Flawless

by Carrie Lofty

  The appraiser led Miles and his guest to the basement. Penberthy was like a child who stayed silent and small so as not to attract the attention of a cruel headmaster. That had never been Miles; he’d hurl a spitball or test a fresh new curse word, an ongoing experiment to determine how long his status would protect his backside. Viv had been the first person to stand up to him since his voice changed.

  “Paper and pens are upstairs with the bookkeeping,” Smets said upon unlocking the basement door. “Shall I show you there, too, my lord?”

  “Quit simpering, Smets. I want obedience, not slavering. And I’ll find the paper myself.” He held out his hand for the basement door key, then made a brushing motion. “Off you go. I’ll inform you of Mr. Penberthy’s responsibilities before I take my leave.”

  Smets offered a hasty bow and departed. Penberthy was smiling.

  “Amused?” Miles asked dryly.

  The blond man shook his head. “It must be like magic, being able to do that.”

  “Pull rank?”

  “Yes.”

  “Absolutely.”

  They passed through the door and down two more steps to a dark crawl space. The air was replete with cool dampness. “I know where I’ll be spending next summer.”

  “You could sell tickets, my lord.”

  “If diamond prices keep tumbling, that may be our only recourse.” He found a lantern and lit the wick. Like a geological boil, a four-foot pile of carbons swelled up from the center of the tight room. “Well, well. I wasn’t expecting quite so many. But this is a boon.”

  He held the lantern with one hand and scooped up a fistful of carbons with the other. Penberthy extracted a jeweler’s glass from his pocket and leaned in to take a look.

  “I knew you’d prove useful,” Miles said. “How did I know that?”

  Penberthy grinned. “You’re an astute judge of character?”

  “Only across a card table. What do you see?”

  Bringing a single carbon close to the lantern, Penberthy squinted into his glass. “I’ll need more light to see much of anything, that’s for certain.”

  “You’ll have it.”

  “High-quality carbons, though, my lord. That much I can say straightaway.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  Penberthy hummed under his breath, made some grunting, appreciative noise, and then nodded a few times. “Very good indeed. Gem-quality brilliants are graded and valued on their color and clarity, but that says nothing about their durability. They’re exceedingly hard, of course, but a glancing blow can crack them along tiny fault lines.”

  “No good for industry.”

  “Correct.”

  “And these?”

  “Durable, my lord. Not just hard but with fewer fault lines than I’ve ever seen. These would grind away slowly, not cleave in two. Some in the Cornwall schools suggested their use for mining, but nothing ever came of it.”

  Miles examined the carbons he held with a new eye. He couldn’t see what Penberthy saw. Instead he pictured something else entirely: a future.

  And he had an idea of how to harness it.

  “I want you to take your time with this, Penberthy. Sort them by whatever grading system you see fit, catalogue quantities, et cetera. You’ll work until the project is complete, or until we run out of funds to pay you.”

  Relief drained the man of tension. He shook Miles’s hand with happy vigor. “I’ll get to work right away, my lord.”

  “Good. I’ll find you paper and light.”

  Miles climbed the stairs in the dark, the image of Penberthy’s face still in his mind. The man was relieved, excited, grateful. The job not only suited his talents, but he would have work for weeks. His family would not suffer. That Miles could bring about such a match of individual and purpose leant a queer rhythm to his heart.

  The responsibility Penberthy shouldered for the welfare of his wife and children must be crushing. Miles swallowed twice just thinking about it. For all of their ambition, he and Viv would fare well even if they fell short of Old Man Christie’s posthumous dare. Her siblings might offer a hand, as would members of his extended family. Worse case, his vote in Parliament would always carry a hefty price tag. Their pride would suffer as poor relations, but they would never know hunger.

  If Viv stopped long enough to consider her options, she might admit the same. Her determination stemmed entirely from a desire to leave him again. Permanently this time.

  Miles stopped on the top step, shuddering, as if this were the first time he had actually contemplated such a thought. Viv would leave. Or he would leave her—his original plan for revenge. But after what they had shared that morning . . .

  It felt like a new start.

  “Mr. Smets.” Miles was a little breathless upon returning to the ground floor, but it had nothing to do with physical exertion. “Four more lanterns for Mr. Penberthy.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “That’s more like it.”

  Miles took the steps two at a time to the upper story and found the bookkeeping room. Leather and stale air reminded him of Christie’s library. What had Gareth called it? A polite dungeon. This cramped office barely warranted even that denigration, hardly bigger than a closet. He tried to imagine Viv sitting here for hours on end, every day, her delicate neck craned over dusty old volumes and ledgers. To his surprise the scene came easily to mind.

  Then he played out a fantasy: he would come to her by surprise one afternoon. Her fatigued eyes would light up upon catching sight of him in the doorway. He would rub the back of her neck with gentle, calming strokes, easing the stiffness. Making love would be a tricky endeavor, what with the cramped space and the men downstairs. But they would manage well enough, whispering and shushing each other like naughty young people evading a chaperone.

  Even in such an inauspicious place, his thoughts turned to her.

  He checked his watch and found the hour just past two. So much time to fill before their plans for supper, but so much to do.

  Out of curiosity as to Viv’s labors, he sat at the lone chair and opened a ledger. Her handwriting, neat and distinctly feminine, ornamented the page. But the figures were all business.

  Diamond prices.

  In fact, diamond prices chronicled by week all the way back to the early part of 1874, when Christie had either established or acquired the brokerage. On a second page waited a set of calculations whereby Viv had predicted their eventual profit or loss based on different variables, as well as their probabilities. Had Christie realized his daughter’s capacity? Never one to miss a bargain, Miles suspected that he had.

  Their predicament was all there, outlined in Viv’s proper script. She had said the market for brilliants was erratic, but he’d never seen the outcome of that volatility with such precision.

  He found the paper and pen for Penberthy, gratified that Smets had secured four more lanterns for the crawl space. Then he bid everyone a good day and headed to the bookstore. His niggling idea would not be quiet.

  Jamie Shelby hitched the carriage. While Mr. Kato quickly gobbled a hunk of buttered bread for his lunch, Viv tucked a red-checked cloth over the gift basket she’d packed for the Penberthy family. Like Miles’ss concerns about offering employment to Ike, Viv mulled how to word her offer of aid. The last thing she wanted was to wound Alice’s pride.

  Viv’s own mother had refused charity when it came at too great a price to her dignity, a contrast to her profession that had struck Viv as absurd, even at a young age. To her eight-year-old brain, food was food and coal was coal. Her clamoring stomach and frozen toes had cared not a whit as to which strangers brought gifts, nor as to their motives.

  “Ready, my lady?” Mr. Kato asked.

  “Certainly.”

  They boarded the coach with Jamie holding the reins. He was a large boy for eleven years, with thick bones and a neck that would only increase in girth and strength as he matured. Mr. Shelby wanted him in the mines, but their spirited houseke
eper refused to entertain the idea until Jamie turned thirteen. Even then, she’d said on many occasions, why send a boy into the Hole when he had perfectly respectable—and frankly safer—employment with Viv and Miles? Jamie’s thoughts on the matter remained unknown; the boy hardly ever spoke. But far from being unintelligent, he was observant and quick to perform his duties.

  The carriage rattled through town, subjecting Viv, Mr. Kato, and Jamie to pits and wheel ruts enough to loosen teeth.

  She grimaced. “I can understand why Lord Bancroft has taken to walking. They’ll have electric lights in town before paved roads.”

  “Not everywhere,” Mr. Kato said.

  “No?”

  He hesitated, squinting ahead toward the downtown’s business hub. “Never mind, my lady. It was impertinent.”

  “I insist. Speak freely.” She tilted her bonnet against the sun and tried to catch his eye. The man could be nearly as evasive as Miles, hiding a great deal beneath a crafted exterior. Brawny and dark as midnight skies, he still caught her off guard by using proper address and words like impertinent. “You know how new I am to this place. I wish to know all I can—the good and the bad. The last thing our household and our business needs is to shrink from facts we deem too embarrassing to hear. Please, Mr. Kato.”

  He glanced skyward as if the answer might fall down from the tarnished blue. Shifting on the bench opposite, he took a breath that expanded his wide barrel chest. A rifle sat across his lap. Viv should have taken comfort in that measure of security, but like the bars on the brokerage house, it was just another reminder of the danger.

  His indecision made her somewhat uneasy. He was an African, yes, and an employee. But he was also a man trying to do right by her. The line between wanting protection and independence was so very thin.

  “Town planners decide which improvements to build,” he said quietly. “Those improvements benefit only the rich. Very simple, my lady.”

  “But I should think security in the shantytowns would be a priority. Maybe then we would all have fewer locks on our doors and windows.”

  “Why waste funds on workers whose wage demands and strikes put the industry at risk?” Mr. Kato shrugged. “On the other side, why live in squalor when businessmen spend more on a week’s liquor than diggers earn in a year?”

  “How did you learn all of this?”

  “I told you my history. Briefly.”

  “Yes, but not every miner and not even every overseer, aside skin color, makes such observations.”

  “I like being underestimated, my lady. I suspect you know something of that.”

  The sun was already dipping toward the west when they arrived. Mr. Kato helped Viv down, then directed Jamie to take the carriage back to a more suitable area of town.

  “Be back for us in an hour,” she said to Jamie. “No dawdling.”

  Viv and her now-silent guard walked away from the pitted road and into the shantytown just east of the Hole. At first the conditions weren’t so rough. Although corrugated tin walls would do little to keep out the cold come winter, they appeared in good repair and free of filth. Women formed loose knots of community, chatting over their cooking or mending, watching one another’s youngsters—but almost entirely segregated by color. Of course, they eyed Viv’s progress, but they were neither hostile nor rude. Simply curious. She caught a few awestruck remarks about her gown, made of functional dark red muslin and cut for practicality. Compared to the women who watched her, however, she was dressed like Queen Victoria.

  But the modest conditions didn’t hold. As they made inquiries and pressed into the heart of the shantytown, a stench gathered and pressed into her nose. Unwashed bodies. Gutted animals. Human waste. The shacks on the outskirts at least looked upon wide-open spaces and permitted access to fresh air. The walk to dispose of refuse was considerably shorter. The inhabitants of these inner hovels could not claim even those scant luxuries.

  Mr. Kato stood close. “My lady, are you sure?”

  “If she can stand living here, I can stand an hour’s visit.”

  But her stomach was an angered nest of hornets. She wanted to remove a handkerchief from her bag and stem the tide of foul odors. Yet even here, perhaps with more need for comfort, women gathered to share conversation and repetitive chores. Their gazes followed Viv with ever more covetous stares. She certainly wasn’t going to hide behind a swatch of linen, insulting them to boot.

  Tensing her back until the muscles between her shoulder blades cried, Viv kept walking. She may as well have been traveling back in time, her every step erasing another day until she was once again a terrified eight-year-old.

  I’d forgotten what it smells like.

  Other long-buried memories struggled out of dark and distant corners: seeing her mother quickly cover her body with a robe after a sponge bath, but not so quickly as to hide the bruises on her hips and upper thighs; the scent of different men’s cologne on the linens they sorted for wash day; the feel of Viv’s first kiss when one of her mother’s callers had cornered her, his tongue like a hot snake in her mouth.

  Mother had beaten him with an iron pipe until the police arrived. They’d arrested the man, yes, only to arrive at the end of their shift to demand payment in tandem.

  A shudder kicked through her torso. She fought for breath. Mr. Kato was there to steady her balance, but her will to move had slipped away.

  “Lady Bancroft?” came a feminine voice. “My, my, I thought that was you.”

  Viv shunted her ghosts aside with as much force as her mother had used when wielding that pipe. A quick inhale brought the shantytown back into focus. She gently pulled free of Mr. Kato’s concern and greeted Alice Penberthy.

  Soon they sat together inside the Penberthy’s one-room shanty. Ike had done well to make it as secure as possible. Shredded paper insulation daubed the cracks and crevices. A small cook stove provided heat, and a neat stack of timber lined the wall opposite the door. The stack took up valuable living space, but Viv knew full well the price of wood in Kimberley. There was a reason Ike Penberthy kept a rifle loaded and hanging above the bed he shared with Alice.

  The new baby, a healthy, tiny girl named Samantha, lay sleeping in a cot fashioned out of a fruit crate lined with a beautiful floral quilt. David and John were out playing, making Viv wonder how far they traveled and what they saw of life out in the shantytown. By their age she’d already seen far more than her scant years could interpret.

  Alice settled on her stool, smoothing her skirts and fussing just once with the strands of loose hair at her temples. She gave a timid smile and poured tea.

  “I’ve come because I wanted to see how you and your family are faring,” Viv said. Then more words spilled out of her even before she could think. “And because I want to help.”

  Fifteen

  Alice’s eyes narrowed with obvious caution. “How do you mean?”

  Viv cursed her lack of tact. The conditions of the slum had called to her on an elemental level. Help them all. Yet . . . how?

  A flicker of her uncomfortable conversation with Lady Galeworth provided the answer.

  “I’ve heard it said that there is—or perhaps was—a women’s auxiliary to help those wives, mothers, and widows who have fallen on difficult circumstances.”

  Alice regarded her with intense frankness. Bearing the scrutiny, Viv calmly sipped her tea, noticing the lack of sweetness. When was the last time she’d taken refreshment without sugar? The twins’ nurse had laughed at her the first time Viv tasted it, there in the Christie brownstone, even going so far as to add more just for the amusement of her amazed reaction.

  Seeing the woman’s doubt, Viv continued her pitch. “I noticed clusters of women throughout these shanties, all of them gathered together to share the work and childcare. That’s what I have in mind, but on a much larger scale.”

  “Many hands make light work, and all that?”

  Cynicism didn’t sound right coming from Alice, but then, Viv was remembering the wo
man she’d met on the wagon train. This woman was . . . harder. Her eyes held little of the same spark or vigor. And after only two weeks! How would she appear after a year? Or five? What would happen to the family she and her husband had uprooted?

  “Something like that, yes,” Viv said quietly.

  “Wouldn’t that be nice.”

  She thought the phrase sarcastic, but Alice’s face revealed a flash of wistfulness. “It can be done. There exists an element of this population that dearly wants to be seen as worthy. I can turn that into generosity.”

  “By playing to their sense of guilt?”

  Viv offered a rueful smile. “Not so much that as to their ambition. After all, what’s an entrepreneur? They want to be ladies and gentlemen, but few here know exactly what that entails. I’ll foster a sense of what I learned in London. No grand family goes without pet projects.”

  “Sounds like a lot of work, my lady.”

  “Initially, perhaps. But then we make it self-sustaining.”

  “Is . . . Do you think that’s possible?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Alice dipped her gaze. “At least you’re honest.”

  Viv finished her tea and decided to stop treating the woman like a specimen beneath glass. She would either be a magnificent general or she would flat-out refuse.

  “But you need to take the lead on this, Alice. Can you do that?”

  After carefully setting aside her cup—porcelain, beautifully painted—Alice stood. She knitted her fingers together in a ball, the first time Viv had seen her agitated.

  “We left a lovely little flat in Camborne. Tiny, or so I thought at the time. But neat and sturdy. Ike had bigger dreams for us.” With a glance toward her newborn daughter, she inhaled. “His Lordship came round today to talk to Ike. What was that about?”

  Viv smiled despite herself. Long-standing impressions of Miles had altered so greatly that the news came as no surprise. A warm varnish of emotion settled over her heart. No matter what other failings lurked for Viv to find, he would do right by this family.

  “Offering him a job, I believe.”