Chapter 5 #2
No, her father’s club had not been like the Full Moon. No house in all of London could possibly be like the Full Moon, with its mismatched guests, its opulent interiors, its excellent food.
The locked door on the second floor.
—
As the days passed with no sign of her brother, Caroline swallowed her growing panic. The years of waiting for Charlie had taught her patience. So she kept her head down and hands busy. She kept her questions to herself.
—
Downstairs in the cellar kitchen, she helped Mrs. Easton cook breakfast. By the third morning she was allowed to mind the eggs—sneaky little things, the yolks changing from perfectly jammy to overcooked in a matter of seconds—while Mrs. Easton did everything else: kneaded the bread, turned the sausages, boiled quinces for jelly and lye for soap.
Around six thirty, Rab arrived to choke down his breakfast. Caroline felt his unsettling gold eyes on her as she moved about the kitchen, but whenever she turned to catch him, he was looking elsewhere.
Caroline’s curiosity and anxiety for the first supper party Mrs. Easton had mentioned, to be held the second Saturday after her arrival at the Full Moon, was only amplified by the landlady’s repetition of their to-do list.
“On Friday we will wax the banister. The job of dusting the chandelier will fall to you, I’m afraid, Miss Huxley.
I’m too old to be clambering about on chairs.
And we must beat the rugs. And we must find a day to try out that sweetbread recipe…
Wednesday, perhaps? That way we can work out any kinks before the Saturday… ”
Caroline did as she was told. She was downstairs before six and didn’t stop moving until the supper dishes were done. And as she went about the tasks Mrs. Easton assigned her, she searched for any sign of Charlie.
She found none. Not so much as a scrap of paper bearing his name. But she did learn a bit about the Full Moon’s strange boarders.
Some of the guests—Mr. O’Riley, the cowboy, Monsieur Rodart, and miniature Mr. Tythe of the massive spectacles—had clearly spent weeks, if not months, at the boardinghouse.
Their rooms felt lived in, jackets hung on chairbacks in a proprietary manner, the desks messy with pomade and cologne (Monsieur Rodart), stained newspapers and old receipts (Mr. O’Riley), and jars of dead insects and bottles of ether (Mr. Tythe, who, Caroline learned, was an amateur naturalist).
But in other rooms, the only signs of habitation were the clothes in the armoire (Mr. Toussaint, the Black man), a Bible on the bedside table (Senhor Perreira, the piratical Portuguese wine merchant), and a small, strange altar, the flowers of which were changed daily (Mr. Bajwa, the Sikh).
Mrs. Easton’s room was beside John’s, the scarred man whose surname Caroline had not yet learned, as everyone just called him John. The landlady insisted on cleaning both rooms herself.
Other than those, and the forbidden east wing of the second floor, the only door Caroline had not entered was Rab’s.
The handle of his door was silver. Not the identical brass of every other bedroom door, including hers, which opened to the same brass key that Mrs. Easton kept on the ring at her belt.
Once or twice, Caroline met Rab on the landing, and as they exchanged pleasantries she watched him slip a silver key into his breast pocket.
She took to creeping up to the garret after he left for the day and trying the handle, praying he might have forgotten to lock it behind him. But he never did.
At night, she wrote.
Phrases swirled through her head like half-remembered melodies, and she repeated them while stirring the porridge or hanging sheets on the line until she could make some excuse and disappear upstairs to record them in her notebook.
Mrs. Easton had many idioms, among them “a watched pot never boils,” and perhaps that was the trick with writing.
For years, Caroline had sat at her desk in stillness, willing the words to come.
But now, when she had no time for waiting, when her hands were their busiest, the words sprang up like dandelions after a rain.
She crammed them into the margins of her notebook, the indents before paragraphs, even the sacrosanct page containing Charlie’s dedication.
Mostly they were disjointed musings: descriptions of faces and autumn skies and the jagged black Whitechapel skyline, rambling questions of Charlie’s whereabouts and what would happen to her next.
But a story had begun to form, its edges hardening like a figure stepping from the fog.
A young woman, orphaned and alone, thrust into a secret society of strange men.
When Caroline ran out of paper, she asked Mrs. Easton. The landlady had none, but, without asking what the paper was for, she directed Caroline to Rab.
Caroline hadn’t seen him much; her days were so busy.
When she passed him in the hallways, they exchanged brief good days and good nights.
It was often ten or eleven when she finally capped her pen and climbed into bed, but no matter the hour, Rab’s lamp still glowed beneath his door.
Once she had awoken in the dark to the sound of something heavy hitting the ground, once to the sound of glass breaking.
Both times she had lain in bed with her heart leaping against her ribs, praying she had remembered to draw the bolt.
—
On her tenth night at the Full Moon, Caroline raised her fist to Rab’s door and knocked.
She heard a scramble of papers, a drawer closing. Then his quick, sure steps. The door opened just enough to accommodate the width of his face.
“Hullo,” Rab said, pulling on a polite smile.
His nostrils flared as they always did when he encountered Caroline, and she resisted the urge to drop her nose to her underarm. She’d not yet bathed since she came here, but she did not think her body odor offensive. Was it?
She said, “Please forgive the intrusion. I’m out of paper. Mrs. Easton said you might have some?”
His curls stood high, as though he’d been running his hands through them, and the skin around his eyes was creased with lack of sleep.
Below rolled shirtsleeves—goldenrod today, with green polka dots—his forearms were the color of new bronze, mapped with veins.
The strange smell of his room emanated past him.
“I wondered what you were doing in there,” he said, fixing her with the strange yellow gaze that made her stomach swoop, “with your lamp lit at all hours. Writing love letters, are you? To some moon-eyed boy back in Birmingham?”
A hot blush crept up her throat. He had seen the light beneath her door, taken note of it. Was now, brazenly, asking questions about what she did, late at night, in the privacy of her own quarters.
In her close, proper life, no one had trespassed like this. No one but Charlie. So she pretended Rab was Charlie, and responded with acid in her voice.
“Do you have any paper to spare, or should I ask someone else?”
In the beat of silence that followed, Caroline did not breathe. But neither did she look away. She forced herself to hold his eyes, raised her chin the way her brother did when he was feeling quarrelsome.
Something flickered across Rab’s face, gone too quickly for Caroline to name it. His mouth cracked into a grin, and he mimed touching the brim of an imaginary hat as he said, “Sorry, ma’am. Right away, ma’am.”
The door clicked closed. Caroline listened to his footsteps, the wooden cry of a drawer sliding open, sliding shut.
Her heart pounded. She had never met anyone who reminded her of Charlie.
But this man, despite their differences in coloring, could be his brother.
Charlie had lived beside him, known him so intimately that pieces of him had blurred into Rab and pieces of Rab had blurred into Charlie.
The way he reached for his cup, the way his eyes flicked to the ceiling when he was thinking.
A million thoughtless gestures that could only be learned over a lifetime of proximity.
Charlie had never mentioned Rab’s name, not once.
But they were light and dark, moon and sun.
If any room in the boardinghouse held a trace of Charlie, it was Rab’s. Of this, Caroline was certain.
“Here you are,” Rab said, appearing a moment later with a thick sheaf of parchment. Caroline held out her hands for it, but Rab clutched it tighter to his chest. “Let him down easy, Miss Huxley.”
But Caroline was not listening. For as Rab stepped back she glimpsed, for a moment, the mirror of her own room behind him.
A desk stood under the window, the chair hastily abandoned at an odd angle.
Rab’s walls, she guessed, were papered in the same pleasant rose trellis pattern as hers.
But she could not be certain, for they were covered from baseboard to ceiling with handwritten notes.
Caroline trained her gaze back on his. He must not wonder at her interest for his room, must not suspect her at all. His last sentence came tripping back to her, untethered and incomprehensible. “Let…who?”
Rab’s eyes roved over her face as he handed her the stack of paper. Their fingers brushed, and Caroline pulled her hand back as though stung.
He smiled again, a cool, curling smile. “The poor moon-eyed sop waiting for your letter.”
Caroline made some curt reply, which she would later not recall. She crossed to her room, shut the door, stood with her back against it. In the yellow light of her oil lamp, she raised her hand.
Her fingers were bone white and slender, the cuticles raw from the day’s work. There was no mark where he had touched her, though she swore there must be, for she could still feel the place where his skin had been.