on destroying it.
“Do you love her enough to sacrifice everything? To reject a woman with the power to change your life as Constance Alban could? To love forever a woman who has nothing to offer you?”
It felt as though the drums from the racket’s band had taken up residence inside his own skull. His heart told him yes . Without question. He would marry her this very minute if she would say yes to such a proposal.
But years of trained feeling restrained him from answering out loud.
Bea took that as an admission. She laughed bitterly. “I didn’t think so. You are one of the wealthiest men in this city. In my entire life, I’ve never met a man with sharper elbows than you, and I was a mistress to a Fifth Avenue millionaire for most of my younger years. Your ambition gives you away, sir. That ambition means you will do anything to acquire and keep power. Even at the expense of your own heart. Or someone else’s.”
Jules added, “Listen, friend. We loathe the idea of accusing you of anything untoward.”
Bea snorted. “I do not.”
“We hate it,” Jules continued, sharper. “Because Evelyn has given everything for us, saved us from ruin and, to be frank, saved my life more times than I can count. She has been dealt such cruelties in this world. Please, don’t be another one.”
Bea nodded along, definitive. “If you love her, you should end this before it is ended for you.”
Thomas swallowed dryly. “Ended for me?”
“When, inevitably, you get an offer too good to pass up and you must leave her behind. Or when she becomes an embarrassment to you and your reputation cannot bear it. Whenever your vanities and your ambitions once again outweigh your so-called love for her.”
Bea said it as though it was all very natural indeed, as though she were reading prophecy.
This was it. The moment to decide. As he had decided to run away from England. As he had decided to reinvent himself. As he had decided to move to America. As he had decided that night to save Evelyn.
He understood the risks. He knew his options. And the choice was clear.
“I will say this and I will say this only,” he said at last. “I have glimpsed true love only once before in my life. It was like seeing a ghost—something you believe one moment and then chalk up to an overactive, youthful imagination the next. But with her, I wonder how I ever could have doubted. Love is real. I know this now, and I know it because of her. Because I am nothing without this love I have for her. So, no, Miss Matterly. Jules. I have no intention of letting Miss Cross go. My heart is hers as long as she will have me. I am not her father. I am not her endless string of lovers. I am not this world of ours that cast her aside. I am hers .”
Just then, Akio and Evelyn arrived with the round of drinks, but Thomas’s eyes never left Beatrice’s. Her stare communicated everything she no longer had the space to say out loud.
Evelyn handed Thomas a glass of soda water. “And what are you three hens clucking about?”
“Dancing.” He lied first, then told the truth. “And you.”
“My two favorite subjects. Shall we?”
When she smiled, even a false one such as that, Thomas quite forgot everyone else in the room existed.
“I should ask you,” he flirted, taking her hand and pressing his lips to her knuckles.
“Then, by all means,” she said.
His heart caught in his throat. Good God, she was so beautiful. “May I have this dance?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
As he rose and led her out to the makeshift dance floor, the band struck up a raucous tune. The sound bounced off the domed underground walls—so loud Thomas feared for the structural integrity of the place.
But even so, he managed to catch Jules and Bea reflecting on what had just transpired.
“Do you think he’s right?” Jules asked. “Do you think they’ll last?”
Bea’s response was as easy as it was grave. “No. Not a chance.”