by Zoë Archer
He had only a scrap of old paper in his pocket to serve as his compass in London, and it wasn’t doing him a lick of good. He’d made about as much progress today as he had the day before—meaning, none. He wasn’t giving up, all the same.
As he walked up and down the streets of this odd city, he couldn’t shake thoughts of that pretty English widow he’d met yesterday. No, she wasn’t pretty. She was damned beautiful. He’d seen over a hundred actresses in his day, rouged and powdered and wearing next to nothing as they performed their fancy dances to the roars of the crowd. Yet not a one of them matched in pure loveliness the English widow. Lady Xavier, her servant called her.
He walked towards his hotel, rolling himself a cigarette as evening started to fall. He’d bought himself some kind of meat pie from a shop down the street and carried it in a paper sack. It would be his dinner for the night.
A couple of soiled doves passed him—they looked the same as the girls in Leadville, and every other town he’d ever been in—so he wasn’t mistaken in their question.
“Lookin’ for a bit o’ fun, lovey?” One swayed closer to him.
“Yeah,” her friend added, “you could ’ave the both of us for a quid.”
“I don’t know what a quid is, ma’am,” he said, “but even if I did, I’m going to have to say no, thanks.”
Both women started to laugh. “An American!” they cried together. “We ain’t never met an American before.”
He tipped his hat. Even whores were ladies underneath it all and he never stopped treating them as such.
“You from Texas?” the older one asked.
“Colorado, ma’am.”
“Is that in America?”
“Last I checked.”
“That case, we’ll give you a turn on the house,” the younger one said. “A welcome-to-England prezzy.” She wrapped her thin arms around Will’s elbow and pressed her bosom against him. Her friend followed suit and began playing with his moustache. He wasn’t the least bit tempted.
“Thanks all the same, girls.” He carefully disentangled them both and set them back on the street. “I do appreciate your hospitality, but I just ain’t up for company right now.”
The women pulled faces of disappointment, but they both shrugged as they pulled their wraps tighter around their shoulders. “If you change your mind, come to the King’s Head an’ ask for Jennie and Kate,” the older one said. “Mind you don’t forget.”
“I won’t. Have a good evenin’, ladies.” He gave his hat another tip. With cheerful waves, the women left in the direction of the docks.
He continued towards his hotel and got back to the business of his cigarette. He hadn’t had a tumble since New York, but he wasn’t like other men coming off the trail, following their johnsons to the nearest bordello and squandering their money on paid company. He liked women, fine. No, he loved them: their talk, their laughter, the way they looked at the world that sometimes defied all logic, but sometimes a man had different priorities besides bouncing mattresses.
That girl in New York, she’d worked in some factory and thought it’d be great fun to polish the sheets with a real live cowboy, and he had been happy to oblige. His body had liked it fine enough. There was something to be said for a city girl’s sophistication. But he’d found afterwards, slipping out of her boarding house with his boots in hand, that he was getting a bit weary of these one night encounters. They were missing something, but he didn’t know quite what.
His mind turned suddenly towards Lady Xavier. He hadn’t been wrong—she was a lady from the top of her silly feathered hat to the tips of her little expensive leather shoes. Her blue dress had to have been made of silk and it covered a slim and curved body. It wasn’t the cost or cut of her clothes that made her a lady in his estimation. She carried herself like a falcon—noble, elegant, so keenly beautiful it made a man’s eyes ache to look at her.
He struck a match against the brick front of a building and lit his cigarette. He took a soothing drag of smoke into his mouth and blew it out. Thank the lord he remembered to pack good old Bull Durham tobacco. Who knew what kind of peculiar stuff they smoked out here in England. Probably something boiled.
“Ches-nuts! Hot, roasted chestnuts!” a passing vendor cried. A few children rushed forward to buy them, then ran off with their snacks.
Lady Xavier’s hair was darker than chestnuts, thick and glossy hair like a raven’s wing, coiled neatly at the back of her head. He’d been dying to take it down from its pins and just run his fingers through it. He knew it would be softer than the silk of her dress. Her skin was smooth and fair, unmarked and perfect.
The shape of her face showed she came from good stock. A clean, neat jawline that lead a man right to her mouth, which was full and wide, the color of crushed raspberries and near to heartbreaking when she smiled. Unlike women who put clothespins on their noses to get the look of the upturned beauties from Harper’s or Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Lady Xavier had a straight, fine nose, just shy of assertive. She had the kind of nose, Will mused, drawing on his cigarette, that didn’t turn away from unpleasantness.
He neared his hotel. He’d traversed London enough to know that he managed to find one of the lowest, roughest and most shoddy hotels in the whole city, but it was cheap and it had been blissfully near where his ship docked. All he’d wanted when he staggered off that boat was someplace that didn’t pitch like a bronc.
Now it wasn’t the motion of the ship that unsettled him. It was the lady’s eyes that kept haunting Will as he walked through London, as he lay down last night, and all the times in between. They were the precise color of the sky just as night eased into morning. He’d seen that color a lot when he’d had last watch on the drive, and it always took him by surprise that something like a color could fill a body with pleasure. But he hadn’t counted on seeing that gorgeous shade of violet-gray in a woman’s eyes. He could lose whole days of his life looking into Lady Xavier’s eyes.
Despite all this, it wasn’t her beauty that had kept her returning again and again to his thoughts. Some cattle baron had once bought a glass vase from a company called Tiffany in New York, and made sure all them men who worked for him had a chance to see it, to show them what success had gotten him. It was a pretty thing, to be sure, a mass of colors that fair glowed under the gaslight, but it was empty, and an empty thing just wasn’t worth much to Will.
Lady Xavier wasn’t empty, though. Like he had told her yesterday, she was full of pepper—spirit, grit, gumption. He saw it in the way she tried to hold off the men hassling her. She didn’t scream, didn’t faint, just held her ground. Even now it made Will smile. What made him smile even more was the sass she showed afterwards, firing back at him with those fine words of hers, that high-class accent that made him feel like he’d drunk a fifth of fine whiskey.
He waited outside his hotel to finish his cigarette. All the ranch wives had frowned on him taking tobacco indoors.
Lady Xavier was, Will realized, watching the smoke uncurl from his cigarette, the kind of woman a man—hell, this man—wouldn’t mind setting up housekeeping with. When the time came.
But then she’d offered him money for doing what any man with a speck integrity should do, and he’d understood that Lady Xavier really was as beautiful and remote as a high-flying falcon. He’d been angry at first that she’d thought so little of him as to try and pay him off like some kind of hired hand. But he’d seen that she was just being what she was—a lady—and he was just a cowpuncher who didn’t even know his parents’ names. Yet.
A lamplighter made his way down the street, only a bit more than a boy behind his dirty face and bulky clothes, and in his wake the street turned into an ugly, sulfurous alley, narrow and grimy.
Will might be able to afford a better lodging house, but sometimes a body didn’t know when his money was going to run out. It was better to practice economy. Sooner or later, he’d have to buy a ticket home. He was comfortable with hard living, so a few
rats and dripping storm drains didn’t trouble him.
Crushing the remains of his cigarette under his boot heel, he smiled grimly to himself. Lady Xavier wasn’t used to rough company, even though she stood up to those bullies yesterday, and he felt pretty certain she would find his bunking-down arrangements less than satisfactory. He turned to head inside.
And ran right into trouble of his own.
The hotel was one shade better than a mining camp bunkhouse, with faded, torn wallpaper, warped floorboards and ceilings stained black from the gaslamps. The walls were so thin Will could hear his neighbor’s every sneeze, scratch and snore. And every now and then Will would be awakened by the sound of a scarlet lady practicing her trade in the room above.
None of this seemed to bother the management. They had no problems with the drunk sailors and assorted blowhards that came and went through the hallowed halls. Americans, on the other hand, were unwelcome. They’d been sour on him since the moment he took a room three days ago, and it was only because the rent was so cheap that Will stayed.
As he entered the hotel’s lobby, he saw the desk clerk talking with a well-dressed fellow, both casting baleful looks in his direction. Yesterday, there’d been a bit of a dust up when the desk clerk whined about Will’s boots making too much noise coming up and down the stairs. Will did what any sane man would do—he’d ignored the clerk and went to bed.
But it seemed that the greasy little clerk had called in the big guns. Which explained Mr. Fancy Pants, wearing an embroidered vest stretched across his belly, giving him the once-over.
Will wasn’t up for whatever those two had planned, but the portly Brit blocked the staircase up to his room.
“You must remove yourself immediately.” Unlike the desk clerk, this man had the fancy accent of Lady Xavier, though without the class. “I own this respectable establishment, and such behavior will not be tolerated.”
“What the hell are you talkin’ about?” He braced one hand on the banister.
The Brit looked as put-out as a frog in the dry season. “Swearing, for one thing. I have received numerous complaints about the manner in which you speak.”
“There ain’t nothin’ wrong with the damned way I talk,” Will growled.
A disdainful snort shot out of the owner’s pointy nose. “And furthermore, I refuse to provide lodging for some ill-bred ruffian.” He pointed to the blood stains on the cuff of Will’s coat with a bloated, pale finger. “Brawling! That is evidence of your brutish behavior.”
Will looked down at the blood and almost smiled. “It ain’t mine.”
“You attacked someone.” The owner’s eyes widened.
“’Cause they were on the shoot with a filly up yonder.” His patience grew thinner by the minute while his slang thickened. “Damn it, I just want to eat my supper, then lay down and sleep for a hundred years thereabout, so just hobble your lip and step aside.”
“What in heaven’s name are you talking about?” The owner turned paler, his large face jiggling like fancy aspic as he worked himself into a lather. “On the shoot? Filly?”
“There was a lady out in the street and some bad men were givin’ her some trouble. I just wanted to even the score.”
“A lady.” The owner sniffed doubtfully. “You mean a trollop.”
Will’s fist shot out and tightened around the silk of the man’s neckcloth so fast that he could only gasp in fright as his feet nearly dangled over the stairs. “She was a lady.” Will’s voice was low and dangerous. “And if you insult her, too, then I’ll have to feed you your teeth. Hear me?” He gave the owner a slight shake to enforce his point. Releasing the man, he added, “I don’t see what the fuss is about. It ain’t like you’re runnin’ the Ritz.” He looked around at the dilapidated front parlor, which contained one dying palm tree, a yellowed painting of a cow and a man passed out on an uncomfortable sofa with a bottle cradled in his lap.
“You will remove yourself at once,” the owner gasped, “or I will fetch the constabulary immediately.”
Will fought the urge to sigh. It was time to cut his losses. Frugality was one thing, but it was another to put up with jackasses. He’d heard once that discretion was the better part of valor. Now was as good a time as any to put that into practice. “Fine.” He started to walk past the owner but the man squawked.
“Where are you going?”
“To get my things out of my room,” Will said. “I’m going to clear out—”
“Absolutely not! Leave at once.”
“I’ve got to get my saddle, at least.”
The owner turned red. “Saddle? In your room? This is not a stable.”
“Stables smell better. Now get out of my way.” He took a step, but the owner blocked him. The desk clerk appeared to try an add some muscle. Will considered himself someone with a goodly long fuse, but felt it burning up by the second. “Am I going to have to clean your plow, too, junior?” Will asked through his teeth. The clerk whitened.
Just as he was getting ready for his second fight in as many days, the front door behind Will opened and closed. He wouldn’t have paid it any mind, except both the owner and the clerk goggled over his shoulder like fish on a riverbank.
“I’m not interrupting anything, am I, gentlemen?” asked a soft female voice.
He had only met a few women during his short time in England, but he knew that voice as sure as he knew his own dreams. Turning around, he saw a sight that made him stare as much as the man and his crony standing on the stairs.
Will had never seen a more incongruous or surprising sight than Lady Xavier, pretty and rare as a peach in December, standing in the mildewed, faded lobby of his fleabag hotel. He wanted to snatch her up and run out into the street to keep lowlife dirt like the men behind him from even looking at her. She was dressed as smart as they come in a burgundy dress and black velvet coat, with a delicate pair of leather gloves and a hat with a turned-back brim, trimmed in burgundy ribbon. He’d had never seen a woman in such elegant clothing before, and certainly no one else who could wear them as naturally as their own skin.
With wry amusement and a hint of confusion in her face, she surveyed the scene in front of her.
“Madam.” The owner hustled his bulk down the stairs as fast as he could. “Can I be of some assistance?” He looked bewildered, but tried to cover it up with sweet talk.
Which was better than Will—who could only stand and stare like a green kid’s first visit to a saloon.
Lady Xavier looked past the owner at Will. Her direct gaze sent a hundred fireflies of awareness skittering through his body. What the hell was going on?
The owner caught the direction of her gaze. “Please take no notice of that hooligan, Madam. The Bentley Arms is a respectable establishment and we are having him removed from the premises immediately.” The owner glared at Will, daring him to argue in front of a lady.
“Removed?” She frowned a little. “Has he done something wrong?”
The owner slid his eyes around the room, trying to drum up complaints against Will and finding nothing. “Regardless, he is leaving right now.”
“Goddamit, I’m going to get my gear and then I’m leavin’,” Will growled. Lady Xavier had already seen him fight with the toughs the other day, but he didn’t care for the idea of her seeing him brought low.
“Fetch the bobby,” the owner squealed to the desk clerk, and the little man began to scuttle towards the door. Will took several threatening steps, causing both the owner and his crony to shrink into themselves, but Lady Xavier’s voice stopped them all.
“All this is quite unnecessary. Mr. Coffin is a friend of mine.”
“He is?” the owner and the clerk asked together.
Will knew better than to question her, though he could hardly call bailing her out from a couple of rowdies the basis of a friendship.
“Who are you?” the owner managed to ask through his shock.
She gave him a look so cold it could freeze chile peppers. If Wil
l had ever doubted that she was high-born, the arctic aloofness of her voice convinced him otherwise. Only folks certain of their place in the world could ever talk or look the way she did at that moment—completely untouchable. “Lady Olivia Xavier, and who are you?”
“H...Horace Whitbridge, my lady.”
“Mister Whitbridge, if you do not want to earn my lasting enmity, you will allow my friend Mister Coffin to retrieve his belongings from his room at once.” Though nobody in their right mind would argue with her, she added, “And if you insist on fetching the law, I will happily report this shambles you call a hotel to the authorities. Believe me when I tell you that I know many members of Parliament, who would happily close down this establishment and any other properties you may own.”
Whitbridge gulped. “Of course, my lady. Whatever you wish, my lady. In fact,” he added, “there is no need for Mister Coffin to leave. We’ll happily accommodate him for as long as he needs.”
Will was about to turn his offer down flat. He’d rather sleep at the docks than spend another night in this dive, but Lady Xavier—Olivia, what a name—beat him to the punch.
“I wouldn’t board my dog in such foul conditions.” Turning back to Will, her whole attitude changed, and she said with a smile that made Will’s chest hurt, “Shall we be going?”
Will had to bury his own grin as he bounded up the stairs—as loud as he damn well pleased—and grabbed his rucksack and saddle from his room. His heart was racing, and it had nothing to do with the three flights of stairs. Damn, she was here. At his sorry shack of a hotel. She’d come looking for him. He didn’t know why or what he planned to do with himself once he cleared out, but none of that seemed to matter, just having her nearby. He didn’t even spare his dingy room a second look as he hustled back downstairs.
It hadn’t been a mirage. She was still there, trim and fashionable, and still cool as a duchess. Her eyes widened slightly at the sight of his saddle draped over his shoulder, but other than that, she behaved as if went to run-down flophouses in dangerous neighborhoods to bail out Colorado cowboys every day.
