Chapter 8
If Beck had thought he could sort business quickly and have Hannah Lazarus alone and listening to the whole of his heart in the space of a single day, he had been a fool.
A week passed before he could scarcely breathe, and just as she’d predicted, the rain came.
With autumn rain, the chill always hid between the droplets, descending from the clouds with a startling speed that permeated the meager protection of canvas walls with nary a worry for the people cloistered within.
Hannah hadn’t been the only prophet in their midst, however. Beck had been right that hands were the easiest resource to secure.
He’d hired linkboys as runners, all of them happier than clams to accept any new vocation.
He’d sent the staff from the Vixen, all of whom were discontent to wait for rotating shifts at the Fox while their primary venue of employment was under repair, to the clinic directly to assist Miss Casper in any regard she chose.
He’d asked Ember to secure her husband for matters relating to the legal acquisition of the destroyed tenement.
That particular choice had been a bounty beyond anything Beck could have predicted, for Mr. Cresson was not just a talented barrister, but a member of a small religious order that apparently thrived on acts of public service, even beyond the scope of their own community.
Before he could say boo, the clinic was suddenly overrun with Quaker do-gooders at all hours of the day, many of whom were happy to provide food, water, medicine, and supplies without a single word of complaint or judgement.
He did not know who these people were or where they came from, but he knew better than to question a good thing or look too closely at its details.
Part of him did want to look very closely, truth be told, but he was almost more concerned that he wouldn’t find any grime in the grain than he was that there was any manner of seed or corruption hiding behind the shiny, helpful veneer of these folk.
Somehow, that was more unsettling.
He had seen her, of course. He had spoken to her in passing. He had promised her that soon, they would speak, and she had returned the promise, tired and hopeful and gracing him with those big blue eyes and her gentle smiles as she moved with grace through the bodies of the needy.
She had looked more beautiful, more impossibly ethereal each and every time. The woman moved through filth and suffering like a dancer in a candlelit cathedral. He couldn't account for it and he could not look away, even when he tried to.
He often tried to.
“They can’t stay here,” Mae Casper had announced as the temperature had continued to fall. “It doesn’t matter how many blankets people donate. This will not hold.”
Of course, a lot of talk had erupted about that, with the rabbi and the Quakers debating on how their gathering spaces could be set up for temporary lodging, but Beck had been struck by a memory of something Ember Donnelly had said, right at the start of this entire mess, something accidentally profound, in that way of hers.
We ne’er-do-wells of the demi-monde ought to make sure we put in our alms when we can.
“There are rooms,” Beck had said, cutting them all off. “Rooms and people who will help, but they aren’t exactly respectable.”
“Who gives a toss about respectable,” Mae Casper had snapped. “Is it safe? Is it warm?”
And Beck had nodded.
That was how they had begun to move the sickest and most infirm of the patients to the extra beds above the bawd houses that lined the corners of Clerkenwell, Soho, and St. Giles. Not a single one had turned them away. None had even considered it.
“High Season’s well over,” they had decided to argue. “The rooms will be empty anyway.”
But instead, they’d barely explained the situation before more than simple beds were put on offer.
“We’ve got a damn fine kitchen, should you require,” one madam would announce. “We can put four cots to a room, more if there are little ones.”
“Sally here’s a midwife too,” another would say. “She can stitch a wound and tamper a fever if you need it.”
And they needed it. All of it.
But it meant the hands they’d gathered were now spread thin, which had brought them right back to where they’d begun.
Ember had offered a sizable amount of funding, but her biggest contribution had been forfeiting her nights at Brigid’s Forge to oversee the Flaming Fox whilst Beck was otherwise occupied at their multiple clinic locations.
He wondered how long it might be before they could put the funding they might raise toward relocating these people to more permanent housing, rather than simply keeping them alive. He wondered, seeing it all improve and then compound back into more complications, if such things ever truly ended.
And meanwhile, there was a razing to attend to in the hopes of one day building that single, wooden room to which they all aspired.
He hadn’t been prepared for it when she appeared at his side and spoke to him, clean and well rested and smiling, that last day in the tent, when the final few people were being moved to the Wooden Badger and that awful floral curtain could finally be burnt to ash.
“I didn’t believe it was true when Mae said it,” she said, so close he could have touched her, could have reached out and buried his fingers in all that beautiful copper-red hair. “About your name, I mean. You really are the saint of lost causes. Look at all you’ve done.”
“Not just me,” he said quickly, feeling himself color. “Not by half.”
She shook her head, looking around at all the empty, packed dirt around them, full of little circular impressions where the cots had been, and sighed happily. “We know it was you. Mae, Rabbi Hirsch, and I. We know, even if you don’t.”
He frowned, which only made her giggle.
“You know,” she said with a little sigh and a shake of her hair, “I thought Judas was the one who …” She paused, giving a self-conscious little wince, and drew her finger across her throat. “You know.”
He hesitated, coughing a little bark of surprised laughter despite himself and turning to face her, looking down into her face and smiling. “He is,” he said. “So did I. That one is Judas Iscariot, though. I remember that much.”
“Iscariot,” she repeated. “That is such a nice name, too, isn’t it? Beautiful. Lovely to say.”
He stared at her, more than a little dazzled. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose it is.”
“It feels nice on the tongue,” she said with a little quirk of her lips. “Iscariot. But Thaddeus is better. It is beautiful. Thaddeus. You were given the better Judas.”
And then he hadn’t trusted himself to speak at all. He had never once imagined his full name in her pretty little mouth. He hadn’t even let himself speculate on how it might sound, falling off her tongue like that.
He would never forget it now, though.
She obviously did not realize how she sounded sometimes. How the things she said could stir and stoke the blood. She couldn’t know, blinking up at him like that, guileless and sweet.
He wondered how it might spook her if she could see the way his blood had flamed at her words. He wondered how far she’d flee if she knew the things he imagined when he allowed his mind to wander a little too far.
“If it is too much trouble, I understand,” she was saying, clearly midway through another thought in that sweet, tempting voice, looking at him expectantly.
“I know you are already so very busy, and you must know you have my gratitude. I could never do anything to repay you that would be enough. And Mr. Beck, I truly would do anything.”
“Miss Lazarus,” he managed to say, clasping his hands behind his back so that he would not be tempted to put them on her. How could he think of doing anything else when she said things like that? “Please do not think you owe me anything at all.”
“Oh, Mr. Beck,” she said, fluttering those rose gold lashes, her fingers darting out to brush against the sleeve of his jacket. “I owe you everything.”
It was all he could do not to groan.
“I told you to call me Hannah,” she added. “Please call me Hannah.”
He only stared at her, helpless and speechless. He wanted to, he realized. He wanted to say her name like she had said his. He wanted to cement an unholy, carnal pact of syllables between them, to agree to taste one another’s given names every time they spoke.
He knew he couldn’t do that.
But Jesus Christ, he wanted to.
“Finally, I will have time to write my letters,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at Reed and the two linkboys who were finishing up the stacking of the cots.
She frowned at them, clearly not wishing to be interrupted in their conversation, but decided to turn back to him and continue speaking anyway, lowering her voice slightly as she did.
“It is only that I did not bring the instructions Miss Donnelly wrote me to the Flaming Fox. If you are able, I would very much appreciate an accompaniment.”
“I can take her, boss,” Reed called, grinning with antagonistic glee from the corner with his flanking of little imps. “Would be delighted.”
“Finish your business, Reed,” Beck barked back, too loudly. He cursed himself, noting how Miss Lazarus had jumped at his volume, and said at a more reasonable level, “I will take the lady.”
“Oh, I trust that you will,” Reed answered with a polite bow, clearly not fearing for his life as he ought to be. “Thoroughly, I presume.”
Hannah was looking over her shoulder at him, her head tilted with what looked like curiosity.
“What a strange man,” she said a few moments later, as she followed Beck out of the tent. “Is he your friend?”
“He is,” he answered, trying not to sigh as he said it. “An old friend. We came up together.”
“Did you? He does not sound like you at all,” she said, and then looped her warm little hands around Beck’s elbow.
It happened so suddenly, her sweet grip, her soft body pressing into his side, that any coherent answer he might have had to the observation of Reed’s otherness swiftly fled his mind and escaped into the evening sky.
He looked down at her with something like alarm, knowing he ought to tell her to keep her distance, not to touch him like this, not to let herself close enough that he could smell the floral notes on her hair. The sweet, particular scent …
“Lilies?” he said without thinking, breathing it in, a little drunk with it.
“Hm?” She looked up at him, tilting her head back and blinking those big eyes. “Oh. My perfume? Yes, it is lilies. How clever of you to know. They are my favorite.”
He blinked at her, unsure if he was being teased. “They are mine too,” he said, if only to gauge her reaction. “Even if they are for the dead.”
“Who says they are?” she retorted with a little sniff, lifting her chin. “The living. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” he agreed, falling a little more in love by the step. “That is right.”
He wanted to tell her about his mother’s flower stall, he realized. He wanted to tell her about how when he was little, he’d pull down the lilies to smell them and get his hands slapped for the effort.
He wondered what she would think of that, a girl who grew up in a little palace, who only saw flowers that had been cultivated in her own gardens or elsewise arranged in vases by unseen hands. Would it disgust her?
He might have thought so, back at Blackcove. But watching her with the injured poor had been a surprising thing. She had not flinched from them, had not sneered. She hadn’t gotten down in the dirt to play knucklebones either, but she didn’t seem to hate them for being less than she was.
Still, he could not quite make himself say it.
“Will you stay with me tonight?” she asked, breaking his thoughts with yet another sentence that appeared custom built to destroy him. “Or will you return to the work once I am settled at the Flaming Fox?”
“Ember will be there to assist you,” he said, guiding her down the cobbled path along a forking divide. “Though you oughtn’t stay terribly late. It gets very dark outside St. James, and it isn’t safe undertaking such a long walk back to your home past a certain hour.”
“I will stay with Ember and Joe tonight,” she told him. “It is already arranged. Part of me wanted to take one of those cots and set it up right next to the desk so I don’t have to leave it at all, but I suppose you’d take issue with that too, wouldn’t you, Mr. Beck?”
“I would,” he confirmed with a little smirk.
She gave a theatrical sigh and smiled back. “Well, I suppose there’s nothing stopping me from crawling onto the desk itself and curling up if I need a night’s sleep. Do you think I’d fit on top of it, if the need arose?”
“I … um.” He gave a little cough, glancing down at her, and then back up and as far into the distance as he could manage, picturing all too well the many ways she might fit her dainty body onto the top of that desk. “I couldn’t possibly say.”
“Perhaps I’ll try it,” she teased, nudging him. “But only if you’re around to help me down should I get stuck.”
“Best not to take such risks,” he said briskly, wondering if he was blushing like a child or elsewise obviously flustered.
“I am only teasing,” she assured him. “I am very good at climbing onto and off very large things. It is a particular talent.”
He sucked in as much air as he could fit into his body and nodded ahead at the gleaming, beveled blue windows of the Flaming Fox. “There we are!” he announced, a bit too hearty to sound exactly like himself.
“Oh,” she said, sounding somewhat disappointed by their arrival. And then, “Oh! Isn’t it beautiful!”
Somehow, the admiration for his beloved little jewel of a club dissipated some of the suffocating weight of the air around them. Not all of it. God, no. But some of it.
Enough to get her in through the front door and handed off to Ember Donnelly.
“Thank you again, Mr. Beck,” she said, turning at the doorway to smile and wave at him. “I trust I will see you tomorrow?”
“Perhaps,” he answered, as evenly as he could manage. “I will be by at some point.”
“I hope to see you when you are,” she said, seeming not to mind at all the way Ember rolled her eyes and leaned against the wall with her arms crossed.
“Good night, Miss Lazarus,” he said, giving her a stiff little bow.
“Good night,” she said softly, “St. Thaddeus.”