Chapter Fifty
Damien slammed his fist against the door so hard he heard the windows rattle in their scarlet panes, heard the wood leap against the doorjamb.
The teashop was never closed, but today there was a handwritten sign stuck to the window, the ‘c’ curling in the wrong direction – and it flapped wildly as Damien rattled the door over and again.
‘Mr Jane? Mr Jane!’
Finally, a voice thundered back: ‘We’re closed. Can’t you bloody read?’
‘Please, it’s me.’
Mr Jane snapped the lace curtain on the door back long enough to meet Damien’s eye, and frowned. Then Damien heard the snicker-click of the door being unlocked, the bolt sliding back.
‘One day a year,’ said Mr Jane. ‘One day. And this is the one you choose to get in trouble.’
‘Who says I’m in trouble?’ Damien said, his chest still heaving as he tried to regain his breath.
‘Perhaps I just—’ He was about to say missed your company, but as he looked around the little teashop, the words died on his tongue.
Everything was dark, the curtains drawn.
The fire was still lit in the kitchen, a distant orange glow, but in the teashop the only light came from the centre table, which was stuffed with candles.
Hundreds of them, the small, flickering ones that Damien would see at church – and in the centre of them, a picture.
‘Oh,’ said Damien, his voice hitching slightly. ‘I didn’t mean to—’
‘I know you didn’t,’ said Mr Jane, his gaze following Damien’s. ‘Now get inside, and tell me what happened.’
‘You know those mistakes I told you of?’ said Damien as he stepped inside, moving into the shadow and turning back towards the door.
It didn’t look like anyone had followed him – but then he hadn’t thought anyone had followed him to Liverpool, either.
Another way in which he’d gone wrong: always assume the worst.
Mr Jane bolted the door, pulling the curtain closed once more. ‘They’ve been called in for payment, have they?’
‘I think so,’ said Damien.
‘Did they follow you?’
Damien shook his head. ‘Not here, I don’t think. But someone was waiting for me outside Miss Adams’ house.’
‘Then I’ll fix you a drink, and you can tell me what sort of trouble you’re in. And then we’ll make a plan.’
Damien’s gaze slid back to the table, to the flickering light there. ‘I’ve got a plan,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a plan since I got here, I just got—’ Distracted. Ensnared by a fantasy – something I cannot have. ‘I’m leaving Liverpool. Just as I’d planned to, when I arrived.’
Mr Jane frowned, and walked behind the counter. He pulled out two teacups, and then, from beneath the table with all the candles, he revealed a half-full bottle of whisky. After he’d poured them each a cup, he sat back, one finger hooked around the delicate porcelain handle.
‘So you’re running?’ he said, eyebrows slanting.
‘Not running,’ Damien corrected. ‘It’s going to be a fresh start. Truly a fresh one. It’s just … happening a bit sooner than I thought.’
‘And what does the lovely Miss Adams think about that?’ asked Mr Jane, his dark gaze not leaving Damien’s face. ‘She got any opinions on the matter?’
Damien looked away, focusing instead on the table with the candles, on the picture that nestled in the centre of them all. The glare was too bright upon the glass for him to see much detail, but it looked like a picture of a woman.
‘She doesn’t know I’m leaving.’
Mr Jane’s eyebrow twitched. ‘So, what? You’ll just disappear? Not tell her?’
He felt the words twist in his stomach. ‘No, of course not – I’ll tell her. I’d have to. I couldn’t—’ leave without seeing her.
Mr Jane leaned forwards slightly. ‘You remember when I first met you? And I asked you a question?’
‘You asked a lot of questions,’ Damien said.
‘I asked you what’d happen,’ he said. ‘If you turned and faced whatever was chasing you.’
Damien reached for his own drink. The whisky smelled of smoke, and oak, and honey, and it warmed him the full way from his throat to his stomach.
The truth was he didn’t know what would happen if he stopped running, but he knew his father hadn’t hunted him halfway across the country for a cosy family reunion.
This was the man who’d left him to rot at a boarding school.
This was a man who believed only in punishment – and considering what he already thought Damien guilty of, and all that Damien had done since – it wasn’t too great a leap to assume he’d be just as happy to let him rot again.
Somewhere he could be forgotten.
‘Worst case? My father has enough to put me behind bars, and by the time I’m out Miss Adams has a happy life with someone else.’
‘And what about best case?’
Damien shrugged. As far as he was concerned, there was no best case.
Not for the things he’d done. Whether or not he was the exact breed of monster his father believed him to be, a man couldn’t steal, lie and gamble for nigh on a decade and not be forced to pay the piper when the time came.
The only option he had now was to run, to America – New York, if he could, or Boston. To start a new life.
Without Ava.
The thought brought his cup back to his lips, made him take another stinging sip.
‘Best case is I disappear,’ Damien said quietly. ‘I disappear. And Miss Adams forgets me. Forgets my name. Forgets—’ He hesitated, his eyebrows touching. ‘Forgets all of it.’
Mr Jane sat back a little in his chair. ‘Aha,’ he said.
‘What do you mean “Aha”?’ Damien took in his face, the smoothness of his brow, the smug twitch to his smile. ‘There is no “Aha.”’
‘You love her,’ said Mr Jane simply.
‘What?’ Damien’s eyebrows furrowed. ‘How did you come to that conclusion from “I’m going to prison”?’
‘Because she was featured in both scenarios,’ said Mr Jane. ‘Both the best and the worst.’
‘And in both of them, she has to forget I ever existed.’
‘According to you,’ said Mr Jane from over the top of his cup.
‘No,’ said Damien. ‘According to reason. According to the fact that I have lived a life that isn’t compatible with the future in store for her.’
‘And what future is that?’
‘A normal one!’ said Damien. ‘A peaceful one.’
‘Aha,’ said Mr Jane again, one enormous finger tapping rhythmically against the porcelain cup. ‘Whereas you will, what? Join a marching band?’
‘I’ll be chased for the rest of my life,’ said Damien. ‘I won’t be able to come back to England – to where her family lives. And I wouldn’t do that to her. I couldn’t do that to her.’
‘You don’t have to,’ said Mr Jane. ‘Not if you face up to whatever is chasing you.’
‘And go to prison?’
‘You said your father was the one chasing you,’ said Mr Jane. ‘What makes you think he wants you in prison?’
‘Because that’s what that boarding school was,’ said Damien, taking another stinging sip.
‘A place where I could be forgotten. He believes I’m responsible for …
for something awful. He believes it was my fault, and now I think he wants to put me somewhere I can disappear entirely, a place I can’t run from him again. ’
Mr Jane frowned a little and drained the rest of his cup. ‘If that were true, surely you wouldn’t have got this far,’ he said. ‘Surely he’d have gotten the police involved. What if you’re running from a ghost?’
Damien gritted his teeth. ‘He wouldn’t want the shame it’d bring to the family name. Believe me, I know what I’m doing, Mr Jane. The question now is whether you are going to help me?’
Mr Jane’s frown deepened a little, but he nodded. ‘What do you need from me?’
‘I need you to take this,’ said Damien, reaching for his pocketbook – all the money he had. ‘And book me onto a ship. I don’t care where in America it’ll take me, so long as I cross the Atlantic.’
Mr Jane looked down at the money and then back up at Damien. ‘There is a flaw in your plan,’ he said.
‘What?’ Damien looked down at the money too, as though that held the answer. ‘What flaw?’
‘You cannot make a fresh start in the shadow of your old life. You think that running across the Atlantic will help? It won’t. I think you’ll find that shadow stretches, and it’ll reach you wherever you go.’
Damien shook his head. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said.
‘Actually, I understand exactly,’ said Mr Jane, reaching to slosh another thumb’s width of whisky into both of their glasses. ‘Come on. It’s time I introduced the pair of you.’
He stood then, the chair scraping backwards, and walked to the candlelit table. It took Damien a moment to realize he was meant to follow, until Mr Jane turned and beckoned him impatiently.
‘Damien,’ he said. ‘Meet Mrs Jane. Mrs Jane, meet Damien.’
Damien looked down at the picture, at the woman’s face. The photographer had managed to catch her midway between smiling and laughing – her eyes were half scrunched up, her hand a blur as it came up as though to cover her mouth, her smile stretching from cheek to cheek.
‘I didn’t know there was a Mrs Jane,’ said Damien.
Mr Jane snorted. ‘You thought “Jane” was a common surname for sailors, did you?’
‘I thought it might be a nickname.’
Mr Jane tilted his head to one side. ‘When we married, I didn’t want her to take my name, but she insisted. And I said she could, so long as everyone called us by her name instead. “What, Jane?” she’d said, and then laughed, and then it just … stuck, I suppose.’
Damien smiled. ‘She was beautiful,’ he said.
‘Never could stand still,’ said Mr Jane, a gruffness to his voice now Damien hadn’t heard before.
‘Right before this was taken I’d told her she had an expression on her like she’d sucked on sour lemons, and she told me to mind my business, mister.
’ He swallowed hard, the muscle in his jaw bunching.
‘She wanted to look serious. A serious picture. I told her I’d rather it looked like her.
And I think this …’ He ran a finger down the frame. ‘I think it came out perfectly.’
‘You didn’t want to get one together?’ Damien asked. ‘The two of you?’
‘Oh, we did,’ said Mr Jane, though his eyebrows furrowed a little now.
‘But I prefer looking at this one. Don’t need to see all this—’ He gestured to his face, to the webbed scar that ran from the crest of his skull, down to his jawline.
‘When I could look at someone as beautiful as her instead.’ His gaze lingered on the photo for a moment longer, before flicking back to Damien.
‘Do you remember that boy I was telling you about, the first time you were here? The one who thought he wasn’t anything? ’
Damien nodded. ‘I think you were making a not-so-subtle comparison,’ he said. ‘Trying to get me to stay and drink your horrible ginger tea.’
‘Because I looked at you, and I saw myself,’ said Mr Jane. ‘Plucked you from the very same alleyway Mrs Jane plucked me from, in fact.’
Damien’s brow furrowed. ‘You were sick, too?’
‘Drunk,’ Mr Jane corrected. ‘Dishonourably discharged at twenty-eight because I tried to earn some extra coin boxing and ended up killing a man with a misplaced punch.’ His expression twisted. ‘Michael Sanders was his name. He was two years younger than me.’
‘But it was an accident?’
‘It was an accident,’ Mr Jane agreed, a roughness to his voice now. ‘But that doesn’t make a jot of difference to the guilt you feel. So, I buried myself. Spent all the coin I had to my name on booze, or opium, or placing losing bets. Until one day – I met Jane.’
He reached to stroke a finger down the frame.
‘I was asleep in the alleyway that runs down the back of the shop, and she kicked my boot. Told me if I was going to lodge there, then I needed to work for it. Carrying things when she needed it. Replacing the oil in the lamps. Fetching the coal from the cellar.’ A ghost of a smile crossed his lips.
‘I’d never met a woman so beautiful. So forthright, and so …
unafraid of me. It was like she didn’t even see my scar.
And I was twenty-eight, you see, and struck dumb by the sight of her, probably gawping like a guppy.
But she just crossed her arms over her chest and said: “Come on, now. You get up and you help, or you find somewhere else to sleep.”’
‘And so you helped?’
‘I helped,’ Mr Jane said, nodding. ‘Every day. On Fridays she would make me supper – fish cakes – and on Sundays, I’d accompany her to church.
And we fell into a rhythm. As we worked, she’d ask me questions, about my family.
About my time in the navy. I told her everything – the good, the bad, the ugly.
Because she trusted me, and I wanted to repay it. I wanted to trust her, too.’
Damien frowned. ‘And she didn’t mind about what you’d done?’ he said. ‘She didn’t care?’
‘She didn’t judge me,’ said Mr Jane. ‘And that was enough to give me the courage to face up to it. To make amends to that man’s family.
To his wife. She was kind to me. Too kind, considering—’ He shook his head, looking away.
‘But that’s how we could have that life together.
Our second life. Because I could put my past to rest.’
Damien’s gaze flitted back to the image, to the smiling woman. ‘I don’t think it’s quite so easy for me,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they’ll just forgive the things I’ve done.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Mr Jane conceded. ‘But is running to America really the answer? What about Miss Adams?’
Damien pursed his lips into a line. Because that was the thought that had chased each pounding footstep, each jagged breath.
What about Ava?
He had to tell her.
He had to tell her he was leaving.
‘Do you think …’ he asked. ‘Do you think you could do one more thing for me, Mr Jane?’