by Rose Lerner
She stopped laughing. “You’ve sprained your ankle.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” she insisted. “You’re limping.”
The humor fled his face, leaving it as harsh and sharp as a woodcut illustration. “I didn’t twist my ankle. I’m lame. Now can we dump out this water?”
She could think of nothing to say that might not further offend him, so she picked up her side of the—now much lighter—trough and they carried it to the street and back in silence. How had she not noticed? He had been careful to walk behind her, she realized, and she had thought nothing of it except to wonder if he was watching her arse.
She opened the door to the back stairs, suddenly aware that they were very steep and very narrow, and that she lived two flights up. Behind her, Mr. Dymond drew in a deep breath. He hadn’t been ill at all earlier. He’d been resting after going up and down the stairs. She glanced over her shoulder, and he gave her an unconvincingly bright smile. “After you, ma’am.”
His footsteps mingled with the rap of his stick on the uneven wood. She looked back once or twice, but in the dim stairway she couldn’t see much of anything. At the top, she opened the door and went through into her modest lodgings.
Even setting aside their small size and the steeply sloping eaves, they were not as well kept as they could have been. Sukey’s two afternoons a week were somehow always filled to bursting. Slippers and an umbrella sat by the doorway, and shawls and her cloak were flung about the room while their pegs hung empty. She should have waxed the worn patches in the wood of the floor months ago.
She had meant to re-cover the cushions on the ancient carved-oak settle too; stuffing spilled out of several seams. Her little table, its surface marred with teacup rings, was littered with books, notes, and old magazines and issues of the Lively St. Lemeston Intelligencer. A plate of crumbs from her morning sandwich and the unwashed teacups from Mr. Gilchrist’s visit yesterday perched haphazardly atop the clutter.
She simply wasn’t a good housekeeper. It was her one fault that had never bothered Will.
She turned to catch Mr. Dymond’s reaction as he stepped into the light, his height making the ceiling look even lower.
His face was set, his knuckles white on the handle of his walking stick. Of course he had other things on his mind than the state of her sitting room.
“Here, you must sit down,” she said in alarm, hastily tossing a shawl and a volume of Robinson Crusoe from the armchair onto the settle. She looked around for Sukey, but the maid had disappeared, along with the teapot. She must have gone downstairs to fetch hot water from Mrs. Pengilly while the soup heated in the kettle. Phoebe hoped she would steal a spoonful of the landlady’s fine tea as well.
“It’s nothing, I assure you.” But he walked to the chair and stood before it, waiting politely.
She sat with a flurry directly on top of Robinson Crusoe. He was already lowering himself carefully into his chair, so she pulled the book out from under her without standing and set it beside her. “It’s not nothing. You should have said something, I shouldn’t have asked you to—”
His face had softened in amusement at her fumbling, but at her words his jaw set. “It will pass.” His educated speech was more precise than ever. “I assure you I can still manage a little washing and a flight or two of stairs.”
Men. “Maybe so, but you’re obviously in pain. I—”
“I have nothing to complain of. Better men than I lost hands, arms, legs, even their lives. I should be grateful.”
That was what everyone had told her when she lost her baby five months into her pregnancy. That she was lucky to be alive. That it was the will of Providence. That other women lost half-grown children. It was all true enough, but—“Pain is pain. It hurts.”
His mouth twisted. “What a profound tautology.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“You can not talk about it.”
She remembered what he had said downstairs; that he recited poetry to himself. She wanted desperately to go and change out of her soaked clothes, but she offered, “I can read to you, if you like.”
He looked mulish for a moment. Then he seemed to remember that he had meant to charm her. His face smoothed out. “Do you like Lord Byron’s work?”
It was pointless to try to talk to him as one human being to another. He didn’t see a fellow soul when he looked at her. He saw two votes. “No,” she said. “Not every woman is precisely the same as the next, you know. We don’t all copy Lord Byron’s verse into our commonplace books from memory simply by virtue of our sex. I haven’t read a word of his silly poem, and I don’t intend to. I do not care a straw about his tragic past or his tragic profile or how many women he had in the East.”
He blinked. “You sound like my mother.”
That brought her up short. “I do?”
She had made that speech before, or something close to it. Byron was all the rage; he came up in conversation. Suddenly, she remembered that there had been a time when she had read every fashionable book she could get her hands on. She’d pored over the lists of new publications that London booksellers sent to the newspaper.
Now she sounded like someone’s mother.
“She thinks him an embarrassment to the Whigs. She called his speech on hanging the frame-breakers ‘theatrical’.”
“I cried over that speech,” Phoebe admitted, subdued and strangely unsettled. “Jack—that is, Mr. Sparks, my brother-in-law—printed it in the Intelligencer.” Did she dislike Byron at all? Or had she simply spouted an unexamined opinion, to be contrary?
“It was brilliant,” Mr. Dymond said hotly. “But it was not in the style of the House of Lords. Passion and compassion have no place in well-bred politics.”
She hid a smile. He wasn’t, after all, much more tactful than she was. “I didn’t mean to be rude. As I said, I haven’t read his lordship’s work. I might like it. Plenty of others do.”
He smiled. “No, I do believe rudeness comes to you quite unconsciously.”
She felt both embarrassed and pleased. She had never been a girl who got on well with strangers, unlike her father or her sister Helen, who made friends wherever they went. Will had called her “hedge-pig”, sometimes. She’d been glad to spend the last two years mostly on her own, seeing only family and the same small circle of friends.
But now she remembered the deep, visceral enjoyment of flirting. The nervous flutter in her stomach that came from looking at men and seeing them as men, not merely fellow rational beings. Mr. Dymond leaned towards her, his blue eyes brilliant even in the filtered light from her unwashed windows. Was he aware of the casual invitation in every line of his athletic body?
“I’m going to change my clothes,” she said abruptly, heading for the door to her room. “You’d better take off your wet coat and boots and put them by the fire before you take a chill. I have an old coat of Mr. Sparks’s you can borrow.”
She had only one dry dress; she wore it every laundry evening now. It was the favorite dress she had dyed black when Will died. She hadn’t had the heart to include it when she sold her other black things. Looking at it now brought on a complex wave of guilt.
Will had liked her in the dress. She’d worn it the first time she went walking with him. She’d worn it at their wedding. When she had pushed down the last bubble of blue-and-green fabric into the tub of black dye, she had cried like a child—for her dead hopes and her dead husband and a small traitorous bit because she had wanted to keep her pretty dress.
The cheap dye she’d used had rubbed off on her skin as she sat with Will’s body. All her mourning dresses had turned her skin black that year, in hot or damp weather. Every time she saw it she’d felt a fresh pang, as if the color was trying to help her conceal the relief in her heart, or maybe sink in and extinguish it. She missed Will, but she was happier without him.
She couldn’t put that dress on and go in the next room and flirt with another ma
n. She couldn’t do that to Will.
Besides—when she’d gone walking with Will that first time, she’d felt so alive, so hopeful and so anxious. She felt the same now, but the dress was old and black and she knew feeling this way didn’t lead anywhere good. It was better to be alone.
Sukey poked her head in the door. “He looks tol-lol in his shirtsleeves,” she whispered. “The arms on him! Hadn’t you ought to forget to lend him a coat?”
Phoebe thought that was a wonderful idea. There was only one just way to punish herself: not allowing herself to see his shirtsleeves at all. “He won’t be very handsome when he’s frozen to death,” she whispered back severely, pulling Will’s old coat out of the wardrobe. “Here, go and give him this.”
Chapter Three
Nick was pleasantly surprised by the Honey Moon, the sweet shop owned by Mrs. Sparks’s prospective husband. The many-paned window sparkled, the jars of sweetmeats displayed inside were colorful and tempting, and the sign—a crescent moon the shape of a man’s profile, mouth gaping to receive a piece of fruitcake—was neatly painted and scrupulously clean.
He was even more impressed when he walked inside and saw the small case of cakes and biscuits beside the counter. It had been unfair of him to expect rustic mince pies and honey-sweetened Banbury cakes. The carefully sculpted tarts, Naples-biscuit towers and candied fruits would have graced a London confectioner’s. He was immediately seized with a powerful craving for sugar.
It appeared he was alone in that among the inhabitants of Lively St. Lemeston. Apart from himself, the shop was entirely empty. He rang the bell on the counter.
A harried young man of about his own age appeared through a swinging door, his floury apron tied over a floury shirt and floury breeches. His head and hands at first seemed an oasis of color, but on closer inspection they were dusted in fine white powder, down to the tips of his outsized ears. He beamed at Nick. “Good morning to you, sir, may I get you something or other?”
“I’m Mr. Nicholas Dymond, here to see Mr. Moon,” Nick said, his eye caught by a marzipan pig.
The young man’s smile only intensified. “I’m Robert Moon. I’m that glad to make your acquaintance, sir.” He shook Nick’s hand fervently, leaving it covered in paste. “Oh—plague take it—I’ll fetch you a wet cloth.” He ran back into the kitchen, returning with the promised cloth and a dark, moist slab of cake. “I be working on the recipe, and I’d be that honored by your opinion.”
He ushered Nick over to one of the small tables by the window and pulled out a chair for him. Once Nick would have thought the man was merely obsequious; now he wondered if Moon thought him a cripple. He sat, trying not to let his unease show. Moon watched avidly as Nick sliced off a corner of cake with his fork and lifted it to his mouth.
Rich flavor spread over his tongue, sugar and lavender and a dark hint of tea. The texture was perfect, dense and smooth.
“Do you like it?” Moon asked anxiously.
Nick took another bite, this time getting a taste of the lemon glaze and the sharp tang of lemon zest. “It’s remarkable.”
He had been sincere, but Moon’s ears drooped. “I put in more than I ought of sugar, didn’t I?”
Nick tried to imagine this praise-hungry young man married to prickly Mrs. Sparks and failed. He would give her cake and she would say, Mmm, it’s very good, but I prefer jam tarts and anyway I’m busy, and he would droop like a blade of grass in the rain. Nick smiled at the image of her bent over her work, licking crumbs from her fingers and cursing when she smeared lemon glaze on her manuscript.
He, on the other hand, was painfully aware of the weight of Moon’s expectations. He leaned forward and looked the man in the eye. “I meant what I said. I’m fond of sweets, but it’s rare they’re so utterly satisfying. I feel as if I’d just taken my first bite of real food after three days of foraging.”
To his relief, Moon’s face lit with joy. It was how Nick must have looked when his mother had been briefly happy with him, that same helpless gratification. Relief faded into a slight queasiness. Lady Tassell was going to pay Moon’s debts if he landed Mrs. Sparks. That was why he was so eager to please.
Don’t think of it as playing lord of the manor. Imagine he’s a nervous young recruit. He lounged a little in his chair, letting authority settle over him like a comfortable cloak. “Sit.” He waved at the chair opposite him. “So you want to marry Mrs. Sparks. Do you know her well?”
Halfway into the chair, Moon’s eyes widened in panic like an unprepared schoolboy called upon by his professor. “Not—not very well,” he said in a tone that meant not at all. “But I know she helped her husband with his newspaper; she’s not afeared of hard work.”
“I believe she supports herself with writing children’s stories, doesn’t she?”
Mr. Moon gave a shaky smile. “Yes! And she’d surely have my blessing to go on with it at night, when we’ve finished down here.”
If the Honey Moon was successful, Mrs. Sparks wouldn’t need the income earned by her pen. Perhaps she wouldn’t want it. It was only the poet in him cringing in sympathy at the thought of giving it up or cramming it into a few exhausted candle-lit hours; he had no reason to think Mrs. Sparks felt the same.
Moon fidgeted. Nick leaned in and asked gently, “You are really going to marry a woman of whom you know nothing?” For money lingered in the air unsaid. His question was rude enough already, aimed as it was at a man unlikely to risk rudeness in his answer. But part of Nick wanted Moon to take this chance to back out, to say, No. I won’t.
But Moon’s anxious face smoothed out, as if here he felt sure of his ground. “If I don’t, I’ll lose the shop.”
Once, when Nick had been very small, he had begged his mother to stay past the daily quarter of an hour she allotted each of her children during elections and read him another story. It must have been the general election of 1790, so he had been six—did other children calculate their ages by election years? She had smiled wearily and smoothed his hair. I can’t, Nicky. I have to work.
It will only take another five minutes, he had said.
I can’t spare five minutes.
But, Mama, I miss you.
She’d wanted to, he thought. Tears had stood in her eyes. But she’d said, with this same quiet certainty, I miss you too, Nicky. But we mustn’t be selfish. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. He’d always hated her blind insistence on following her head over her heart, her refusal to swerve even for five minutes to give happiness to someone she loved.
He used to compare it to Evangelical fanaticism. Since then he’d been in the army. He’d seen officers who knew sacrifices were necessary for a goal that could not be sacrificed. He’d seen fallen men piled atop one another in the breach in the wall at Badajoz. He’d climbed over their bodies, because the city had to be taken. He hadn’t faltered.
The vital importance of a city was easy for Nick to understand, a confectionery or an election less so. But he could see in Moon’s face that he would sacrifice far more than his domestic happiness to keep this place. “You’ll be at the Orange-and-Purple party Thursday evening, won’t you?” he asked. “Mrs. Sparks has promised to be there.”
“Then I’ll be there.” Moon looked like a man preparing to face the firing squad.
“Have you given any thought to how you’ll court her?” Nick asked as delicately as he could.
Mr. Moon froze. “I thought you were looking after that side of things!”
Nick smothered a groan. “I’m working at it, but Mrs. Sparks may be a hard nut to crack. Don’t take it to heart if she snaps at you, will you? She can be a bit blunt, and her first marriage—”
“They fought like Kilkenny cats,” Moon said glumly. “Do you think she likes sweets?”
Nick had no idea.
“She must,” Moon answered for him. “Everyone likes sweets. Especially with a splendid figure like hers.”
He tried not to think about Mrs. Sparks’s figure, but it was too l
ate. He wouldn’t mind feeding her sweets—that rosebud mouth closing around a bite of cake, her tongue darting out to lick icing off his fingers. Her eyes drifting shut. The heave of her breasts as she sighed in satisfaction.
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He was supposed to be helping Mr. Moon, not daydreaming about the widow’s mouth. He could do this. He would do this. Even if he had no bloody idea how.
Phoebe thought perhaps she could afford a new dress.
No, that was foolish; she had only half a pound put by and she needed it to patch the roof. That was far more important than feeling pretty. No matter how much she wanted to prove to a handsome lord’s son that she was not a draggletail, thank you very much. He’d thought she was a maid!
But that was foolish, too. To the Honorable Mr. Nicholas Dymond, there wasn’t much to choose between Mrs. Sparks, printer’s widow, and Sukey Grimes, maid-of-all-work. It was like asking a man in an air-balloon to tell the difference between a beetle and an ant crawling on the ground below.
You look like a beetle, as round as you are, a nasty little inner voice said. Vanity will only expose you to ridicule. It sounded like her mother.
I don’t care, she thought defiantly. I don’t care about Mama’s opinion and I don’t care about Mr. Dymond’s, either. I am going out on Thursday to enjoy myself, not to please anyone else. I work hard, and I deserve to feel pretty.
She pulled on her boots and headed for the Lively St. Lemeston circulating library, where her younger sister Helen sat behind the desk three days a week for a small salary and the right to have the first look at the London fashion magazines.
On her way, she passed the market square at the center of town. Carpenters clustered around the half-built hustings, the raised wooden platform on which speeches would be given and votes cast come the polls three weeks from now. Most of the structure was there in skeleton, and the steps were mostly complete, but the floorboards, sidings and distinctive sloped roof were entirely absent. Since carpenters were freemen and the candidates paid for the work, construction tended to drag out as long as possible with little protest.