by Betina Krahn
Remington Carr seemed to be several men inside, she suddenly understood. Her anger from that morning was dealt a fatal blow. In its place she felt an odd warmth growing for the prideful but sporting man she usually saw. How many noblemen would have braved a whole houseful of women, or donned a ladies’ corset, or taken on the work of a scullery maid even to make good a bet? And how many men of any breeding would have braved having their name bandied about in Fleet Street scandal sheets to return for a second dose of women’s work?
Dangerous musings, she realized as he stepped out of the shop with his basket filled with vegetables and early fruits, and his eyes filled with satisfied light. Dangerous light. Mesmerizing light.
“Your change, madam,” he said, sifting coins through his fingers into Molly’s outstretched hand. He turned to Antonia with a triumphant sniff. “And I managed to get some fresh strawberries thrown into the bargain. I love strawberries.” He cast her a devastatingly tactile look from the corner of his eye as he started off.
“Not, however, as much as I love cherries and cream.”
Antonia managed to stall her reaction until his back was fully turned, then let the shiver come. The handsome wretch. He had just served notice that he wasn’t giving up his pursuit of her. To her everlasting shame she flushed hot with pleasure from the top of her head to the ends of her toes.
There were more lessons in store for Remington that afternoon. They entered several plain grocers, baker’s stalls, and tea and coffee shops where he watched Molly, and sometimes Antonia, taste, smell, or otherwise test the foodstuffs, then leave without purchasing anything. After the second or third of these fruitless missions, he stopped in the street outside and shifted his heavy shopping basket from one aching hand to the other, demanding to know why they hadn’t just made their purchases and gotten on with it.
Molly sidled closer, looking up at him from under the rim of her bonnet, and beckoned him down and into whisper range. “A body has to be wary these days,” she said confidentially. “Not all foodstuffs is good food. Even in decent shops ye get food wot’s cut wi’ tuck an’ filler. That coffee … he already ground it an’ added roast beans an’ chicory to stretch th’ poundage. Ye cannot buy anythin’ but whole, roasted beans and be sure of proper coffee, these days. A body must watch all the time. They’ll put potato flour in yer lard, water yer milk, shake barley rubble in yer oats, and put pea flour in yer pepper. Wheat flour gets cut with sulfur, lime, or alum, and yer tea is some part sycamore leaves if yer not careful. Then yer pickles an’ yer marmalades—well, ye wouldn’ want to know.” She shook her head at his expression of disbelief. “Come, I’ll show ye.”
They led him into a lower-end shop and let him sniff and sample a few ripe offenders. On holding a jar or joint into the sunlight, he could see the blue copper salts in the pickles and that some of the meats looked oddly red. His eyes widened, then narrowed as he began to see the sharp trafficking around him. And when they steered back to the better shops, they found several examples even among the more reputable merchants.
“Food is dear enough,” Antonia said to him as she saw him looking at working-class women doling out hard-won pennies for flour and salt that he had only minutes before discovered were badly adulterated. “They can scarcely afford it. And when they can buy, it may be as apt to do them harm from some noxious additive as it is to nourish them and their growing families. A woman must know how to tell what is good and what isn’t to safeguard her family’s health.”
“But aren’t there acts to stop such things?”
“Look around you, your lordship.” Antonia nodded around them, her mien quietly fierce. “Do you see anyone enforcing any ‘acts’?”
It was a lesson that followed Remington all through the evening. When he sat down to eat at Antonia’s table, he found himself looking at the deliciously crusty bread, tender poached halibut, and savory roast capon with new eyes. When the ladies inquired as to what he had learned while shopping that day, he felt an odd tightness in his throat and glanced at Antonia. She was watching him with an unreadable expression.
He lifted the glass of wine Antonia’s abstemious ladies had provided for him and with a bit of effort produced a strained smile.
“I learned that spending money can be exhausting … that one should never buy a fish with milky eyes … and that I must never make a wager with Molly McFadden. She drives a mean bargain, indeed.”
The women laughed and nodded approvingly.
And in spite of himself, his smile began to broaden.
For the next two days Remington was kept busy at a number of tasks; inventorying linen, scrubbing bathing-room porcelain fixtures, polishing floors and furniture, and separating and preparing laundry to be sent out to be cleaned. He learned what constituted a worn bedsheet, how to keep gravy and wine stains from setting in table linen, how to bleach and sanitize a sink, how to scrub down a floor for waxing and then mix a proper beeswax and turpentine mixture, then wax it.
He also learned that women love nothing better than to talk while they work.
It occurred to him that here was a perfect chance to learn things about Antonia that might give him an advantage with her. He began with a simple question or two about them at first: “Where did you live before coming here?” or “How did you meet Lady Antonia?” They generally paused and glanced away into remembered vistas.
They spoke of parents: old and young, well-fixed and penurious, indulgent and stern. And they spoke of their husbands: a young officer, a butcher, a watchmaker, a sailor, a farmer, a petty magistrate, a vice admiral, and a tailor … always with heartrending traces of longing.
As he watched Dame Hermione, the most oft-married of the lot, recounting the pleasures of her various husbands’ company, he found himself imagining them and envisioning them with a younger version of her. Her girlish smile was contagious as she recounted their exploits, some bordering on the wicked, some on the sublime. All her husbands were held and remembered with great affection. When a mist rose into her eyes, the smile still played at the corners of her mouth. Remington cleared whatever seemed to have gotten stuck in his throat and went back to counting table napkins, trying to think what it was he had intended to ask.
Each woman had a story to tell about how she met Antonia. Some had placed ads in papers or magazines, some had bundled up their possessions and come to scour the streets of London in the desperate hope of finding employment, and some had found her when they stumbled into the settlement house operated by the Assistance League.
“There she stood … with the saddest, sweetest eyes,” Maude Devine said, dabbing at the corners of her own eyes.
Remington shifted uncomfortably; he knew all about those beguiling blue eyes.
“Like a pure angel, she was,” Gertrude said, wagging her head. “A smile so sweet and kind … an’ me so desperate as to do whatever flesh allowed just to line my belly wi’ food.”
He adjusted his collar, remembering the alluring little smile that could seem so proper and so wicked at the same time.
“Not a word of rebuke or shaming. Naught but words of comfort and consolation,” Victoria Bentley remembered with disarming candor, lowering her eyes. “Not even when she learned where I had … slept … the week before.”
He fidgeted, thinking of just how sweet Antonia’s tongue could be.
Antonia hadn’t judged or blamed or coerced these women, he understood. She had merely offered them a place to live, a place where they were needed and wanted. The warmth and admiration in the way they spoke of her unsettled him. He didn’t like all this goodness and virtue; he could feel it chipping away at his righteous male indignation. Just as he was about to abandon this potentially dangerous tact, her aunt Hermione came up with a bit of information that piqued his interest.
“She brought a breath of fresh air into Geoffrey’s life,” Hermione said, pausing in the midst of her stitchery. “He was considerably older and a bit set in his ways. Not a very romantic husband for a young girl.
But she didn’t seem to mind. Humored him, she did, indulged all his crotchets … like candles of an evening. Geoffrey was forward thinking in many ways, but he hated gaslight. Preferred candles at night.” She smiled fondly. “And we still use them. Antonia does it out of respect for his memory. That”—the old lady laughed—“and I suspect she loves the candlelight herself.”
A woman who loved candlelight and stray cats, but coldly trapped men into marriages. A woman who looked and sounded like an angel but held a devil of a grudge against men, bachelors in particular. One minute she was breathing fire at him, the next she was melting in his arms. He couldn’t seem to get a grip on her. And that didn’t seem likely to change anytime soon; she seemed to have completely forgotten him.
He looked down at the parlor table he was waxing and saw his scowl reflected to him. What in hell was he doing here?
Contrary to Remington’s conclusion, Antonia was far from abandoning or ignoring him. She knew from hour to hour and minute to minute exactly where he was and what he was doing, including the fact that he had begun to talk to her ladies. She made rounds periodically and watched him from a distance as he listened, watched, and bent his efforts—however reluctantly—to the tasks they set for him.
His guarded manner was still there; he still didn’t trust them. But as they talked, over the course of two days, Antonia could see additional signs of change in him. His tightly coiled frame had begun to relax, and the hard angles of his face had begun to soften in her ladies’ presence. He wasn’t as easily startled, and at meals he no longer braced in his chair as if he were ready to bolt for the door at any moment. She was going to win their wager; she could just feel it.
On that first Saturday he finished helping restock and rearrange the larder in the kitchen, then found himself at loose ends for the first time in quite a while. It was a perfect opportunity for a “chance” encounter with Antonia, he thought, prowling the first floor, looking for her.
Most of the ladies had gone out for the morning to pay charitable calls, shop, or simply take the air in the park across Piccadilly. The house was quiet, and as Remington passed the study, he heard a noise and ducked through the doorway, thinking he might have found Antonia. It was only old Cleo Royal with her feather duster and chamois cloth, dusting off both her figurines and her memories. Remington paused, watching her tawdry theatrical finery and birdlike movements from the doorway, then turned to go.
“No,” she declared, but not as loudly as he was used to hearing her speak. “Stay, your lordship, and keep me company awhile.”
He turned and found her facing him, wearing a garish purple satin with tattered sprigs of silk violets drooping here and there. In her frizzled silver hair was a grand Spanish comb made of carved tortoiseshell inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and she wore ropes of tawdry glass beads.
“Better yet,” she said in her papery voice, tottering closer to him and thrusting the handle of the feather duster into his palm. “Come and help me.”
“Help you?” He scowled at the feather duster, then at the room full of figurines.
Taking hold of his sleeve with a thin, blue-veined hand, she pulled him toward a graceful set of porcelain miniatures. “You can start there.” She pointed to a group on a sideboard nearby. “I’ve already done these over here.”
When she stared expectantly at him, he tucked his chin and looked uncomfortably around him. This would take the better part of the day to finish, he grumbled to himself with a trace of annoyance. But the trust he glimpsed in the old woman’s expression tempered his response. He heaved a disgusted breath, picked up a figurine of a milkmaid and her cows, and began to dust it.
“Why don’t you just sell them?” he said aloud after a few minutes. As he watched her pick up a figurine of a waltzing couple and clasp it to her breast, he thought better of that and amended it. “Or at least a part of them?”
“Sell them? What for?”
“For money, of course,” he said, stepping back a pace.
She laughed. “And what would an old girl like me do with money, eh?” Looking down at the porcelain couple she held in her hand, caught forever in blissful youth and festivity, she sighed. “I have all I need here.” After a moment she looked up with an otherworldly glow in her face. “And I do so like to pet them. They make me think of the old days, you know. Each is like a frozen memory.
“This one makes me think of Vienna, where we waltzed until the sun came up, Fox Royal and me.” Her faded brown eyes focused on some other time and place. “I wore my most scandalous red gown—actresses always wear indecent red dresses—it’s traditional. The archduke wanted me to waltz fast and loose with him, but I declined. When he insisted, Fox called him out. There was such a scandal.
“And this one.” She picked up another, the figure of a goosegirl and a country swain adoring her over a split-rail fence. “We played a pastorale together in Geneva. Fox wooed and won me in verse and song, seven nights a week and twice more on Sundays.” She caught Remington’s eye with what on a younger person would have been called a lascivious grin. On her it seemed oddly gnomelike and endearing.
“I always said yes to that man, both onstage and off. But then, very few people—male or female, high or low, rich or poor—ever said no to Fox Royal. He was a man of a thousand persuasions.” Her eyes fluttered closed and she just stood there for a moment.
The sliding sensation in his middle had something to do with defenses, he knew. But he couldn’t stop it; she seemed so small and frail. When she swayed, he didn’t understand that she was falling at first. He barely had time to catch both her and her figurine before they crashed to the floor.
Setting the statuette aside, he gathered her up gently in his arms. She weighed next to nothing and felt dry and reedy, like a crumpled bird, against him. Calling her name urgently, he looked about for a place to lay her down. He spotted an overstuffed leather sofa along the side wall beneath the windows and carried her there.
“Don’t put me down just yet,” She threaded her arms around his neck and refused to let go. “I am so cold. Just hold me.”
For a brief moment he wondered if he should go for help. But she patted his shoulder and looked up at him, seeming more lucid than he expected.
“It’s just one of my spells.” She managed a weak smile. “You know, it’s been a long time since a handsome young gallant held me in his arms.”
Something in that time-weathered countenance and those faded brown eyes that had seen so much of life tugged at him. It was the same full-chest sort of feeling he got when dealing with Uncle Paddington’s less rational moments—a sense that he was responsible, a feeling that something timeless and precious had been entrusted to him.
With effort he managed to lower himself to a seat on the sofa, still holding her. She sighed and settled against him wearing that faint, angelic smile. Neither spoke for a few moments; then she lifted her head from his shoulder to look up at him.
“Toni says you don’t like us very much.”
“She does, does she?” he said defensively.
“Women, I mean. You don’t like women. Says you don’t like marriage much, either.” She looked him over. “What happened? Some skirt give you the jilt?”
“You certainly get points for bluntness, madam,” he said rigidly.
“Cleo,” she insisted. “I’m too old to put a fancy skirt of manners on my yens and curiosities. I speak my mind. And right now I want to know what it is about us you don’t like.” She frowned. “Aren’t of the ‘Greek’ persuasion, are you?”
It took him a moment to react to what she’d said. “I … am not.” She had caught him totally off guard, and in reaction he slipped easily into phrases he had written and spoken numerous times:
“I have nothing against women in general, just against women who expect to be married and kept and cosseted by men. I suppose it’s marriage I object to most. All that nonsense about home and family and love … it’s a house of cards, an illusion. Marriage is primarily a
n economic arrangement, hideously one-sided.” His voice thickened. “To make us go into it more willingly, society dresses it up in respectable or romantic terms. But all their talk of love and happiness is nothing more than a cynical deception at worst, and at best, a socially useful myth.”
He felt her moving against his chest and looked down to find her grinning and wagging her head. “Don’t believe in love, eh? Poor boy.” She patted his chest gently, and he glanced away, roundly annoyed by the way she seemed to be patronizing him.
“That’s the greatest fairy tale of all,” he said with a growl. “That love business.”
She reached up and stroked his cheek, comforting him. After a moment she laid her head against his chest again and sighed.
“You know, my boy, I’m an actress, bred to the drama, the paint, the applause. I know a great deal about illusions … I’ve lived my whole life making believe.” Her voice lowered as she descended once again into the halls of memory. “With all that, my love with Fox Royal was the only real thing I ever had.”
Remington felt something in his chest begin to sink, leaving a hollow space.
She nestled closer to him. “I can tell you’ve never been in love, my boy, and I’m sorry for that. It’s the only thing that makes life really worth living … two hearts beating as one. My Fox had a hundred ways to say it. But it all came down to that: just two hearts beating as one. When I lost my Fox, half of my heart died, too.”
Something seemed to be stuck in his throat; he couldn’t speak. But it was just as well, for he had no response to make. In a few short statements she had penetrated his finely honed defenses and made him admit for the first time that it was possible. Perhaps on rare occasions, for a special and ordained few, there was such a thing as lifelong and soul-binding love, unions of man and woman that transcended the bondage of matrimony to a higher plane. Love. It was exactly what Uncle Paddington carried on about. Perhaps belief in it was something people settled into as they aged.