Chapter Three
“Those Bath buns in your window are the most magnificent things I have encountered today, and I watched the sun come up over the entire city, so the competition was considerable.”
The baker, a flour-dusted man with forearms like bread loaves and a deeply sceptical expression, considered the girl who had materialised on his doorstep at half past seven in the morning.
She was damp, bright-eyed, limping slightly, and smiling at him as though his shop window contained the Crown Jewels.
“They’re yesterday’s,” he said.
“They are exquisite regardless. The glaze alone is a work of art. Is that honey? The light suggests honey, though I have been wrong before. I was wrong about the weather this morning, for instance. It did stop raining, but only after it had finished with my hair.”
Her copper hair, escaping whatever arrangement had once contained it, did indeed look as though the rain had taken liberties. She pushed a damp strand from her forehead and continued to regard the buns with reverence.
“Are you planning to buy one, miss, or only admire them?”
A flicker crossed her face. Quick, barely there, the kind of shadow that appeared when a question landed somewhere tender. She recovered within a heartbeat.
“I am presently in the process of deciding. They look absolutely worth every penny, and I intend to return when my finances are more… assembled.”
The baker considered her for a long moment. Then he reached into the case and handed her a plain roll, warm and almost the size of his fist.
“On the house.”
“Oh, I could not possibly.” Molly waved her hands in refusal, her palms still scratched from the rose bush, the gesture half batting the kindness away and half, she suspected, betraying how badly she wanted it.
“It’s a roll, miss, not a jewel. Take it before it cools.”
Molly took the roll. She held it in both hands, feeling the warmth of it against her palms, and for one terrible second, her chin trembled, because people kept being kind to her when she had done absolutely nothing to deserve it.
The accumulated kindness of strangers was, she was discovering, far more devastating than cruelty.
“Thank you,” she said. “You are a gentleman and an artist, and I shall tell everyone I meet about your window display.”
“Please don’t,” the baker said.
But she was already walking away, eating the roll in large, graceless bites, while he stood shaking his head in the doorway with an expression that fell somewhere between bewilderment and the reluctant admission that the mad girl had perhaps been right about the glaze.
She ate the roll and spent the driver’s sixpence on a cup of tea at a public house near the Abbey, where she sat in a corner and tried to think strategically about her future.
This lasted roughly four minutes.
Then a woman at the next table dropped an entire basket of parcels, and Molly was on her feet before the strategic thinking had properly begun.
“Let me help, please. Those are going everywhere.”
The woman was elderly, small, dressed in lavender, and entirely overwhelmed by the number of packages she had evidently purchased that morning.
Molly gathered them from the floor, stacked them in order of size, and carried the whole pile out of the public house while the woman trotted alongside her, explaining that she had a weak wrist, that her usual companion had a cold, and that modern hatboxes were far too slippery.
“Where are you headed?” Molly asked.
“Gay Street. Just past the Circus.”
“I have not the least idea where that is, but I shall carry your packages there with great enthusiasm.”
She carried the packages.
The walk took twenty minutes, during which Molly learned that the woman was Mrs Dalrymple, that Mrs Dalrymple’s cat had recently had kittens, that her daughter had married a vicar in Devonshire and visited far too seldom, and that Mrs Dalrymple believed Bath was deteriorating as a social destination and the waters tasted worse every year.
“You are very kind, dear,” Mrs Dalrymple said, when the packages had been deposited in her hall. “Do you live in Bath?”
“I do now,” Molly said, which was somewhere between a statement of fact and an act of optimism.
“Well, you must come for tea.” Mrs Dalrymple was already untying her bonnet, then paused with the strings half undone, fixing Molly with the particular intensity of a Bath widow committing a stranger to her social calendar. “Tuesdays. I am always at home on Tuesdays.”
Molly added this to her growing mental inventory of Bath assets, which currently consisted of one free roll, one cup of tea, one invitation to Tuesday tea with Mrs Dalrymple, and an increasingly detailed map of streets she had walked that morning while talking to everyone who would stand still long enough to listen.
Tom the crossing-sweeper had given her, with no prompting beyond her asking how his morning went, the entire history of his marriage, his three sons, and his views on the paving.
Two women in matching bonnets had directed her to the Pump Room.
A boy crying the morning paper had corrected her pronunciation of Pulteney, and seemed quite charmed when she thanked him for it.
Bath was a city full of people, and people were Molly’s medium. She moved through them instinctively, leaving a faint trail of bewildered goodwill wherever she went.
By afternoon, however, the warm wind was flagging.
Her ankle had progressed from aching to actively hostile, each step sending a jolt up her shin that made her teeth ache in sympathy.
Her dress, which had dried into a wrinkled approximation of respectability, was beginning to attract glances that fell on the wrong side of curious.
Her sixpence was gone. Her hair had abandoned all pretence of propriety.
And the question she had been outwalking all morning was catching up with her stride by stride, as relentless as a creditor.
Where are you going to sleep tonight?
She was considering this question with the first genuine flicker of dread she had permitted herself all day when she turned a corner onto a quiet side street and saw, halfway down the row, a tidy stone house with a bow window and a hand-lettered sign that read, in sensible black paint: Rooms and Board. Mrs E. Bramble, Proprietress.
There was a cat in the window. A large ginger tom sat upon the sill with the proprietary air of a creature who owned the premises and tolerated the humans out of noblesse oblige.
Below the cat, through the glass, Molly could see a front parlour with a fire burning and a table set with a white cloth and, upon the table, a teapot.
She went inside.
This was a decision made entirely by her feet, which had apparently formed an alliance with her stomach and overruled her brain.
Her brain was saying something along the lines of, You have no money.
You cannot pay for tea. You should keep walking until you find a church, or a charitable institution, or, at minimum, a bench.
Her feet ignored all of this and carried her through the front door and into the parlour, where the warmth of the fire struck her like an embrace, and the smell of tea was so immediate and so perfect that her knees nearly gave way.
“Good afternoon,” said a voice from the kitchen doorway. “Sit down before you fall down, dear. You look as if you have been through a war.”
Mrs Bramble was a woman built for authority.
She stood in the doorway like a general surveying a battlefield, shoulders square, apron immaculate, hands planted on hips that had clearly been planted upon for decades and showed no signs of yielding.
She was perhaps in her sixties, with dark hair pinned beneath a cap, and she had the sort of face that communicated, simultaneously, that she had seen everything the world had to offer and that very little of it had impressed her.
Her eyes, though, were the tell.
They were quick and dark and warm beneath the briskness, the eyes of someone who had decided long ago that kindness was most efficiently delivered without sentimentality.
Her gaze fell on Molly with a surgeon’s appraisal, assessing damage, calculating remedy, already three steps ahead.
“Sit,” she repeated. “Tea?”
“Please,” Molly said, and sat down at the table so quickly that the cat on the windowsill opened one eye in disapproval.
Mrs Bramble brought tea. She brought bread. She brought butter and a small dish of jam, and set all of it down with the brisk, unhesitating competence of a woman who understood that a girl who looked as this one did required feeding before questioning.
Molly ate.
She ate as a person eats who has been running on one roll, one cup of tea, and the fumes of her own stubbornness since dawn: quickly, gracefully for approximately thirty seconds, and then with an abandon that sacrificed dignity in favour of survival.
She was halfway through her second slice of bread before she remembered that she had no money, that she would have to pay for this, and that she had absolutely no means of doing so.
The bread turned to chalk in her mouth.
Mrs Bramble, who had been watching from behind the counter and had served enough desperate strangers to recognise the exact moment when reality arrived, set down the teapot and said, “How much have you got?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Money, dear. How much have you got on you?”
Molly put the bread down. She straightened her spine. She attempted to arrange her face into an expression suggestive of financial solvency, a difficult thing to do with her hair staging a rebellion and her travelling-bag leaking a mismatched shoe.
“I seem to have left my purse at home.”
“Mmm. And where is home?”
“Somerset.”
“And what are you doing in Bath, with no purse and no chaperone, and an ankle that ought to have been seen to hours ago?”
“I am visiting my aunt.”
The lie emerged by pure reflex, weak and transparent, and Molly watched Mrs Bramble receive it with the gentle contempt it deserved.
She took a breath.