by Maren Smith
“Are you ashamed to tell me?” he asked suddenly, halting me in the bud of what I personally believe might very well have been a suicidal attempt to gain my freedom. “If so, then I promise not to look out the window when we arrive.”
“Ashamed?” I stared at him in silent disbelief, not blinking until my eyes began to burn because of it.
“Of your home. Believe me, I am not too lost in my own extravagance not to realize we can’t all live in palaces and townhouses.”
Palaces and townhouses. I remembered a flash of marble and Grecian columns and tall multi-pane windows that let in the sunlight in a white, white drawing room where once I had played. In comparison, my home these days was a rented room above the corner pawnshop. It was windowless, which made it stuffy in the winter and oppressively hot in the summer, and only just barely big enough to house the narrow cot I slept upon. There was a communal bathroom down the hall, and twenty-six tenants to share it. Another eight tenants were yet in nappies, which meant that at least one of them was guaranteed to be crying at any given time of the night, and the man in the room above me had somehow smuggled in a cat, which had peed on the floor so many times that an ugly brown stain was beginning to leak through to my ceiling. The smell was horrible.
Still that nasty little room was a veritable lap of luxury compared with the alternative. Unless I found a way to make my rent—fifteen shillings, due in full tomorrow evening—I could just as easily be sleeping on a rooftop somewhere or in a doorway.
I turned my face away to look at the curtained window to my left and I tried not to cry. Maybe if I went back right now, just maybe Old Hodges would let me have my job back again. He would almost certainly finish the beating he’d begun, and I knew it would be even worse for me than before. But I could take it. I could, if it meant I wouldn’t have to live on the street.
My eyes began to tear. “I don’t see any point in being ashamed of something I probably won’t have for much longer.”
My companion drew in a deep breath. “That sounds vaguely as if the rent must be due.”
I clenched my hands tightly together, wishing I’d not said anything at all.
“Which, I suspect, would also mean you are thinking of the job you no longer possess.” He tsked and said, not unkindly, “There must be a hundred taverns on this side of the Thames alone. Surely one of them is lacking a server.”
My eyes began to tear and my lower lip quivered. I was glad the darkness hid my emotional foibles from the man beside me. Slow and deep, I forced each breath I took to be like normal so he would not know I was crying. There were definitely more than a hundred taverns; over the years, I must have worked for at least half of them at one time or another. I was not a good server. I could not seem to suffer the indignities that other girls seemed to accept as a matter of course. Like when Ames at the Donkey’s Long pushed me up against the butcher block in the kitchen one night, sweating and panting and pawing at my breasts. I laid a flat iron up against his head as hard as I could and spent the next two months hungry and cold in prison. Last I heard, Ames was still drooling and his brother now ran the Donkey’s Long.
Very few taverns would hire a troublemaker, and that was my reputation.
“There’s a fish market one street over, I believe,” the stranger suggested. But I had been fired from Dubby’s Fish Mart two years ago when my mother had first fallen ill. There had been no one else to care for her. To this day, I still could not bring myself to eat fish.
“There’s always a call for buffer lasses. Heavy work, I know, but the wage is extraordinary with practice. You see, the opportunities abound; you simply have to look for them.”
So sayeth a man who’d probably never had to work for a living. Ever. Not one day in all of his life.
“Which brings us back to the unanswered question of the hour: what to do with you.” He lay his neatly folded coat and gloves on the seat between us. “Home again, home again, jiggity jig, as the rhyme does go.”
“Why are you so insistent on gaining my address?” I turned practically into the wall just so I could dash away my tears unnoticed. Then I faced him, frowning and tight-lipped. Defiance was not a normal thing for me, and from where exactly I had managed to summon this remarkable little thread of it, I just don’t know. “Why must you know so badly? You did spare me a thrashing; should I show you my gratitude by giving you some sort of reward? Will a kiss be enough to satisfy my debt, or shall I raise my skirt, lie back and think of England? Do you believe I will fancy the pawing of a nobleman above that of Bax and his eager friends? Will you take pity on me when you see how poor my accommodations and perhaps compensate me for the pleasure of my time? I may be poor, my lord, but I am not Unfortunate.”
We passed another street lamp and for a brief moment the inside of the carriage became illuminated enough for me to see his mild surprise and for him to see the tears in my eyes.
“I don’t believe I ever suggested you work as an Unfortunate,” he finally offered. “Nor do I think I have pawed you or shown you disrespect in any way. They do not call these streets ‘hells’ without reason, and I am not a man in the habit of helping people, only to leave them in situations worse than when I found them.”
No, he hadn’t. And I should have been ashamed of myself for my outburst. But I was hurt, far removed from my element of comfort, and scared all the way down to the very core of me. No longer feeling rescued, I felt myself a prisoner. No longer my angel, he had become my captor. And who was I that anyone would miss me if I simply disappeared?
“Let me out here,” I said again, this time my voice did not waver.
“You truly are determined to make me into someone nefarious, aren’t you?” he asked, his tone painstakingly mild and yet developing some of that same calm authority that he had used with Old Hodges.
In contrast, my tone was rising and growing wilder. “I will not give you my address!”
“What if I promise to cover my ears? You can shout it to Buckley, and I’ll never be the wiser.”
“No!”
“All right then, you shall simply have to come home with me. At least then I will know you are safely ensconced in someone’s house for the night.”
My heart was beating wildly, my hands shaking. “You are holding me hostage!”
“There I am, being all nefarious again. My dear, I promise you—”
He broke off sharply when I dove for the carriage door, accidentally stepping on his foot and tripping myself. I would have cracked my chin on the window ledge had he not caught me about the waist. He probably meant to drop me back on the seat, but for all my struggling I ended up sitting in his lap and that made my franticness to break free of him all the more urgent.
“Let—ugh! Let me go!” I thrashed and the welts across my back and hips exploded in a new agony of throbbing. “Oh!”
“Easy,” he said soothingly.
But nothing about tonight had been easy; nothing about tonight had been soothing. My elbow jabbed back into his ribs, and I launched myself again for freedom, this time managing to kick the door open. I had one foot out over the moving ground before his arms again locked around me.
“Are you trying to break your fool neck?” my captor demanded, and then yelled to Buckley, who immediately reigned in the horses.
“Let me go!” I cried, not caring whether the carriage was moving or not.
This time when he pulled me back to him, instead of sitting in his lap I found myself flipped about and dropped belly-down across his hard thighs. I kicked my feet outside the open door, fighting to right myself or, failing that, to simply slide backwards and down onto the street, but a strong arm like a band of worked iron locked around my waist. With the easy strength of a grown man, he hauled me center across his lap and pinned me there.
“Oh!” I beat my hands on both the seat, the floor and even reached back to claw and scratch him, anything to break his hold. But in an instant, all my struggles came to a sudden halt when I felt the flat of his ha
nd come to rest on the seat of my upturned skirts.
As light a touch as it was, his fingers unwittingly pressed over one of the welts left by Old Hodges’ belt, and I came completely apart.
For the first time in my life, I wished my father had found the courage not only to end his life, but to take me with him when he’d died. I burst into tears.
Chapter Two
The tears poured down my cheeks, my nose ran, I could barely breathe and could not make myself move at all. Beatings were not unfamiliar to me, but I had never been held like this to receive one before, and it left me feeling… scared, to be honest, but strange, too. His thighs were hard and steady beneath my stomach and hips, and the touch of that hand, pressed so firmly to the seat of my skirt—it sent a wave of heat scouring through me. Cringing, I waited for him to strike me and just get it over with.
Except that he didn’t. His broad palm rested across both buttocks evenly, stern and unyielding, and did not move. “Are you going to settle yourself enough to listen to me, or will I first have to clear your ears?”
Clear my ears by beating my bottom? I drew one shaky breath, and then another. I had never heard of that method before. I had to swallow twice just to get past the lump in my throat. “I-I am ready to listen.”
His arm loosened, and he helped me sit up without so much as laying a single burning swat against me. I would have slunk back to my cornered perch against the carriage wall, except that he did not release me that far. Instead, I wound up sitting upon one of his strong knees, my back to the open carriage door.
“I am not going to hurt you,” he told me solemnly.
No. He would not hurt me. He was just going to beat me unless I did as he wanted.
“It was not my intent to frighten you, although I can see that is what’s happened anyway.”
The welt down the back of my leg burned where it pressed against his thigh. I stared at the curtain straight ahead of me and tried my best to be impassive.
“My only thought tonight has been to help you and to see you home. That is it. That is all.”
The tears streaked down my cheeks, forced from my red-rimmed eyes with every slow blink. I clutched my hands so tightly in my lap that my fingers hurt. I didn’t move. A thin ray of light from one of the gas lamps filtered into the carriage over my shoulder, falling onto the end of his gloves. With every ragged exhale, the light dipped lower and fell upon his coat. And sparkled.
“But you’re not going to believe that, are you?” he asked, more to himself than to me.
I blinked again, and slowly my eyes focused upon the sparkle. It was a pocket watch on a thin, gold chain, peeking out at me from partially beneath a fold in the fabric of his coat. A series of jewels set in the face glittered when they caught the lamplight.
“Ella, with the beautiful name,” the stranger said with a sigh. He reached up to touch a strand of my hair, pulling it back from my face, tucking it behind my ear. It was the hand he would have beat me with.
Except that it hadn’t, my mind whispered. My body tingled at the touch of that hand, moving down over my shoulder to rest itself gently at the small of my back. “Where?” he asked simply, the intimacy of his touch searing me through my clothes. “Where do you live?”
My hands clasped and unclasped, and then I gave in. I pointed back down the street in the way we had already come. “Five blocks behind us.”
I told myself it did not matter if he knew. After tomorrow I would not still be there anyway.
He let me go from his lap, and I crawled back to my seat. Again I saw that sparkle as the street light lit upon his watch when he leaned out to grab hold of the open carriage door.
It truly is amazing how quickly a young woman with no future can disregard a lifetime full of honesty, pride, and self-respect. Already living in one hell, I condemned myself to the other in all of four seconds flat. While my unwitting companion called up to Buckley with new driving instructions, I lay my hand upon his folded coat and stole his waist watch. My conscience made not a peep in protest. I simply took it in my palm and then folded my hand into the volumes of my skirt as he swung the door closed and sat back beside me.
I had never stolen anything before, not in all my life. The watch burned in my fist. I snuck a quick look down at the seat between us to make sure the length of gold chain was completely tucked out of sight, and then glanced sidelong at the stranger, my bottom tingling even more fiercely where he’d laid his hand upon me. Because I wasn’t used to being handled quite like that, I told myself, not because I had taken his timepiece.
“At this point, I suppose I should walk you to your door to make sure this truly is your residence.” His tone said he was joking, but something told me he really wasn’t.
“I am not lying,” I said woodenly.
“Good. I’m glad. Lying is, as I believe I’ve said before, a very naughty thing to do.”
I wonder what he would say about stealing if he knew. Sharp little peaks and edges of the jewel-studded watch dug into my palm as I squeezed it tightly. I all but sat on my hand in my effort to hide what I had done.
“This is the one?” he asked, as we drew close to my building.
“Yes.”
He knocked and the carriage came to a stop, but for a moment neither of us moved. I was almost afraid to. If he got out ahead of me, how was I to disembark without his seeing what I had taken? Even worse, what if he didn’t get out at all? My guilty hand faced him fully, he’d have to be blind not to notice what I held as I tried to slip right by him. My numbness changed to nervous apprehension, but finally he smiled.
“I think I believe you.” He opened the door and stepped out ahead of me, and I breathed a very small sigh of relief. But then he turned and held out his hands to help me down, and there was no way for me to move around him without stepping into his reach. I went to him slowly, reaching one hand out to cup his shoulder, but keeping the other, tightly gripping the watch, inside the carriage as if holding to the door for balance. If he pulled me clear of it, he would have seen the watch, the chain dangling through my fingers because my hand wasn’t big enough to hide it all at once. By some miraculous stroke, however, he only lifted me promptly down and I was able to tuck that watch back into the folds of my skirt without his ever being the wiser.
“I shall wish you a fond farewell, then,” he told me, with a smile and a bow of his handsome head. “May you find fairer employment in a kinder environment.”
His watch would all but guarantee that, I determined with shaky relief. I was done living in Hell. The pawnshop broker would give me good money for it, without a single question as to where someone like me could have found such a fancy piece of jewelry. With any luck, it would be enough for me to find a better way of life in another part of London. Maybe in another city entirely. Where no one knew me. Where I could start anew.
“Thank you for the ride,” I told him. Thanking him was the least I could do; whether he knew it or not, he had just saved my life again.
Once more my angel, he waved my gratitude aside. “Think nothing of it; my pleasure entirely. Having stopped that unfortunate assault upon your person, I could not in good conscience leave you in the company of those brutes. Especially since they would have resumed said assault the minute I’d gone anyway.” He dipped a hand into his breeches. “Here.”
I looked down in surprise at the two pounds—a veritable fortune—that he held out to me. As I stood staring, my mouth dropping open, he reached down to take my left hand and laid the coins in my palm. I was so surprised, I could not even close my fingers. He did that for me.
“Don’t object to this, Ella with the beautiful name, and do not be insulted.” His hand cupped my chin, raising my eyes to meet his as he said; “I mean no offense, but only to give you a little time free of worry until you find another job. I believe I owe you that much, especially since it was my interference that cost you your last one.”
“Thank you,” I whispered, my breath hitching in the back of
my throat.
He stepped in close to me, his breath caressing warm against my face. “Don’t,” he murmured, gently holding my chin when I would otherwise have stepped back from his intimate approach. “Just one, Ella. Just one taste of your pretty lips, and I’ll go.”
He held me fast with only two fingers, but I could not break his hold. The pad of his thumb passed softly across the bow of my mouth and all the steadiness of my knees just melted away. I could not stop myself from trembling. When he leaned in to me, my eyes fluttered closed of their own accord, but every nerve inside of me exploded to life.
His kiss was soft but devastating. His mouth branded mine, igniting an answering heat deep down inside the core of me. I had never felt anything like it, and it was over altogether too soon. True to his word, he took only one small taste of me. Then he let me go.
I stood on the cobblestone sidewalk, one trembling hand pressed to my burning mouth, as he climbed back into his carriage. His two pounds burned hot against my cheek, his stolen watch positively scalded my right hand. I felt horrible and yet I could not give it back. What if he became angry? What if he took his money back, too? I was not being greedy; I needed it. I really, honestly needed it, or tomorrow evening I would be completely lost.
Keeping my mouth shut, I tried to remember the design of the carriage’s crest as my angel knocked to Buckley and the vehicle rolled away. Someday, I determined, I would find a way to give it back to him.
Someday.
My angel had been correct in one regard. There were plenty of opportunities for employment if only one bothered to look. With my two pounds I found a place to room where Bax and his father would not know to find me, and then I got a job as a Kelly match girl. I held that position for two days. On the first, by the time the evening whistle relieved us of our drudgery I was covered head-to-toe in so much white phosphorous that I glowed from it. Two hundred girls filed out of the factory into first an alley and then a busy London street, and even with the nearest streetlamp a good block away, we all glowed. The phosphorous was in our hair, our noses, and our mouths. Almost two dozen of us—of which I was one—doubled up in the shadow of the brick factory and vomited up our noonday meal. That glowed, too.
