Chapter 5
The amount of discarded paper in the Tod & Vixen wastebasket had won Beck the first sour look from his housekeeper that he’d ever seen.
She had been upright and resolute through sick on the floor, broken glass, and the partially collapsed ceiling under the weight of two seasons’ worth of tepid, stinking rainwater. Wasted paper, however, seemed to be her limit.
“What is all of this?” she asked, fishing out one of the discarded letters and beginning to unball it.
“Nothing!” he’d boomed, loud enough that she’d startled and dropped it again. “Private discourse of a delicate nature!”
“Oh, well, isn’t that fine,” she’d muttered, scooting away and vanishing back into the rest of the building to see to her business. “Very fine indeed. Such waste.”
After that, he’d decided to quit the establishment in total for the day and see to the rest of his business at the Flaming Fox.
She wasn’t wrong, he told himself. She was nosy, though. He ought to have taken the discarded one-line drafts with him. He could have unfurled them into a lovely mosaic of his ineptitude once he reached the Fox and admired all his fine, eloquent attempts to return a letter to Hannah Lazarus.
I thought—
I only—
It is just that—
Pathetic.
Yesterday, he had resolved to just go talk to the girl in person, and bring a generous donation with him besides.
He had gone by way of Covent Garden and bought a posey of calla lilies, sweet, white cups that had always been his favorites when he was a boy, attending his mother’s flower stall in the same locale.
He’d walked to Clerkenwell, asking this passerby or that shopkeep about the clinic until he’d been pointed in the correct direction. And when he’d found it, he had been so stunned by how poor and modest it looked that he had been momentarily unable to believe it was what he was after.
It was not even a building, but rather a large tent, with two smaller ones on either side.
He’d stood across the street, clutching those flowers, imagining he looked rather like a bison in a waistcoat, flowers clutched in his unwieldy, too-large hands, and could not make himself move.
He’d seen her. He’d seen a flash of her through the open flap of the tent, likely left askew to invite in any breeze that might bless them. He’d felt his heart leap into his throat and stick there at that bright red hair catching the setting sun as she flitted from cot to cot.
There was another girl inside, doing the same. Just one.
Surely it was not only the two of them in there, managing it all. Surely it was not just two young girls in a sea of rough men, injured or not.
“Hello, young man,” a voice said, startling Beck so badly, he’d nearly sent the lilies tumbling into the gutter. “Have you lost someone?”
“Lost?” Beck repeated, turning to look into a kind pair of dark green eyes belonging to an older gentleman dressed in a cleric’s black frock, his face shadowed under the brim of a wide, flat-brimmed hat. “Oh, from the … from the accident, you mean. Why do you ask?”
“The lilies,” the rabbi said, gesturing at them. “For the dead, aren’t they?”
“Are they?!” Beck had repeated, aghast. “That’s what they’re for?!”
The rabbi chuckled, not unkindly. “They are also very good for the smell. Or perhaps just to brighten the bedside of the injured. You must pardon my presumption in assuming they were for us. It is a lovely bouquet.”
Beck looked down at it again and frowned. “The smell?”
“Indeed,” the rabbi answered, unabashed. “It is a good flower for that, I think. I ought to have brought some bundles of sweet herbs with me on my own accord, come to it. I can hear my wife sighing about my blunder from beyond the grave.”
“Have them,” Beck said immediately, shooting his arm out to push the lilies into the rabbi’s chest before he could refuse. “Bring them to your sick. I was here to deliver a donation anyhow.”
“A donation!” the rabbi repeated, his eyes widening. “Were you really, young man? How very kind of you.”
But Beck was already digging in his pocket and retrieving the envelope, a sudden and violent urge to be gone from this place tickling at his spine. He wasn’t sure what he had been thinking, coming in the first place.
He hadn’t even known what he was going to say. Why would it be any different directly from his mouth when he’d had all the time in the world to think of words on paper?
He grimaced about it then, letting himself into the Flaming Fox just as fresh tapers were being wedged into the wall sconces and the glasses set out for the evening’s drinks.
Ember Donnelly was behind the bar, chatting to the new barkeep as she tossed a lime back and forth between her hands, preparing the man for his first night on the job.
She always insisted on talking them through it, leaving her primary club, Brigid’s Forge, in the hands of another barman, for whose competence she claimed full responsibility.
Beck made a mental note to hide the paring knife.
“Teddy!” she cried, eyes widening as he came in. “I didn’t expect you for hours yet. This is O’Sullivan. I stole him from the Wooden Badger.”
The man looked up with a begrudging, partially toothed smile. “Aye, she did.”
“I believe you,” Beck replied politely. “Welcome. I’m sure you’ll settle in very well with Miss Donnelly’s guidance.”
“Oh, ignore him,” she tutted. “Call me Ember. Now show me again your pour.”
Beck sighed, straining his neck from side to side, and pulled out a chair at the faro table, dropping his folio on it and flipping it open.
He was surprised he was meeting margins so cleanly from just the Fox over this last week, even with all those slips held in escrow.
His half would comfortably cover the cost of the repairs on the Vixen.
“What’s that you’re doing?” Ember asked, appearing over his shoulder like a suspicious school marm. “Writing a letter?”
He froze, his fingernail hovering just over last night’s final sum. His head came up slowly and turned in careful, measured horror to meet Ember’s smiling face. “What?”
“A letter,” she said again, looking down at what was obviously a bunch of numbers. “Are you writing one?”
He stared at her. His stare usually sent cheeky types scrambling away after a moment or two, but it only seemed to widen her grin.
“Do you need help?” she asked, batting her russet-brown lashes. “I’m no author, but I know some damn fine ones.”
He sighed, holding his hand out toward the chair that was tucked under the table next to him, and sighed again when she accepted the offer.
“You could always go use the office, you know,” she said innocently.
“I’ve just had it cleaned out. I offered it up to a friend of mine, in fact.
She needed a place to do some charity work, and we have that lovely, fine desk and so much filing and sundry back there that no one uses.
We ne’er-do-wells of the demi-monde ought to make sure we put in our alms when we can. ”
“You did what?” he said, so calm and velvety that he could hear the artifice himself. “Why would you do that?”
“Well, no one else is,” she said with a put-upon little sigh.
“Think of it, Teddy: the high and toity will scramble to help a needy cause when they see that the only folk decent enough to step up were the gambling hells of London. It’s a brilliant approach.
I’ve already got a gossip sheet half written through those author friends I told you about that will run once I’ve got the operation buzzing. ”
“Ember,” he said softly. “Why?”
“Because it pleases me, you great oaf,” she replied, dropping all pretense and shrugging. “And because it’ll be funny. Tell me, is the cherub coming back tonight? Looking at him makes my working hours go by so much smoother. We ought to contract him at the Forge for Spinster’s Night.”
“Do not change the subject,” Beck snapped, then paused. “But yes to hiring Reed for Spinster’s NIght. Only if I can come.”
“Deal,” said Ember Donnelly, and reached out to shake on it.
Beck sighed and humored her wrapping her tiny hand around his and then noted, with surprised admiration, the strength of her grip.
“She could work at a desk in a hundred more reputable buildings,” he said as she slid her hand free and smirked at him. “You should consider the girl’s reputation. And her safety.”
“She’s never safer than she is with me,” Ember replied with a sniff. “And if you’ve a better desk to offer, I’m listening.”
He frowned at her.
He did not.
“Correct. Even you are using a gaming table instead of a desk just now. And you ought to be writing letters rather than numbers, anyhow,” Ember told him, pushing the chair back to go back to her mischief with the barman.
“You’ve had more than enough time already.
Wait much longer, and she’ll be very cross when she gets here. ”
“Which will be when?” he said, tilting his head back to watch her. “When, exactly?”
“Oh, who knows?” Ember replied with a wave of her hand. “Could be next week. Could be tonight. I can never remember such things.”
“Tonight?” he repeated, the word escaping through clenched teeth.
“I didn’t say that,” she answered, stopping midstride to glance over her shoulder. “Did I? In any event, Teddy, you’d best get to writing.”
He glared at her. He glared at his ledger. He glared out the window in the direction of his wastebasket at the Vixen.
He wasn’t going to write the damned letter.
So he slammed the folio shut again, threw it under the bar, and took his jacket back off the coat rack.
“Where are you off to now?” Ember called, already having taken up her paring knife.
“Clerkenwell,” he snapped, and shut the door behind him before she could comment upon it.