by Edith Layton
“Do they?” he asked, his voice muffled beneath his own mask. “Show me.”
But as she did, he never laughed at all, or replied in words, and realizing how moved he was, she fell silent and continued, with his slightest touch as her guide, until he drew in his breath sharply and moved her up at last and then beneath him, and then with him. She was pleased at how tremendously eager and rapt in her he was. Yet then, as she watched his lips, the only facial feature now free of his mask, as they parted to let his breath come quicker as he strained to her, she became curiously displeased. Not at his methods or his manner, for as ever, he was expert even in his extreme arousal, even in his urgency, he was a gentleman. Rather, she was remotely disturbed at how well their disguises suited his mood, at how her fanciful flower face pleased him far more than her own appreciative face ever did in their most ardent lovemaking, which, withal, had never been so ardent as this night had become through their pretense of anonymity.
He didn’t even attempt to recreate the moment. After they’d rested, he arose and put on his clothes again, even as he left on his own mask.
“We paid for the night,” she said drowsily, watching him through slitted eyes through the mask.
“But I promised to meet Arden, remember? If we don’t appear he’ll imagine us carried off by villains, quite the little mother he is, you know. Come, stop languishing,” he ordered, tapping her on the rump, “Off with you.
“But not off with the mask,” he corrected her as she began dressing. “Best if no one knows we stopped off here,” he explained.
At least he thought of their reputations, and that was all to the good, she thought as she retied the flower again, noting, with a little chagrin—for she always liked to appear in her best looks, masked or not—how dented and sparse its plumage was now. It might be only his own fame he cared for, but since a gentleman seldom made excuses for even his worst behavior, she fancied it could even be that he wanted to keep her face and name from curious stares and comments. Still, there was something in his odd start tonight that nagged at her. The masks had been amusing, for all she preferred to see his face and let him see hers when they made love and she put on the mask of ecstasy that he needed. But she was never one to think too deeply, life was hard enough, she’d always said, without complicating it more by looking for worms in the roses.
However, it did bother her greatly when they left the masquerade. For it was past midnight then and most of the guests had unmasked. She finally saw the other revelers for what they really were as she passed by them. She’d have preferred they’d removed the damned things then, reputations or not, she thought, if only so that the others could all get a good eyeful of who she was, and then be forced to pay her due attention and respect when they beheld the true glory of the face of the gentleman she was leaving with by her side.
*
“It’s late, we’ve promised ourselves to Julian, and if we don’t meet at a good hour, he’ll call out the troops, good as any nanny is our Julian,” Arden said as he settled in his seat after giving directions to the coachman. That had taken time. There’d been some protest on the fellow’s part until a look from his passenger, along with a coin slipped into his hand for his pride so that he’d be able to tell himself it was the bribe and not the terror that made him go against his better judgment, ended the matter and started them on their way.
“But we were already here this evening,” Francesca observed, peering out the window as the coach slowed and began to inch down the long cobbled street.
“Just so,” Arden agreed, his voice a comfortable low rolling thunder in the quiet of the darkened coach. “I’d best be careful to blindfold you when I abduct you—you’ve a good eye for detail. Yes, there’s the theater where we saw that superior production that would’ve made Shakespeare gnash his teeth in envy, this entire district is for such entertainment—and more. It’s rather like the reverse effect of the mask you wore tonight. Even though it was magnificent in its own false and theatrical way, it hid your human, and so more beautiful, features. Here, it’s only when the mask of respectability is dropped that a more glamorous, less human face is shown. When we arrived earlier it was playtime, but now it’s another sort of playtime.
“There are twin Londons, Francesca,” he said softly, “and it’s this other face beneath that smiling face that I must show you tonight, so that you understand what I’ve been talking about. It’s been like that old story of the blind man and the elephant with us: I speak of the beast; you see only what has touched you. You’ll never understand me if I don’t,” he said, almost to himself, “Although God knows I’d rather not.”
Then he spoke up in a cool strong voice very like that of the tour guide her father had once engaged to show her the Tower on that long-past last visit here.
“Do you see those two women, there in the shadows?” he asked, and without waiting for answer, he went on, no judgment or emotion save for bleak humor in his voice: “Not a mama and child, as you may’ve thought. Come now, how could you think it? At this hour? And loitering so? Any female afoot at this time of night is for sale. No, the elder’s a whoremonger, and the child’s for rent to any man for less than the price of a handkerchief in his pocket. She’s too old to pass off as a convincing virgin, for all she likely cries at her work, for she’s already all of ten, I’d judge. No, there are few untouched around here at any age, and so it’s left to the professional maidens to simulate that desirable state to any good effect. It’s a profitable ruse, for fools believe such sexual congress cures the pox. I imagine what it cures best are their heavy purses. No matter, that child has a thousand competitors, and a thousand thousand more to take her place when she succumbs to the diseases that share her bed and body for no fee at all.
“There,” he said dispassionately, “see those other, older females in the alleyway? And the lads? All at the same trade. Walk the alley further if you dare, to find still more, or the nice men who give them room to sleep out of the rain for the favor of luring their customers so far, so that they can be relieved of their purses, boots, and watches instead of their desires. In all,” he said in the hardest voice she’d ever heard from him, “they’re more fortunate than the gents who achieve their goals, for they only lose their valuables and not their health, or life.
“And can you hear all those pretty ladies singing out, almost as nicely as those other painted ladies did on the stage tonight? Only don’t listen, my dear, for what little you’d understand of their offers would upset you. Some only deliver what they promise. Others have friends to deliver their patrons’ keys and home addresses to while they sport, so that the fools can return home to find their silver, art works, or furniture missing, for each thief here has his specialty.
“For example,” he went on, “that little rat-faced chap who sidles rather than walks—there. He’s got no female to provide for him, but he makes do. He don’t need keys to get into pockets. The big fellow there in the doorway, the one almost my size? He sells his power to any purpose you have in mind, for he must eat to keep up all that strength. They all must eat to live, God knows why, for they’re not wellborn, after all,” he said harshly, in an angry under-voice. “And so nothing goes to waste. Not here in this end of town. There’s a market for everything here, from wet sheets stolen from a line, to stealing a man’s breeches with him still in them—if his family won’t come to ransom, and if his flesh don’t tempt a gent who fancies that sort of pleasure, why then, living or dead, it might interest some medical chaps, and when they’ve done with him, his very bones can go to the burners, and all for a profit. That’s what it’s all about, profit. Not lust, or anger or perverse cruelty. They’re far too hungry for those luxuries. Don’t look at me like that!” he commanded as she stared up at him with wide, frightened eyes. “I didn’t invent all this. I only profited from it. But you couldn’t know that if you couldn’t see this. And still you don’t, so we must go on.
“But don’t worry,” he breathed in a suddenly gen
tler voice as the coach slowed at last to a halt on a tumbledown street, “no harm shall ever come to you through me. That,” he said on a sad exhalation, “is precisely the point of all this.”
She followed him out of the carriage. Although she was alarmed at where she found herself, and the sounds of merriment—raucous singing accompanied by fiddle music—coming from out of the scabrous-looking Golden Rule Coffee House, as the sign proudly proclaimed the place to be, she took his hand and stepped down the small stairway that had been let down so she could alight, without faltering. Arden was with her, after all, and he’d protect her, he’d said it, she never doubted it, although she badly wanted to doubt the reason for their visit here tonight.
It was Arden who paused for a deep breath before he drew himself up to his full, formidable height and entered the back-street pub with her.
Within, it teemed with life, so varied and colorful and loud that for a moment Francesca believed they were back at the masquerade they’d just left. Indeed, she noted what seemed to be a few of the same class of gentlemen here in evening dress in among the truly ragged, filthy common folk.
Arden noted the direction of her gaze. “Oh, yes, the quality does love a show,” he said knowingly as he led her to a corner table. He stared down at the two men at it until they stood up in a crouch and slid away, and then he seated Francesca and himself. “It’s lively enough here,” he continued nonchalantly, as if that was the way he always obtained a table. “It may name itself a coffee shop, but they sell gin by whatever name it goes under and sport of every sort, and its inmates call it a ‘flash house.’
“For all it delights and titillates the venturesome bucks who dare come down here,” he explained, “it’s a respectable place of its sort. There are ballad singers and peddlers, coal heavers, beggars and thieves, pickpockets, whores and their fancy-men all present, to be sure. But for all their several interesting occupations, they do work. So for all their rags, they do eat. There are many worse places. But those I would never show you by moonlight, and dislike to even mention to you by day. I know them all, and well. They were my employment bureaus. Do you see now?” he asked all at once, staring at her.
But she did not and could not and so she only shook her head, beginning to be afraid.
He sighed.
“So be it,” he breathed. “We’ll go on, tomorrow. For now, I believe this is both enough and not enough, so…” He looked about. He arose, beckoned to her, and led her to a table where a grimy man sat with a huge female and an ancient blind beggar. Arden stared down at the old man until his two companions stopped talking and shifted nervously in their seats. At that the old blind man looked up. He took off his cracked black spectacles and slowly rose to his shifting feet, so staggered by what he saw that his old dog beneath the table began to growl.
“Gawd innis mercy!” the old man quavered. “’Tis the Lion rose hup from t’ dead!”
“Never dead,” Arden answered softly, as the music and laughter in the room came to a dead stop. “But yes, risen again. Who has the running of my old haunts now, old man? Is it Whitey Lewis or Gamy Leg Bob who’s got the Spitalfields-Whitechapel ken, from Houndsditch to Petticoat Lane?”
“Whitey’s lagged, Gamy Leg crapped,” the old man whimpered.
“Ah,” Arden said thoughtfully, as Francesca tried to puzzle out what language the beggar spoke, even as she attempted to breathe shallowly, for the stench of fear had joined with the other odors emanating from the old fellow and it was becoming overpowering. “Transported and hanged, eh?”
It was much as he’d expected. Lives didn’t grow long here. So many would be gone. The women soonest, since their lives were the hardest and what disease didn’t take, childbirth would. The men would be gone to sickness, accident, and murder, as well as the hulks and the hangman. But enough would remain. He looked to the stricken old man.
“Don’t tremble,” he said more gently. “I’ve no quarrel with you. And don’t talk flash, neither, I’ve a lady in tow. Who runs the district now, then?”
“Portwine John has hisself a big piece, and Ben-be-Good’s got ’nother, but it’s Sam Towers got the biggest share,” the beggar whispered, as his two companions at the table nodded fiercely, as though their bobbing heads drove in the truth of the old man’s utterances.
“I know Towers, and knew Portwine when he was a boy,” Arden mused aloud. “Ben-be-Good’s new to me, but it don’t matter. Tell Sam I want to parley tomorrow, noon. I’ll have a lady with me, so I’ll come in peace, and go quicker if he comes quiet and fair, though it will go hard for him, my word on it, if he betrays my trust,” Arden said, and then, taking Francesca’s arm, he strode to the door with her.
“You have the night to think it over,” he finally told her after riding with her for long moments in silence. “You never have to come with me. You’ve already had a glimpse of my past, or part of it. And that’s why I cannot offer you what in truth I wish I could. It was mad, I see it now, Warwick was right,” he muttered, “a man needs new eyes now and again, but in my case they only show the filth and slime to me the clearer. It was insane to even offer for an older experienced, widowed Francesca. But then,” he said, at last raising his head to look at her, “I didn’t know you then, did I?” Nor did I love you to distraction then, he thought.
“I’ll be ready,” she said softly, “in the morning, because, Arden, I don’t understand at all.”
And I must, she thought. For I’m far more afraid of your leaving me without my ever knowing precisely why than I could ever be of discovering what it is you’re so deeply shamed about. But there was a great deal of fear in all she was thinking, and brave as she was, she was only human, so she remained silent, even as he did, as they rode back to the clean, safe section of town and her temporary home.
*
She’d dressed in a green sprigged-muslin gown for their outing and he didn’t know whether to weep or to shout with laughter when he saw her. Her jet hair was dressed simply and charmingly, pulled back in two raven’s wings to the side of her smooth, wide-eyed face. She looked so lovely, so sweet and gold and green and young and clean to him that she belonged, he thought, in a meadow, and never in Warwick’s sophisticated London town house, or in the filth he was about to take her to today. But she was as she was, he thought, as he bowed over her hand, delighting at least in this last opportunity to see trust and friendship in her eyes before he ended it, as he was shortly to do, forever.
“Are you sure you ought to do this?” Julian had asked him worriedly the night before.
“No,” he’d answered truthfully, “but I know the right thing to do.”
And so he did, he thought, as he helped her into the coach wordlessly, and so he would, he sighed, as he sat beside her, sorrowing too much to speak. But a man ought not hold a funeral until the corpse stopped kicking, he remembered, and as the streets outside grew meaner and grayer, and they approached their destination, he tried to explain again.
“This is the lowest part of the city, although there’s great competition for the honor, and many such districts,” he said in a low calm monotone, for there was no gaiety to be made of this human wretchedness, and no sense trying to pretend to it. “Here the Golden Rule would be considered a pleasure palace. Here dwell those who’ve lost everything or had nothing from the start. London is rife with the poor, but here, those who look to a future beyond tomorrow are rich, for they have at least hope. I lived here, twice upon a time,” he said softly, “once when I was a boy running from my dear father’s bitter charity. And then again when I’d grown and seen enough of war, finding the supposed over-world’s prime sport too filled with savagery parading as nobility and honor for my taste. I came here for old time’s sake then, seeking temporary oblivion, and found myself thrust into a new career instead, because, I suppose, I was used to command. But no excuses. The first time I learned to survive here. The second, I learned how to make a profit out of survival.
“I owned this place once,” he s
aid suddenly, loudly, “I held sway here, and was king of the underworld, king of the dungheap. That is a truth, now I take you to a gent who’ll swear to it, so you know without a doubt it’s so. Although,” he said in normal accents, his sense of humor never deserting him for long, even as his heart seemed to crack as she finally averted her head from his steady gaze, “it’s truth he’ll swear to anything if paid enough, as any sane fellow down here would do.”
The Hole in the Wall was grimier than the pub had been last night, she thought, following Arden as if in some strange dream, although, perhaps, she reasoned as she sat in a crooked chair that didn’t stick quite so much to the filthy floor as the others he’d pulled out for her had done, it was just that the sunlight that finally managed to filter through the streaked windows wasn’t kind to any sort of squalor. A few drunken creatures lay snoring on the straw-covered floor, a few sat at back tables and ignored them, or seemed to do so. She scarcely minded. Arden was here; she kept her eyes upon him. If he’d taken her here, he’d a reason, she supposed, because all he’d said meant nothing to her. If he’d been or done something in his past, she knew it would have been the right thing; he was, after all, of all the men she’d ever met, the most honorable. She could not be wrong in that. She mightn’t know life very well, she’d conceded that in the long sleepless night she’d just passed, but she knew him.