Chapter Twenty
Jo
Maybe she’d been spending too much time with Emily. Though it was near to freezing, Jo didn’t even consider catching a ride to the bookshop. Her feet moved toward their destination automatically, pounding out their path on the familiar segment of earth beneath them.
“We ought to get a coach,” she muttered, not really to anyone in particular, but since she was clutching Emily’s arm like it was the only thing tethering her to her senses, it was Emily who took responsibility for it.
“Don’t be silly,” she said, that clipped, professional tone she’d taken in the flat returning. The first time Jo had heard that tone, she’d despised it. Now? Under these circumstances? It was comforting beyond all reason: firm, assured, and kind, like a good hand with a frightened horse. “It’s not much farther, and it doesn’t sound to me like speed is the thing that matters. He will be there, or he won’t. You must prepare yourself for either eventuality with a stretch of the legs and a few good breaths of...well, whatever it is we’re breathing here in London.”
Jo appreciated Emily’s understated levity, even if she couldn’t quite bring herself to laugh.
“Jo, may I ask you a question?”
“Anything,” Jo said, happy to be distracted.
“Are you likely to see trouble over this? Legal trouble?”
Jo thought about it, but came up short. Strange. Obsessed as she’d been for months now over her own legal fate, she hadn’t thought about herself once regarding this raid. “There are too many possible factors,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know. Like everything else, much of it is in his hands. My name’s not on anything official. That’s the downside of a wifely position, but a benefit too, under circumstances like this. Scotland Yard won’t be overly interested in me unless he says they ought to be.”
“Before we arrive at the shop, then, are you certain you shouldn’t give this whole thing a bit of space? Just in case?”
“In case what?”
“In case he says they ought to be.”
Jo’s feet paused their incessant movement. She drifted with Emily out of the way of the foot traffic, near the overhang of a bakery that smelled temptingly of the morning’s bake, a very wholesome, safe smell, at odds with the circumstances.
“Are you nervous to come along with me?” Jo asked. “In case it goes bad? I’ve appreciated your presence this morning, Emily, but you have a point. This might be on the dangerous side for someone who needs their reputation. I’d hate to cause you trouble in the other areas of your life.”
Emily glanced down the street, where the Morgan Murray’s sign was finally in view. She took Jo’s hand and gave it a squeeze.
“I am not nervous if you aren’t,” she said. “If you believe he wouldn’t bring you trouble, that he really is the friend you think he is, then I trust your judgement. But if you’re at all nervous, I do hope you will...” She drew her eyes from the road ahead and met Jo’s at last. “If you’re at all nervous, dear Jo, I hope you will extend our bracing morning walk past the bookshop entirely and straight along to the train station. My father and I have grown quite used to entertaining outlaws, you know. You’d be comfortable with us until this all blows over.”
For a moment, Jo didn’t know what to do with an offer like that. It seemed so immense, so profound, so unreasonably kind, that it fell almost like another language to her ear.
“What?” she said, unable to summon anything else.
“You can stay with me for a little while,” Emily repeated. “In Farncombe. To wait things out until you know it’s safe to return to London.”
Jo looked down at their clasped hands, filled with the sweetness of the offer. This was it, wasn’t it? The escape hatch from this life she’d built. She might never have to find out whether Paul would betray her in this legal situation. Or even if he’d shun or betray her later, when his baby came. She could scarper, flee into the suburbs to start the newest phase of her fragmented life. Become a Unitarian. Live a proper “spinster” life with a lovely woman and her dotty old father, setting type for one of Farncombe’s liberal-minded newspapers, and maybe even giving one of those rational skirt sets a go when she went into town. They didn’t seem so dreadful, honestly.
She could see it clearly. See it like she’d read it in a novel—not an adventuresome one, of course, but one of those more domestic tales. It was a happy enough ending, really...
But it wasn’t what she wanted. She didn’t want to start again, yet again. She’d built up a life here. Not an average one. Not even a particularly good one. But it was hers. She’d made it, scraped it together from the scraps she’d been granted.
And while she was absolutely enamored of the notion that Emily Clarke was now part of that life’s future, the sort of lover she’d never dared dream of, there was still a quirky old git knit into the fabric of that life, and she didn’t want to cut him out for good. Not if she could avoid it.
At last, she shook her head, managing a half-smile for Emily. “I appreciate that more than you know,” she said. “But I don’t really believe he’s going to betray me. Others have, so I’ve been readying myself for it. But he hasn’t. And I won’t do it to him, either.” She held her arm back out for Emily to take. “You were right. He’s my family, and it’s well past time you met him properly. I don’t want to start a new life, Emily. I want to bring you into mine, as you’ve brought me into yours.”
Emily took the offered arm with a smile. “That sounds very lovely, Jo.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” said Jo. They started walking, the clip quicker as urgency returned to her movements. “If, you know, he’s actually at the bookshop and not sniveling in a cell somewhere, yeah? I may not think he’ll turn on me, but that doesn’t mean he’s not in a fucking barrel of trouble himself.”
Though the remainder of the walk to Morgan Murray’s bookshop was brief, hurried, and fueled by Jo’s barely contained fear, they did find her bugger of a husband hiding in plain sight behind the counter. Face a bit pale. Eyes a bit bloodshot. Tie askew and jacket wrinkled. But decidedly on the right side of the bars.
“You fucker, you scared me to death!” Jo hugged him a bit violently until he ducked out of her grasp and clasped his hands together as if in prayer.
“Joey,” he said, meeting her eyes with a glowing desperation. “I must thank you profusely for being so disorganized.” He gave an obnoxiously low bow before hugging her amicably one more time. “If you hadn’t made me realize what a damned disaster those shelves were, I would be good and fucked, no question.”
“Why?” Jo demanded. “What happened?”
“Well. Let’s set the stage, shall we?” He spread his hands in front of him like he was literally drawing a performance space with them. It was Paul all over, familiar as an irritating but nostalgic folksong, the sort that families sang drunk around the fire.
“All set. Now—” As he completed this bout of theatricality, he finally noticed Emily hovering near the door. He smiled and pretended to doff a hat that he was not wearing. “Oh. Well, hello, there, Doctor! To what do we owe this oddly timed pleasure?”
The circumstances were, admittedly, bizarre, but Jo was determined to do this right. She’d gotten another chance, not just to do right by Emily, but by Paul as well. She took Emily by the arm and led her across the shop to where Paul stood, his head still tilted with curiosity.
“I wasn’t just an escort yesterday, Paul. Dr. Emily Clarke is formally here, in the city, to visit with me,” said Jo with a note of pride. “She was with me at your place, when we found it all fucked. And I’m glad she was, because I could hardly think straight, worrying about you.”
“Why, exactly did you bring her to my place at this horrifically godly hour?”
“To reintroduce you properly.” Jo took Emily’s hand and pulled her forward. “Emily, this is my good companion and business partner, Paul Smith. Friends call him Smithy, so you should too. And Paul, this is Emily Clarke. You call her whatever the fuck she wants to be called, but she’s not just Vanessa’s doctor; she’s my very dear friend, here for a visit with her family and me in addition to yesterday’s appointment.”
It was the first time Jo had ever witnessed her lover shake hands with her husband, firm, friendly, and smiling on both sides. It was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen, and she would be thankful to Emily forever for being willing—no, eager—to give Jo this gift.
“Your dear friend,” said Paul, looking very pleased. “Isn’t that interesting?”
“No more questions—that’s the limit of what’s your business,” Jo said. “Now what’s happened to you?”
“I shall begin with a beautiful, shining, vital prologue,” he declared like some royal herald or minstrel. “In which the misplacement of your grandmother’s book made me realize that I really did need to finish getting those shelves cleaned up, and sooner rather than later. That day when I brought your things out to the shop for a stunt, I also handled the choicer volumes, which I brought to the print house, where they’re supposed to be kept anyway. Over the course of looking for the book and getting a handle on the mess, I’ve made a few more trips like that in the interim.
“Now, if you’d asked me about the situation yesterday morning, I might have had different feelings about the timing of all this, because that’s when the prologue ends and the story begins—when the police bust down the doors at the print house.”
“They raided the print house yesterday?” Jo repeated, aghast. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well, you weren’t here, were you? And given how well our conversations have been going lately, I figured you didn’t want me barging in at your clubs, looking for you. You weren’t in danger, so I just made sure there was nothing for them here that could tie you back to the print house raid and decided to try again today.” He grinned winningly. “And here we are! No harm done.”
“No harm? You prat, our bloody house has been ransacked!”
“Our house?” he said with unfortunately reasonable irritation. “Weren’t you just insisting it was only my house?”
“Oh, fuck off, you know I didn’t mean any of that.”
A heavy pause fell between them as Jo realized what she’d just said.
“Didn’t you?” he asked, as if genuinely unsure.
Jo crossed her arms against an onslaught of regret over how she’d handled all this. “No, Paul. I didn’t. I’m just a wanker, alright?”
There was another of those suspended moments, the sort that could go either way.
And this time, Paul chose to smile. “You really are.”
She felt doubly so, now that she was being forgiven so easily. But she’d take it, and hopefully, remember this moment the next time she considered the path of the wanker.
“So what happened?” Jo prodded. “Tell me everything.”
“Well, apparently, during that first raid, they got a couple of the dissenters who were actively using the press at the time. I hadn’t realized anyone had actually been arrested, because I was chatting with one of my authors in my office, and we managed to sneak out the back no worse for wear.”
“Not Reginald Cox, I hope?”
“No, thank God.” Paul laughed darkly at the notion of his most paranoid author being present when the bobbies showed up. “I’d never get another word out of him if it had been. Nah, it was just Tipton, funnily enough.” He turned to Emily, ensuring she wasn’t left out. “Tipton doesn’t even write anything bothersome, unless one despises lofty literary musings on the human condition, which would not surprise me in this political climate, to be honest.” Back to Jo. “Anyway, I felt like an idiot for moving all that inventory from home, because the police took it all, along with a few other stacks that hadn’t made it to the cellar yet, which is a damned shame, but it means that when they most unexpectedly busted through our own door at the crack of dawn today, there was nothing for them to find.”
“How’d they find you?” Jo asked.
“The blokes who were arrested talked,” he said. “No hard feelings, though. We use the same machines, but it’s not as if we’re old chums. I imagine it was either talk or take responsibility for the politics and the porn. I probably would have done the same, so it’s only fair, really.
“Anyway, I played it off as being properly offended by the police harassment, denied any knowledge of the books, the printer, the radicals, any of it, and since there was nothing left in the house to contradict me, they eventually accepted the idea that they’d gotten the wrong Smith.” He turned to Emily once more with a conspiratorial smile. “It’s a decent enough name to possess in a crisis, don’t you think?”
Emily looked stunned, eyes wide and lips parted in indignation. “Good heavens!” she said, looking like she was about to tell Paul off for having printed such indecent material in the first place. But then she said, some of that beautiful fire escaping as she did: “If they believed they had the wrong man, why would the police leave your sitting room in such a horrific state?”
Paul and Jo shared a look. He gave a sweet smile. “Joey, how on earth did you cross paths with such an uncynical soul?”
“She let me into her house for that first appointment with Vanessa, remember?”
“My dear doctor,” he said to Emily with overblown concern. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you not to let the vampires in? They can’t cross thresholds without an invitation, you know.”
Emily’s nose wrinkled. “Excuse me?”
“Don’t worry about it.” Jo rolled her eyes. “He just thinks he’s funny.”
“On the other hand,” he went on, “I must congratulate you, Joey, on making a friend who could possibly believe that London’s police care if they leave an innocent man with a mess to clean up.” He turned to Emily. “Not that I am an innocent man, of course. I absolutely deserve my mess, the trouble it will be to fix it, and the fact that my landlady’s given me one week to clear the hell out after that debacle. But the officers who trashed everything don’t know that, do they?”
One week to clear out?
After all the fear of this morning, all the fury that came with police invasion of her spaces, somehow, it was the landlady’s words that got Jo’s legs shaking again. Any insistence she’d made that the flat was not her home evaporated. She was starting over after all, and it hadn’t even come down to her original worries. It wasn’t Paul and Vanessa forcing her out. It wasn’t that their baby was taking up too much room. It didn’t even stem from the desperate itch that had always lived within her that said she had to run.
She should have known better. It wasn’t friendship, love, little ones, or any of the other lovely things in life that kept forcing her out of her circumstances. It was police and landladies. Priests and parents. Power grabs and the fearful demands of people who saw her as an object for their own ends, too wrapped up in their own safety and self-image to give two fucks about hers.
A gentle grip on her upper arm brought her out of the swirling fog of helplessness. Emily. Emily’s grip, Emily’s clipped insistence that Jo allow herself to be led to the stool behind the counter. Emily’s fingers brushing a stray bit of hair off her forehead and tucking it securely into one of her pins.
“She looks like she could use a drink,” said Paul.
“Of tea,” Emily said like the hiss of cold water over hot coals, harsh but warm and satisfying. “Is there somewhere here I can fix one, or should I go across the street?”
“Upstairs,” Paul told her. “The other shopkeep, Miss Merriweather, lives up there, and she’s got Vanessa with her. They’ll help you find the fixings. She takes—”
“Sugar and extra cream, I know.”
“Would you like me to go instead?” Paul offered. “You stay with her?”
“That is very polite, but no thank you,” said Emily, unsmiling and a bit stiff. “I assume the two of you might like a moment to talk without me anyway.”
Paul waved the notion off. “If Jo’s brought you here, then I don’t think that’s necessarily true.”
“I could stand to check in on Miss Garcia,” she said. “I’m sure this morning has been a terrible shock to her nerves.”
“You just think I’m going to slip whiskey in her tea if I’m left to my own devices, don’t you?”
Emily pursed her lips so tight that Jo couldn’t help but fix her own into half a smile.
“Well,” Emily said, “you will, won’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
She took a moment to secure Jo’s pin one more time before fixing her gaze on the staircase. “I’ll handle it, then.”
As she left, posture perfect as ever, Jo watched her, thinking that while she’d rather not have to start again, if whatever came next involved exchanges like that one, maybe it would be worth the trouble after all.