Chapter 20 #2
Twice she was told Sergeant Corbet was on patrol.
The miss could leave a message, if she wanted.
But Caroline shook her head and retreated into the icy streets.
She could tell him about the locked room on the second floor.
But she had nothing to give him, no tangible evidence that would implicate the boardinghouse or any of its inhabitants.
And—she was ashamed of her cowardice—a part of her did not wish to know whether her brother’s name appeared on the manifest of the SS Oceanic.
If he had willfully abandoned both his sister and his pregnant fiancée, then he was not the man Caroline had thought him to be.
No, Caroline told herself whenever this thought raised its ghoulish head. She pressed her fingers to her eyelids until she saw a kaleidoscope of color. You know Charlie better than anyone. He would never leave you.
But as the weeks passed, and the moon swelled, Caroline’s hope of ever seeing her brother again dimmed like a star at dawn.
Senhor Perreira came down with a terrible influenza and spent four days in bed, sneezing violently and ringing a bell (which he had among his possessions, evidently, should just such a need arise) to call for tea and beef broth.
Mr. O’Riley took to sitting before the parlor hearth wrapped in a moth-eaten velvet duster, casting withering glances at anyone who sidled up to share the heat.
Mr. Bajwa was positively gray, and Mrs. Easton purchased a second warming pan for his bed.
“Don’t tell the other guests,” she said, with a surreptitious glance up the kitchen stairs as she filled the iron trap with coals, “but I’m worried about him. Poor fellow. So far from his home. From his family. Could use all the warmth he can get.”
Only John and Rab seemed to be immune. John appeared to not feel the cold at all; Mrs. Easton often covered his lap with a blanket or brought down his forgotten slippers, which he acknowledged only with a vague half smile.
And Rab seemed downright invigorated by the weather, arriving home each evening pink-cheeked, with a joke for the sad sods huddled around the fire.
Caroline shivered whenever he passed her, and blamed it on the cold.
—
On the fourth day of Senhor Perreira’s illness, Mrs. Easton began to lose patience with the wine merchant.
“That’s the third time this hour,” she muttered, as his bell rang out from the second floor.
It was an hour to supper; most of the guests were gathered glumly in the parlor, clutching cups of madeira to their chests like hot coals.
“I still have the popovers in,” the landlady said. “I’m sure it’s more tea he’s after. Would you mind bringing it up, Miss Huxley?”
So Caroline, who had been eavesdropping on a conversation between Mr. Toussaint and Mr. Tythe about Commissioner Warren’s resignation, begrudgingly agreed.
She brewed the tea, arranged milk and sugar and biscuits on a tray, and placed it all in the dumbwaiter. As she ascended the freezing servants’ staircase, blowing breath into her fisted hands to warm them, she cursed Senhor Perreira and Rab Ripley and all the rest of them.
On the first-floor landing, Caroline fumbled in the near darkness for the dumbwaiter shaft doors and gripped the rope pulleys with cold-stiffened fingers.
But before she could begin the tedious work of raising the tea tray from two floors below, a shaft of light briefly illuminated the staircase above her.
A door creaked as it opened, then closed, once more casting the staircase in darkness.
Caroline froze. She was not alone.
Whoever it was stood on the landing just above her. With her heart in her ears, Caroline tried to conjure the image of the men seated in the parlor below. Mr. Toussaint and Mr. Tythe. John, milky-eyed and slack-jawed. Mr. Bajwa, ashen-faced beside the hearth.
Senhor Perreira was in his room. Which left Mr. O’Riley, Alfie Rodart, and Rab.
Then she heard the footsteps. Not one set. Two.
“I cannot bear it!” Alfie Rodart gasped.
A tussle, like hands on fabric. The thud of a body against a wall.
“I cannot bear—”
“Shush,” said Mr. O’Riley, in a far more tender voice than Caroline had ever before heard him use. “Shush, Alfie. You don’t have to decide nuthin’ tonight—”
“I must leave, Jim. I’ve been gone months longer than I planned; Amelie is writing daily, begging me to come home. I think she suspects—”
“It’s too dangerous to cross the Channel now. It’s December, Al, just think of the storms. You won’t get there no sooner if you’re dead.” An audible swallow. “And I don’t rightly know what I’d do if you drowned.”
The Frenchman whispered something that Caroline could not make out.
Then the sounds of a tussle—no, she realized belatedly, na?vely—the sounds of embracing.
Monsieur Rodart and Mr. O’Riley were kissing on the landing above her.
Her head filled with the sounds of hands dragging at clothing, breath catching in throats.
She wanted to melt into the floorboards. She considered, briefly, trying to escape down the dumbwaiter shaft.
“We can’t,” whispered Monsieur Rodart. “Not now. It’s nearly supper. The others will notice our absence.”
“Later?” The cowboy’s voice was thick with longing. “Please, Al. Who knows how many more times—”
“Later,” the Frenchman promised. Caroline imagined him stroking a thumb down Mr. O’Riley’s stubbly cheek, over his lips. “At nine. We’ll meet here.”
More sighs, more whispered words. Then the door opened—Caroline flinched beneath the bright beam of light—and two pairs of feet made their way out onto the second-floor hall.
Caroline stood alone in the frigid darkness for a long time.
Alfie Rodart and Jim O’Riley were lovers.
Thank God, she thought. Thank God they left before…
It did not bear imagining.
But as she forced her numb and shaking hands to resume their task, as she wound the rope around its hook and lifted Senhor Perreira’s tea tray, another image floated to the surface of her mind.
The cigarette lighter she had found in Monsieur Rodart’s room.
Beloved A ~ You are the smoke to my fire. Yours, J.
At least there was one open mystery she could strike through.
At supper, Caroline watched through her eyelashes as Monsieur Rodart and Mr. O’Riley, seated at opposite ends of the table, conversed nonchalantly with the men around them and avoided each other’s eyes.
She only saw their gazes catch once, fleetingly, but in that brief moment of connection there was such depth of feeling, such bare yearning, that she found herself looking away before they did.
She completed the dinner service in a strange fog of emotions, and as she retreated to the kitchen to start on the dishes, she was surprised to recognize the pinching in her chest as pity.
Apart from the illegal, physical act, there was real affection between them. Real love. And although she tried to hold on to the horror she had felt when she discovered Monsieur Rodart’s pornography, the feeling slipped through her fingers, and all that remained was melancholy.
—
Upon entering Senhor Perreira’s room, she had found the man asleep in his winter coat, a bottle of Godfrey’s Cordial on the table by his bed.
Caroline had left the tea tray on his armoire and slipped out as quietly as possible.
But she caught a whiff of cedar cologne in the air.
Rab had been here before her. Had given the wine merchant a dose of medicine.
As her eyes flitted, now, across the starched tablecloth from Mr. O’Riley to Monsieur Rodart, Caroline schooled her face into a blank expression. For, sudden as the report of a shotgun, she had a plan—a foolish, dangerous plan—to steal Rab’s key.