Chapter 5
It took five days for Edward’s splitting headache to abate. Such was the cost of a hard nut and a hard truth.
Without the benefit of Tobi—Tabitha bringing him meat pies and ale during his confinement, the malaise dragged longer than usual before he could pull himself together and go outside for food.
He caught sight of Tabby at last while he stopped to fill her silver flask at a water pump in the Seven Dials.
Edward followed her down several streets undetected. At least his time in the army had amounted to something! It was when she crossed New Compton Street, heading further into the warrens, that he had to act, else maybe lose her forever.
It was the work of a moment to grab at her sack jacket.
She still wore the trappings of a lad. Perhaps that’s who she was, Edward had reasoned in his rooms during all those sleepless nights.
If fear of his reaction to such a revelation was keeping his friend away, he’d dismiss all that nonsense immediately so they could get back to having a grand time.
When Tabby turned, her face looked stricken, and terror entered her eyes.
“No, please,” Edward rasped, searching for the combination of words that would keep the urchin from bolting. He needed to say his piece.
Tabby was like a cornered animal, her back to a wall with Edward using the advantage of his height and size to block avenues for escape.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said. “Or expose you.” Edward tugged at the filthy little jacket to make his point. “I’d never do that.”
Still, Tabby didn’t speak. Her breath came in short bursts.
“Do you hate me?” she asked.
“Do I hate…now see here, T—”
Edward was closer now, his taut abdomen and lower chest crowding hers. They both seemed to struggle with the intake of air.
“What do I call you?” he asked.
She regarded him questioningly.
“I’ve had a miserable time, not least because I don’t know your name. I know Tobias. The doctor said Tabitha. But I reckon you know best.”
“You know what I am,” said the urchin, kicking his shoe hard. She did so with the fine boot Edward had given her, the rascal!
Edward’s grip on Tabby’s coat tightened. “Now see here, I’m telling you I don’t! I’m asking who you want to be. Who you are.”
“I wasn’t looking to make trouble for you,” said Tabby.
“I know you weren’t.”
A cart rattled by, and the driver gave the two ostensible gents standing rather close together a look. Edward pulled Tabby down Church Passage leading to St. Giles in the Fields so they could talk unobserved.
“I’m trying to make my way,” she admitted.
“Make your way?” asked Edward, loosening his hold as he felt his friend relax.
“Come up in the world. On my own,” said Tabby, her expression resolute.
“Why does it have to be on your own?” asked Edward, secretly sliding the silver water flask into Tabby’s coat pocket while she struggled with an explanation.
“We can’t be friends, not really, unless we’re equals,” said Tabby, her proud chin hard.
Edward was gobsmacked. “I’m a disgraced soldier who can’t sleep through thunderstorms,” he said, fully bewildered. “And what’s the equals business? I’ll be demmed if we can’t be friends!”
“It’s just the way the world works, Dick Stone,” said Tabby with a pitying look.
“Why in God’s name does it have to work that way?” he half-shouted, feeling adrift. “Because you have some”—he lowered his voice—“lady parts?”
“That, and I’m an adult,” said Tabby, suddenly wistful. “I’ve been telling you that since we met, but now you know. I can’t keep living off your breedings.”
“Why in fuck’s sake not?” asked Edward, his headache roaring back to life. “Plenty of people have associates. People who work under them and receive wages.”
“Yes, but everything has changed,” said Tabby, not without a note of longing.
“What’s changed?” asked Edward, feeling the reins of the conversation slip from his usually able fingers. “Nothing’s changed. Nothing. Nothing has to change.”
He was tugging at Tabby’s jacket like a child trying to rouse their just-deceased mother. It was pathetic, the peak of humiliation, and he had no intention of stopping until his friend agreed to come back.
“You know about me now,” said Tabby, refusing to meet his eyes.
“I know you,” he said. “Always have. The important stuff.”
“But now you know—”
“Do you think I care about that?” asked Edward, his desire to shout tempered only by the last vestiges of his aristocratic manners. He felt spittle at the corner of his mouth, and he wiped it away with a cuff.
They stood in that passage, the buildings overhead casting shadows, their partnership shadowed by an impasse. Edward knew he looked terrible. If Tabby had a heart within that baggy coat, she’d set aside all this nonsense and get back to the way things were!
“Have you been eating enough?” asked Tabby, kicking at his shoe with her boot, this time gently.
“No,” he said. “You’re going to need to come home and feed me.”
“But I can’t come to your home, not now,” she said. Was that longing he heard in her voice, too?
“Whyever not?”
“Mrs. Chaffinch knows I’m a girl.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“You know how upstanding landladies are about men who bring girls back to their rooms,” she said, casting him a quelling glance.
“Now, didn’t you say you’re an adult? That makes you a young woman,” said Edward, awkwardly cuffing her on the shoulder. “Is that what you are—what you want to be? For me to call you? Tabitha?”
“It’s who I am,” she said with a sigh.
“What’s that for?” he asked, imitating her sigh. “If you want to be someone else, you can be someone else. Tobias or some other name, it doesn’t signify to me.”
“You never realized I was a girl?”
“Young woman,” he said offhandedly. “Demme, no, I’m not in the business of trying to see inside my friends’ drawers. I see plenty of parts in my line of work already. Too many.”
“Never suspected…”
Edward pressed himself closer to Tabby, presumably to make his point, but reveling in the sense of closeness at last. He was no monster, but if there were a way to eat some part of her — something she didn’t need — just so she’d be this close always, he’d surrender almost anything.
“Do you think I give a single fuck?” he intoned.
When Tabby’s face fell, he knew he’d said something wrong. Edward grabbed the girl’s — young woman’s — chin, so she’d look at him and hear what he was trying to say.
“Do you think I give a single fuck about that, what parts you’ve got? When you’re the one friend I’ve got besides my horse, and I’m not always sure he even likes me for me or for the clover I buy him?”
He’d always known Tobias as a street-hardened urchin, so when those eyes he’d missed so much filled with tears, Edward knew she was finally understanding him.
“You and me,” he said, resolving to make something of this accidental chance to put things to rights, “all that doesn’t matter when you’re friends like us, made of the same stuff. Probably some London clay because we’re thick as shite sometimes.”
“Most of the time,” she said wryly. “I thought you’d be angry.”
“Angry? I’m angry as hell! You scared me half to death falling off Tencendor, and then you bolted without a word? And stayed gone for weeks? All because of what’s in your breeches? Or that you wear breeches when you could wear a dress? I’m of a mind to let Mr. Rymer give you your next haircut.”
“Not that,” she said, smiling at their shared suspicion of the barber. “You weren’t even a little mad that I didn’t tell you after all this time?”
“Fuck, Tabby, how many times have I got to say it!” he exclaimed.
He grabbed her hand and placed it on the spot below his rib where he’d been aching since she’d bolted from his room.
“I don’t know what you put in those meat pies you bring, but they’ve not sat right since you went away.
I must be buying them from the wrong seller — who knows what’s in there because it’s sure as hell not lamb.
Sawdust, most likely. Thought I was dying at first. Considered sending for the physician!
I can’t live like this much longer. You’ll simply have to come home. ”
She let him hold her hand to the spot that had caused him such incredible pain.
Her fingers shifted against his waistcoat and shirt, her palm warming and loosening the knot so plaguing him.
He dropped his forehead to hers, bending low and exposing his neck to anyone passing by.
It was all so inadvisable, and he had no plans of stopping.
“Tabby,” he rasped, “I’m just a used-up, well-drained pair of cods. Fucking come home. I’m dying without you.”
“But I want both of us to be well-drained. Used up. Equals,” she said, pressing her hand into his belly as if she were trying to gesture between them.
“Where are you getting that hare-brained notion?” he asked. “Did you fall in with a nest of radicals while you’ve been away? This is England, you know we can’t be equals!”
“Gesù, Dick Stone, you sure know how to make a girl feel special,” she groused.
“Young woman,” he muttered, not letting her move.
“I need to make my own way. To get a little more equal,” she said.
“You’re the other part of me, so why this sudden need to be equal?” asked Edward, delivering a small kick to Tabby’s boot.
“I want to buy the meat pies sometimes,” said Tabby. “Fix those boots of yours that get soggy each time it rains.”
Damn and blast, he hadn’t realized she knew about the state of his boots.
“I’m a marquess’s heir. The fall didn’t make you forget, did it?”
She gave a nod and looked deuced miserable.
“Someday I’ll have money. Sure, I don’t have any now, devil take my father, but someday. And then we won’t have to eat eel at all!” he continued.
“That’s not all that will happen when you’re the marquess.”
Edward’s scrambled brains struggled to think what she could mean. When he didn’t answer, she continued.