Chapter 29
I’d shared sleep since I could recall.
For years, I’d had Sarah in the same bed and my mother close by, snoring thickly.
Sarah slept the way she lived, more quietly than I, though often I’d wake to find some part of her touching me—a hand on my shoulder blade, a foot on my shin.
After Ma died, Sarah and I shared a bed in the lodging house, and later, after Sarah left to work in Mayfair, I slept alone in my bed, but still in a room with Mary, whose whistling snores sometimes worked their way into my dreams.
But I’d never woken up to a man until now, for I’d taken to spending one or two nights each week with James.
It was a Sunday morning, and neither of us had a reason to rise early. James’s face was soft in sleep, his dark hair tumbled, his lips parted.
My own mouth felt hot and tender from last night’s kissing. I shifted my limbs cautiously, remembering James’s hands on them and feeling a pleasant heat run over me at the memory of it.
I might have stayed there just to watch his face, but practicalities intruded.
I slipped out of bed and found the chamber pot. Using it is one of the few things I cannot do stealthily, and when I crept back, I found him watching me, his eyes still sleepy and a grin on his face.
“You weren’t thinking of sneaking off, were you?” he asked.
“No,” I retorted, climbing back in under the quilt. “Not without my morning tea, which you’re going to make for me, seeing as it’s bloody cold in this room.”
He drew the quilt up over both of us, rolling so his body covered mine. “It’s not so cold,” he said. “I’ll make your tea later.”
We’d loved and dozed until we could no longer ignore the sun blazing through the window. His hand rested on the sheet, and the light was enough I could see a scar on his thumb that I’d never noticed.
“Seems you have scars all over you, on every limb,” I said, kissing it. “Where did you get this one?”
“Ach,” he shrugged. “Wrapped a rope wrong way around a cleat a few years back. Wasn’t paying attention.”
“Hmm,” I said.
He began coiling a lock of my hair around his finger, like a bandage covering the scar.
“Mr. Stiles came by a few days ago,” I said.
“Oh?”
“He said he could find me a position as a costumer at a theater. It was kind of him, but I don’t want to sew for my living.”
“I can see that.”
“And Sarah and Mary are happy as clams in the shop, but I can’t imagine standing at a counter all day, talking to strangers, fetching tea and helping them with purchases.”
“It’s going well, isn’t it?”
“They’ve already installed a second oven for Mary.” I drew a breath. “From what Sarah says, their tearoom is crammed from opening to closing.”
James nuzzled into the warm spot between my bare shoulder and my neck.
“But I’ve been thinking,” I said, pushing him away so I could sit up. “Do you think the Mirror might take me on?”
James propped himself on an elbow, palming his temple. “The newspaper?”
“Mr. Fuller owes me a favor, don’t you think?” I asked. “And there’s a woman working there. I spoke to her. She’s not much older than I am. She has an office right near him, and she was writing.”
Understanding lit his eyes. “You mean to write stories for them.”
“Well, I don’t mean to be hawking them on the street.”
He laughed. “I didn’t think so. Scandal, scandal.”
I rolled my eyes. “Sometimes the truth is scandal enough, and there are plenty of things I could write about that they might be able to use.” I studied James’s face, and to my relief he wasn’t laughing.
“It would be a new game for me, but I think I could reuse some of the cards I picked up during my last one.”
“Would seem so.”
“Mr. Fuller could steer me in the proper direction.”
“I’d think he’d be glad to have you.” He took my hand in his own and raised it to his mouth to kiss my bare fingers, one by one, in a way that shredded my breath to nothing. “Clever girl.”
James walked me to the offices of the Mirror, left me at the front door, and went to a pub nearby to wait.
I entered through the heavy wooden door. Recent rain had swelled it, so it stuck in the frame, but I pushed harder and it gave way.
I took it as a good omen.
At the desk sat a young man scribbling on a page in front of him.
“What’s the name of the young woman who works here?” I asked.
“Miss Mitford,” he replied without looking at me.
“Is she in?”
“Dunno.”
Clearly, he didn’t think much of her. And nothing of me. Well, that was no matter. Most men wouldn’t admire Miss Mitford for what she was doing or welcome another woman newspaper writer.
However, I wasn’t disheartened. This wouldn’t be the first time I’d made my way into a place I didn’t belong and left with what I wanted.
“Can I go up?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Please yourself.”
I walked up to the first story, where the typesetting room was noisy with chatter and the click of metal type into lines.
I poked my head in to watch for a moment, liking the very smell of the metal and ink and the busyness of it all.
As I watched, the press started belowstairs, beating a steady thump.
It gave me the odd fancy that I had placed my fingers on the very heart of London, the pulse of life in every borough, the tide of the Thames, the turn of the railway wheels.
Motion, all of it—people everywhere, waking to their cold rooms or to the sound of curtains being drawn by servants, selling fruit from their carts or buying it to feed their children, offloading barrels from a French ship or sipping tea brought from India.
Most of us simply wishing to keep ourselves and those we loved safe and warm and well-fed, wanting to find our place, to feel we belonged, to believe that when we spoke, it mattered.
I took the stairs and followed the hallway. When I reached Miss Mitford’s door, it was open. Her head was bent over a pamphlet, the toe of her boot jiggling under the desk as she read.
I knocked on the doorjamb, and she looked up in surprise. Then her face transformed with a smile. “Ah, the girl with a story.”
“Kit Jimeson,” I said. “And you’re Miss Mitford.”
The chair scraped as she stood and stuck out her hand cordially across the desk for me to shake. “Frances.”
“I was wondering what you’re writing about.”
She turned the pamphlet upside down on the desk, tenting it to hold her place, and pointed to the chair by the wall, which I pulled toward her desk so I could sit.
The wooden chair creaked as she resumed her seat. “At the moment, I’m writing an article that concerns meat that is improperly butchered and prepared, leading to disease. Mostly I report on social problems.”
“Women write those stories?”
“Of course. Why not?” she asked. “Have you not heard of Eliza Meteyard? Frances Power Cobbe? Mary Howitt? They all write for the papers. There’s an entire cadre of us and more each year.”
“I don’t know the word ‘ca-dray,’” I admitted, grinning. “It sounds vaguely improper, like a ring of thieves.”
She laughed. “Rather, though I suppose we like to think of ourselves as doing good rather than harm.”
“I didn’t realize women did this, until I saw you here.”
“Well, we women can often get stories the men can’t,” she said frankly. “We’re not so intimidating, so people talk to us. But it isn’t for the faint of heart.” Her expression sobered. “I’ve been threatened twice by managers at the slaughterhouses for what I’ve written so far.”
“I can imagine.”
She studied me. “Are you looking for a position?”
“Yes,” I said simply.
“You can read and write, I assume?”
I bristled a bit. “Of course.”
“No offense meant,” she said, amused. “Which papers do you read?”
“The Dover Chronicle, the Kent Advertiser, the Canterbury Journal, the Daily News, the Standard, the Times, Reynolds’s, the Falcon—”
Her eyebrows rose. “So many? Why?”
“I’m from Elephant and Castle,” I said, thinking of the six roads converging, not to mention the railway bringing people and news from all over England. “All the papers come there.”
Her eyes narrowed, then sparkled, as she put this bit of information together with my allusion to the ring of thieves. “Ah.” Her mouth crooked in a funny smile as she sat back and folded her arms across her chest. “Tell me a bit more about yourself.”
I told her a quarter of an hour’s worth of truth, with her startling at parts and chuckling at others. At the end, she smiled in satisfaction and rose from her desk. “You certainly have the knack of telling a story. And I assume Mr. Fuller would vouch for your character?”
I wondered about that, but I nodded as if I was certain.
She marched around her desk. “Come, shall we go and see the editor, Mr. Murdaugh? I believe he shall be intrigued.”