Chapter 6 #4
I do, Tamsin wanted to say, but she bit her tongue.
“Sleeping under the bridge isn’t safe, Mama.
You know, likely as not, thieves will steal everything we have.
Besides, it doesn’t have to be charity. We can help Big John.
His shop is dusty. We can offer to clean it and help make it more…
” She searched for the right word. “Appealing.”
Did pawnshops need to be appealing? Probably not, but she was desperate.
“I don’t know, Tamsin.”
This was as close to agreement as her mother was likely to get. Tamsin turned back to the pawnbroker. “We’d expect to earn our keep, Big John. We’ll clean the place for you and rearrange everything so it looks nice.”
“Ye won’t touch anything. I’ll never find it if ye do.”
“Well, at least we can dust and wash the window.” Tamsin gestured to the shopwindow. “I can barely see inside there’s so much grime.”
Big John looked at the window then back at the women. More precisely, he looked at Tamsin’s mother. “Fine. One night. Mayhap two.”
“Thank you, Big John!” Tamsin tried to hug him, but he put his hands out, preventing her.
“None of that now. Ye can sleep in the back room. There’s a stove there, and ye’ll be warm enough.”
Tamsin turned to her mother. “There’s a stove, Mama.”
Her mother sighed, seeming to realize she’d been beaten.
For the last eighteen months, they’d shivered in their room at Brown’s Coffee Shop.
In the winter, Tamsin had to break the ice that formed on the basin of water they used to wash in the morning.
And here Big John was casually offering them a space with a stove.
Not that she was under any illusion his back room was some sort of palace.
She’d spent plenty of time there. It was dirty and stuffed with all the things Big John liked to tinker with.
Still, it would be vastly better than sleeping under a bridge.
Big John gestured toward his shop, and the two women went inside. Tamsin didn’t think her mother had been inside more than a handful of times, and she glanced around with some interest. Big John suddenly appeared rather sheepish as he led them to the back room. “It’s not much,” he said.
Her mother looked about, and Tamsin couldn’t help but notice the hopeful expression on Big John’s face.
Curious. Why should he care if her mother approved or not?
“There’s the stove,” he said, moving across the room to point out the obvious.
The room was warm, and Tamsin could see the glow of the burning coal inside the cast-iron stove.
“I hope we won’t be dislodging you from your work area,” her mother said, glancing at an upside-down chair with a leg lying on the floor beside it. “It looks as though you are making repairs.”
Big John shrugged. “I can take that out front. Let me clear a space for you.”
“We can do that,” Tamsin said. “We don’t need much.”
Big John looked like he might object, but the tinkling of the bell above the door sounded, and he turned toward the front of the shop. “I’ll be right back.”
As soon as he was gone, her mother grabbed Tamsin’s shoulder. “Now we’re in his debt.”
“We’ll earn our keep, like I said.” Tamsin looked around, mentally rearranging some items so they would have enough room to lay down Kildare’s greatcoat as a bed. “Besides, he wanted to give us a place to stay—or at least you. Did you see the way he looked at you?”
“You’re imagining things.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You forget that I’m disfigured. No man would look at me.”
“Mama, you lost an arm, not your head.”
“Don’t get ideas, Tamsin. I’ve had two husbands, and that’s enough for any woman. Now, move that table, so we have a bit of room by the stove. I’ll look for some rags we can use to dust.”
“Yes, Mama.” Tamsin set her pack down by the stove and began pushing the table into a corner.
The jumble of necklaces on the table winked up at her, and Tamsin glared at them.
“I might just untangle you yet,” she said.
Beside the necklaces sat the automaton caterpillar.
Tamsin ran a finger over the jewels covering its body.
What would it be like to have jewels like this?
To be a duchess with diamond necklaces and ruby earbobs?
Tamsin had never worn a single piece of jewelry.
When she’d been little, her mother would tie a string around her wrist, and she’d pretend it was a bracelet.
That was the closest she’d ever come to jewelry.
She sighed. No point in wondering about things she couldn’t have. Her mother had torn an old petticoat of hers into strips. “I’ll take these into the shop and start dusting. You dust in here then find a mop and fetch some water. If we’re to sleep on the floor, I’d rather it be clean.”
By midafternoon the next day, the shop was practically sparkling.
The floors had been mopped, the shelves dusted, the window washed.
The back room was still cluttered, but some of the jumble of items had been dusted.
The floor was clean, and the Archer women’s things had been put away on a shelf Tamsin had cleared.
Big John hadn’t said anything about leaving, so Tamsin hoped they could stay another few nights.
As evening approached, her belly rumbled, but she didn’t dare say anything about being hungry.
Big John had given them boiled potatoes a few hours ago, and that was generous of him.
Now she sat at the table and worked at a knot in the tangle of necklaces.
She wasn’t making any progress, but her mother was polishing some of the silver in the front.
She could hear Big John speaking and her mother’s soft voice replying.
Tamsin decided to give them a little time alone.
Her thoughts wandered, as they often did, to Garret Kildare.
He’d told her he’d meet her tonight with a plan to help free Charlie and Joanna from Snoozer.
Would he keep that promise? Tamsin didn’t have much faith in men.
She’d loved her father, and she’d been fond of her stepfather.
But where were they now? She couldn’t exactly blame them for their own deaths.
Her father had been impressed and died at sea when she was only eight.
When she was barely twenty, her stepfather had been killed when a rope came loose and a pallet of heavy cargo had fallen on him down at the docks.
The deaths had been disastrous for Tamsin and her family.
Like her mother, she was reluctant to put any faith in the ability of a man to save her.
And yet, Garret Kildare was different from the other men she’d known.
She withdrew the handkerchief she kept tucked between her stays and rubbed it against her cheek.
Kildare wasn’t just richer and more handsome—though he was both of those things—he had a way about him.
When he said he would do something, she believed him.
He was the sort of man who inspired confidence. She just hoped hers wasn’t misplaced.