But even as I walked away, the word opportunity settled into my mind and ignited a bloom of fanciful notions. They came almost unbidden, for I had been born with both a spirited imagination and a life that demanded regular escape into it.
I slowed and snuck another glance behind me. The odd stranger appeared both sober and sane. His trim gray cutaway coat with perfect black buttons contrasted sharply with the surrounding grime and decay, and made me both suspicious and fascinated in whatever drove him to continue pursuing me.
I strode on with my head high, some wicked part of me willing him to catch up and quench my curiosity. A few paces later, he did at least grant the first part of that wish. His shoes splat-splatted over the rain pooled in the ruts of the cobbled road, and he again stepped before me, halting my progress. “I noticed you did not say no.” The defined M of his upper lip uncurled into an enticing smile as he held out the little jeweled shoe.
“Only because I cannot bring myself to take you seriously.”
“No, it’s more than that. Admit it—some little part of you desperately wants to hear what sort of adventure this stranger is attempting to offer you.”
I dropped my gaze, for surely my entire personality must be in vivid display upon my face. How else could he have spoken so directly into my secret heart? His smoothly spoken word “adventure” inflamed a desire in me so great, it tempted me to cast aside everything I knew and follow him.
“I’ve passed hundreds of other women in need before now, but you’re the first to catch my attention, to inspire me to do more.” He paused when I remained silent, cocking his head at a charming angle. “You seem to doubt my sincerity. Shall I tell you more specifically what I find so enchanting about you?”
The dress—it must be this magical dress. I touched its wilted skirts as my fickle heart struggled to remain aloof. “I’ll not believe you. You’re either lying or . . . or mad.”
“What a monstrous thing to say to someone who’s just paid you a compliment.” He offered his arm with a smile. “Your punishment is that you must endure my company for the duration of your walk home.”
Unease sliced through me at these words and I stepped back. The man would not come near the flat occupied only by myself and an elderly widow. “I bid you good evening, sir.” Tingling with fear—or maybe excitement—I turned, but he laid a hand on the wall to bar me from leaving. The effect was surprisingly arresting.
“What if I could manage a respectable position for you at a magnificent estate, among the finest gowns and fields of flowers, and all you had to do was come with me and step into it?”
His words pulled at me at the heart level, where a love of beauty was buried, yet I resisted with all my might. If only he knew how he tortured me. “I couldn’t simply walk away from—”
“From what, all this?” He spread wide his arms in the dank alley thick with the odor of trapped moisture. “Come, what would you be leaving behind, truly? Have you a family at home? A respectable man waiting for you?”
In an instant, images of the man I loved engulfed my heart with a familiar pain. My mind saw him as he was years ago, swinging upside down from a rusted stair rail, fueling our lives with music and joy, saluting his farewell with a lopsided grin from the Maiden Faire as it sailed into the fog. That dear face and the marvelous personality behind it, forever gone with the sunken ship.
Oh yes, I had a man. A splendid, big-hearted, gallant one who was no less mine simply because he was dead.
But that wasn’t what he meant, of course. I fisted my hands against the wall and forced myself to answer over the wave of fresh pain. “I suppose not.” My parents were dead, all my older siblings long gone from Spitalfields, and my younger brother Paul was stationed somewhere in the West Indies with no desire to return.
And why would he? Nothing about Spitalfields could ever feel like home, even to those who lived here. Even my rag cart was now lost to me, abandoned in my haste. I studied the man’s waiting face, tempted to cut the slender threads that bound me to this place and walk into whatever it was he offered. I cradled the idea in my mind even as I searched feebly for reasons—any reason—that I should refuse him.
His smile revealed perfect white teeth. Too perfect. “Have you ever heard of Rothburne Abbey? It’s far from here, where green fields spread out like gentle carpet and flowers bloom on every doorstep. The position pays one hundred a year.”
I coughed. “Pounds?” My brain immediately sifted that sum into a thousand possible uses. First, I would have the pure pleasure of writing to Paul that he could keep the pittance he sent me out of his pay, that his sister was finally earning her independence and would no longer be his burden to bear. “I’m naught more than a rag woman, you know.”
“I see so much more in you, in that restrained fire in your eyes, that poise in your spine, and I see what could be.”
My lashes fluttered at the weight of the temptation before me. I could work endlessly and never see reward, or I could step into this opportunity and fill both my pockets and my soul. Still, anything that seemed too good to be true usually was.
“At least come see it. You owe yourself that much. You already know what it is to be here, barely surviving and cowering from every stranger. Empty pockets, empty belly, empty future. There’s so much more you can do with your life.”
I stared at him as a parched person eyes an icy lemonade.
“Now that I have you sufficiently intrigued, I’ll leave you to your normal routine and see if you still find it worth holding so tightly. Tomorrow morning I’ll be at the train. I pray the night will not torment your mind to a great degree with indecision.” With a sweeping bow, he handed me the little jeweled shoe, replaced his hat, and followed his shadow back into the darkness from which he had come.
A powerful shiver ran through me. I slipped on the shoe and paced home, my sore feet crossing back and forth over the drain gutter running down the center of the rain-drenched street. All manner of rationalizations flooded my tired brain, tugging me this way and that.
Soon I ducked beneath the flapping sheet strung across my alley and stood before the broken shutters and ugly chipped brick of my tenement building. I was hemmed in with no evidence of God’s creation around except the starless sky above, but it was my life. My reality. What right had I to hope for more?
With a sigh, I lifted my skirt to climb the steps and glimpsed the jeweled slipper he’d left with me, inviting me into a Cinderella story. I found myself surprisingly immune to his charm on the whole, having already spent my entire heart on one man with no desire to retrieve it, but the hope of his offered adventure flared through my heart. I looked up and suddenly my building seemed ten times more wretched and grimy than it had when I’d left at dawn. With a whole world of possibilities offered to me outside this cramped district, it suddenly felt impossible to remain here.
I settled before the open window that night with a view of the distant train station, churning the decision through my mind. If I left, that meant admitting Sully wasn’t coming home. His ship was gone and my Sully with it. He’d be my most treasured memory, captured in my mind like a miniature in a locket—his wide smile, the jaunty blue cap he always wore. I’d made it for him in return for him teaching me to read so many years ago, and he’d worn it so often it seemed a part of him.
“Hello there!”
I jerked as Widow McCall’s voice carried through our flat from her curtained-off cot, and I swiped madly at my tears.
“Oh, and look at you, lassie! I’ve never seen you looking so fine, even if the gown do have a bit of extra trimmings to it.” Her shrunken form sailed through the room to finger the mud stains on the lovely skirt, and the frown that contorted her warted features made me smile. “And just what is my li’l lass doing out after dark? Only God is invincible, you know. Ach, you and trouble ought to be the closest chums, the way you always go together.”
“This time my trouble may have brought about some good.” I unleashed the tale, and wi
th every turbulent sentence, the encounter seemed more unbelievable. I told her about Rothburne Abbey and showed her the little slippers, wondering if I’d stumbled into the pages of a fairy tale on my way home. What other reason would a gentleman have for imploring the woman who sold castoff rags to follow him to a life of splendor? It wasn’t as if I even had experience in service or letters to recommend me.
“I shouldn’t do it, should I? It’s too odd. Too risky.”
Her eyes glistened. “Precisely why you should, love. This place holds you in its grip, but it doesn’t define you. It’s as if fate is plucking your pretty little self out of this mess and placing you where you belonged from the start.”
“Oh no, I—”
“Now, now, don’t argue with an old woman. I have eyes, don’t I?” She reached out and rubbed the ends of my curls between her gnarled fingers. “A sort of queen is what you are, stepping through the rubbish like you was balancing a crown on that pretty head of yours. I suppose it’s in your blood, being one of them wealthy Huguenot silk people.”
“That’s long past. We’ve been nothing but rag vendors since I was small.” It was the cost of progress. If only those merchants who’d begun importing silks knew what their prosperity had cost an entire community of local artisans. The Huguenots were no longer a respected immigrant community spinning silk from behind tall, sunny windows. I barely remembered what it was like to wear ribbons in my hair as I recited my lessons in the schoolroom. We’d never been as wealthy as our ancestors, but we’d been respectable.
“Ah, but you’ve got a touch of the old blood in you, coursing through like a vein of gold. The way you talk, the look of your face . . . There’s something noble about you, lass. Finally someone else stood up and took notice of it too, and you’ll not refuse the brilliant man who’s had the sense to see it.” She lifted sharp old eyes to meet mine. “I’ll miss you something fierce, but don’t you ever come back. You’ve always belonged somewhere better’n here.”
I frowned. “What do they want with the likes of me at an abbey, anyway? It’s an odd place to find a position.”
Her eyes sparkled beneath the frizz of gray hair. “Did Abraham require the good Lord to give him a description of the place where he was being sent? You’d best go and find out.”
When she took herself away to her little cot in the corner again, I turned back toward the distant station where I was supposed to meet the mysterious man on the morrow. For years that station had symbolized the hope of Sully’s return, but now it meant the opposite. Leaving on that train would sever the last connection we had—a lifetime of memories in Spitalfields. Could I give up that dream to risk another?
It struck me then that I’d never see on his face the great love he wrote of, never hear him say it in his own voice. For years we’d been the best of friends, and somewhere along the way I’d fallen deeply in love with the man so full of life and music, but I hadn’t dared to hope he’d return it. Until he left for sea after a row with his father and the letters started to come.
Oh, those letters!
Once again I drew them out of the little broken place in the wall and flipped open the first, sinking back against the blanket in the windowsill.
My dear Raina, it began, and that was enough to saturate my heart, for his every action since I’d known him had proven I was exactly that. He was one of the few who called me by my true name, and his use of it always touched me. The rest of the letter was doused with words from a passionate heart that had lain hidden behind the playful, lively exterior I’d always known. Why had he never spoken these words aloud before he’d left? He couldn’t have feared rejection from me, for I’d loved him fervently before I even understood what the word meant.
What would I do, come morning’s light? I could go two ways—one was bleak, offering nothing, and the other was beckoning me away to adventure, which had been my weakness since childhood. It lured and fascinated me, causing me trouble and constantly disrupting the ruts of life. Though now there was no Sully to rescue me from my scrapes.
But neither would there be if I remained in Spitalfields, pining away after his memory.
So it was that I found myself taking one final walk through Spitalfields the following morning as the sun dawned over a new day and a new life, a limp carpetbag swinging against my leg, anxiety and excitement chasing each other through my veins. I slipped the carefully freshened gown and slippers back into the laundry cellar of Mrs. Hollingsworth and turned toward the station. Widow McCall had made the situation seem so natural, almost inevitable, but now that I reached my destination, the oddness of it all pricked me again.
As the sun heated my skin, I stood on the platform until the throng of travelers parted to reveal the stranger who had slipped into my life and upended my future, and I tensed at the sight of such a finely dressed man smiling at me. What was that odd sensation he elicited in me with a mere look? I couldn’t tell if it was thrilling or scary. Either way, it was addictive.
He strode over and, with a small smile of victory, scooped up my bag. As I watched him stride away with everything I owned, panic unfurled inside. I hugged my patched old shawl about me, a tangible reminder of who I truly was, because it seemed I’d forgotten. I dreamed so often of normal clothing and a world of acceptance, but I still awoke every morning—including this one—as Ragna the seller of rags.
Yet this gent wanted me. Quite ardently. Something was not right.
I caught up to him as steam huffed from under the train. “I don’t even know your name.”
“It is Prendergast. Victor Eugene Prendergast. I am the private solicitor for Rothburne Abbey.” He considered me with amusement. “Would you also like to see my character references?”
I looked up into his tolerant face. “What is Rothburne? What could I possibly do at an abbey?”
“It’s a monastic fortress renovated into a private estate. It’s now the country home of the Countess of Enderly.”
A countess. He wished me to work for a countess? I pressed my lips together and watched hundreds of more appropriately dressed people swarm onto the train ahead of us, wondering again why he’d insisted on me. With one more powerful billow of steam pouring across my vision, I followed him and glanced back for the last time at everything I was leaving behind.
“Final boarding!” A red-coated man hung out of the door of the train car before us, urging us on.
I hesitated, waiting for the steam to clear for my final view of home, but my new employer tugged my arm. “Come, Cinderella. It’s time to go.”
“Raina. My name is Raina.”
When I glanced back at the station again, uncertainty weighting my steps, a blue cap descended into the billowing steam farther down, black boots landing firmly on the solid wood platform. Heart exploding in my chest, I braced myself against the doorway, willing the steam to clear so I could see who it was. It couldn’t be him, but I simply had to know before I left. Through the haze I saw a lanky, energetic sailor with a coat tossed over one arm, bag in hand. How well I knew that stance—but it was impossible. Impossible! If only I could see his face.
“Doors closing.”
I gripped the metal bar, but strong arms guided me into the train car. “Wait! Stop!” The chaos of the station drowned out my voice as I resisted.
Another billow of steam, and the blue-capped man turned at the commotion I made. I strained for another glimpse, but before the steam cleared, the arms yanked me in and the train door shut and latched before my face.
2
I have a great many adventures simply because I have always feared regret more than failure.
~Diary of a Substitute Countess
I clutched the edge of my seat and rested my forehead on the shuddering train window. It wasn’t Sully. Wasn’t. Months ago I’d seen the notice in the paper about the storm they called the “Great Gale,” and my trembling finger skimmed down the list of lost ships until I spotted it—Maiden Faire. I forced myself to recall the sight of that nam
e. The ship had gone down, and with it, Sullivan McKenna. My Sully.
How foolish to risk everything for proof that the stranger at the station was not him. There were plenty of men in the world who owned a bright blue wool cap. Sully was dead, and I was merely nervous.
Yet I resented my new employer’s slight coercion. Catching sight of my carpetbag—my bag—in the stranger’s grasp, I snatched it away and held it close, the sound of crinkling letters inside calming me.
He shifted in his wooden seat. “You are cross with me.”
“You wouldn’t listen. I changed my mind, but you forced me onto the train.”
He flipped out a newspaper and scoffed. “What a terrible word for it—forced. I tell you, it was merely a misunderstanding. I thought you were dallying and might miss the train, and we wouldn’t have caught another until the evening. Surely you can understand my position.”
His cool words swirled anger and doubt into a vague apprehension, and I didn’t know what I believed. Perhaps if I could just be certain about that stranger. As the long, low whistle sounded and we approached the next station, I sprang up but the man stood and braced me as the train shifted.
“Come, take your seat before you fall across the aisle. You haven’t a shilling for return fare, anyway.”
I gripped the seatback in front of me. “Can you not spare the little it would cost to return me?”
“Certainly not.” He tensed as the train jerked to a final stop. “I could, but why ever would I pay for what I do not want?”
“Gentlemanly regard for a lady.”
He puffed out a breath and turned that warm gaze on me. “It is my regard for you that makes me so insistent. I believe this will be a chance of a lifetime for you, even if you cannot see it. Return now, and you’ll forever be the rag lady, scorned by all decent society and even by most in Spitalfields. Besides, what are you returning for, anyway?”
Finding Lady Enderly Page 2