Chapter Fourteen
L ark stood at the window of his small parlor. Rain descended on London in drifting gray veils, a rattling sort of rain that shook the windows and ran noisily in the gutters.
A true gentleman, when he woke at noon, would sit by his fire and let his servants bring him coffee and the morning papers. Wretches that picked pockets or cleaned street crossings or begged for a living would huddle in their hidey holes on such a day and wait for the sun to shine. Lark remembered that, remembered that in the old days Dav knew places to wait out a storm where the eaves of one roof overhung another, or where to find a bit of canvas to make a shelter of a corner where a pair of rooftops joined each other. And Dav knew how to wait.
Lark’s rooms were perfectly comfortable. He should resign himself to a day without Viv. It was the smart thing to do, to keep up the pretense that he had an employer and work. She already suspected him of some deception about his connection to the duke.
The problem was that he wanted to kiss her again, to kiss her more thoroughly, and now he knew the thing could be done. The little room in the basement of Lady Melforth’s house was a temptation, but there were other places they could go. He could write his own guidebook, a gentleman’s guide to kissing girls in London.
He didn’t want the false engagement to end. He sensed the ending was near, but he wanted to stay in the moment, in the world apart from his old life. Since he’d met her, he’d been drifting like a passenger in one of Green’s balloons. For eight shillings a man could ascend with Green from Vauxhall into the ether, suspended in a basket beneath a great red-and-white striped silk balloon. For Lark the price of a ride was the wound in his side. For a fortnight he had been untethered from his ordinary life. To see London through Viv’s curious eyes, to show her the things he’d discovered, was to see it as he’d not seen it before. He didn’t want the ride to end. But it must, and his aim must be to end it gently, not in a wreck. He should put his mind to that, how to land the balloon and walk away whole. Not how to kiss her again.
It was unthinkable that their false engagement could become real, that he could step so far into the role he’d created as Edward Larkin that he could marry Viv. The thought of it was crazy, even scary. A real engagement meant he would have to tell her the truth about who he was.
He wasn’t ready. The stumbling block was his parentage. He wanted to believe his mother had been a gentlewoman and that she had not abandoned him, but he had no proof, only elusive memories of her gentleness, of the ring on her finger, and of falling asleep in a warm, well-appointed carriage somewhere in London. And there was Rook, a real tangible obstacle to any claim of Lark’s to being a gentleman.
He had thought that wandering with Viv he might come across the place he’d been searching for. Instead, he’d abandoned his search for the spot. In the months since the fire, he had searched dozens of streets, but he had yet to take his search as far as the great West End parks and beyond.
Today would be a good day to return to the search. Riding with Viv in Lady Melforth’s carriage, being in the house on Henrietta Street had sharpened his memories. He believed his mother had left him in a carriage to enter a building, not a private house, but an edifice that dominated a square. If he could find the place where that parting had taken place, he could unravel the mystery of his birth.
He would call to see that Viv had come to no harm from the Strydes’ visit. He wouldn’t try to see her. He didn’t know how she felt about that kiss. She had participated in a surprised sort of way, but he knew her. She had now had hours to think about it, to feel awkward or uneasy in his presence.
*
On the morning of a third day of rain, Lady Melforth crumpled to the floor in her bedroom. Viv was at her desk working on the guide when Sarah, her ladyship’s maid called for help. Her ladyship revived almost at once and insisted that she had taken no harm, that it was only her pesky foot giving way underneath her, but she allowed them to help her back to bed, and Viv sent for Dr. Newberry.
The doctor spent nearly an hour with his patient before joining Viv in the upstairs drawing room. He looked grave as he entered, but his expression brightened when he saw Viv at the tea table with a teapot and plate of biscuits.
“Thank you for coming like this,” she said. “How is she?”
The doctor took a seat and accepted a cup of tea from Viv. “Rebellious, I’d say. She’s planning a dinner party.”
“A dinner party?” Viv had forgotten, but apparently Lady Melforth had not.
“To celebrate your betrothal and the completion of your guide.”
“Oh dear, is she up to it?” Viv made some rapid calculations. She would have to reach Lark. She would have to see him again. She had been trying so hard to put him out of mind. To forget the kiss. To invent the speech she meant to give to end their false betrothal.
“I don’t think anyone can stop her, but I do think a day in bed won’t hurt her.”
Viv dragged her runaway thoughts back to Lady Melforth’s situation. “Is it usual for a broken bone to take so long to heal? The lack of progress seems to lower her spirits. She no longer writes, you know.”
“She doesn’t?” The doctor put down his cup and took up a biscuit, turning it round in his fingers as if deciding whether to take a bite. “When did she stop?”
“Not long after we came to London. I can consult my notes, but I took over her correspondence in February. Is it significant?” she asked. Newberry looked grave and he wasn’t meeting Viv’s gaze.
“I’m sorry to hear it. It gives us a measure of her spirits. I hadn’t realized she was feeling quite so low.”
“You always cheer her. I think she puts on an act for you.”
He took a bite of the biscuit. “Does she?”
“I must ask about visitors. May she have them?”
He gave her a quick sharp glance, amusement glinting in his eyes. And it occurred to her that though he could be called handsome, her pulse never quickened in his presence. “You don’t want a dinner party? Or you want an excuse to turn away the Strydes.”
“Am I so obvious?”
“Perfectly, but you need not worry. The Strydes may not call for some time.”
“Why? What’s happened? What do you know?”
He grinned at her. “You haven’t heard? Mr. Stryde was taken up in a police raid of a shop on Babylon Street.”
“What? Oh my! I knew they were planning something of the kind. They told Lady Melforth that it was their duty to assist the police. Mr. Stryde claimed that his evidence alerted the authorities to the publisher.”
Newberry offered her a grin. “He may have been overzealous in collecting it. He stuffed his pockets with a very different sort of guide from the one you and her ladyship are writing. I believe it’s called The Swell’s Night Guide to London’s Bowers of Venus . Illustrated, one shilling. The police thought he was a regular customer and another witness claimed to have seen him in the shop before.”
“How embarrassing for him.” Viv could picture him sputtering and protesting his innocence. She wanted to tell Lark. It was almost a habit now, the desire to tell him things. She carefully placed her teacup on the table, afraid that if she met Dr. Newberry’s gaze, he would see where her thoughts had strayed.
“It gets worse,” he said. “Mrs. Stryde was with him.”
Viv could not help looking up at that.
“She whacked a constable over the head with her umbrella and was taken up, too.”
It was too much. For a minute, they just laughed until he rose to take his leave.
“There’s a letter in the Chronicle , describing their mistreatment at the hands of the authorities and expressing the Society’s outrage that their members in the pursuit of duty should be so mistreated.”
“Oh dear, the Strydes will be furious with me.”
“With you?”
“I encouraged them to do the raid.”
“Ah,” he said. “Well, best to deny them Lady Melforth’s company for a few days if they do call. And watch out for them, Viv. They would see you sacked.”
“I know.”
With a quick bow he was gone, back to his busy rounds.
*
Hours after Dr. Newberry’s visit, Viv returned to her desk. Outside the rain had subsided to a drizzle. Lady Melforth was sleeping peacefully while Viv was anything but at peace. The dinner party was going forward. Without consulting Viv, Lady Melforth had drawn up a small guest list including Viv’s aunt Louisa and her uncle Sir Oswald, the inevitable Strydes, and ambitiously the Duke and Duchess of Wenlocke. While Viv had been working to complete their guide, Lady Melforth had turned to Haxton and her maid Sarah to send invitations for the following Wednesday. Viv was to turn the final draft over to Dodsley, and they were to celebrate.
She needed to consult Lark. It was the prudent thing to do. She had no idea whether in his vague position with the duke, Lark would see the invitation. Surely, if they worked together, the duke would speak of it. But if, as the Strydes reported, the duke was not in London, how would the invitation reach Lark? She had discouraged his visits to Henrietta Street with a note delivered to him by Haxton, when Lark had stopped by the day after their kiss. As far as Viv knew, he had not called again, and she still didn’t know where he lived. If he did not know what they faced, how could they carry on their charade in company with the Strydes? If they were exposed, she did not know what would happen to her part in the book. She really had to find him.
He must have a bachelor set of rooms somewhere, not in the most exclusive sort of place like the Albany, but somewhere not far from Henrietta Street. She realized he was always on foot. To her knowledge he didn’t keep a horse or a carriage or a groom. He had never offered to take her up in even a hired carriage. He didn’t pretend to great wealth though he looked as fine as any other gentleman of taste, finer than many. His mode of dress had alerted her to the excesses of others.
The kiss remained a problem. His name remained a problem. Those things had troubled her even as she bent her mind to working on the guide. He had changed her approach to writing. With him she discovered more on each of her walks. She wrote with him in mind as well as those female readers who were to be inspired by their book, those readers who were to be shown how not to be cowed by London, by its history and grandeur, its rowdy, boisterous streets, its fondness for male privilege. She had discovered living women who acted in the assumption that men might be superior in their circumstances but not in their character.
She looked at the pages piled up on her desk. Each walk was numbered, and each had its own set of notes plus any questions she still had about the route and the places to see along the way. She wanted to go back over those early entries with what she had learned since meeting Lark. She had worked their river adventure into the walk from Green Park to Westminster Abbey. And she thought perhaps there was a walk into which she could fit the Haitian woman leaving flowers for her queen. She went back to her notes on the walk from Regent’s Park to Marylebone.
Her notes were thin. The rain, Lark’s kiss, and the visit from the Strydes had driven the woman’s image from Viv’s mind. She needed more details. She needed a real story to tell before she could put the absent queen’s former house on the route. A point in her notes abruptly struck her. The woman had known Lark, and of course, Viv remembered, he was used to seeing the woman leave her floral tribute. She closed the little notebook. If she found the woman again, she could get her story, and she could ask about Lark. It was possible that he lived in the neighborhood of the Haitian queen’s house.
Outside her window, shafts of sunlight were breaking through the clouds. Rain drops sparkled on everything. Viv stuffed her notebook and pencil into her favorite bag.