by Rose Lerner
The blonde shopgirl appeared when the doorbell tinkled. “I’ll let Mr. Moon know you’re here, sir.” She bobbed a curtsey and ducked back into the kitchen.
Nick took his time walking to the counter, going easy on his leg. There was no one to see him. The Honey Moon smelled wonderful. Surely something here would make him feel enthusiastic about breakfast.
“Mr. Dymond, what a pleasant surprise! What can I do for you?” The pastry cook popped through the door like a jack-in-the-box, looking as nervous and eager as ever.
Nick’s appetite faded. “I just dropped in to break my fast.”
Moon couldn’t seem to decide whether or not to be pleased about this. “Of course, sir. What do you fancy?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said, feeling as if he were confessing a deep, dark secret.
“I’ve a pound cake just out of the oven. Then there’s one left of my currant kickels, a fresh lemon-glazed lavender cake like the one you had before, candied-orange-and-cinnamon turnovers—”
It wasn’t panic, but it was a feeling like panic, a sort of blankness behind his eyes. His thoughts slipped away, and he found himself trying to reason out the correct choice. If the pound cake is fresh from the oven, it must be the best and Perhaps he’d like to get rid of that last kickel, whatever that is, and none of it to do with what he wanted.
Moon’s forehead creased. “Is something amiss, sir?”
“I—do you know what the most delicious thing I ever ate was?”
Moon shook his head, eyes widening as if he thought maybe he ought to know.
“I was in camp with my regiment. A friend of mine had brought us all some provisions from Lisbon. In my share, besides the usual sugar, anchovies, ham and bad coffee, he had included—miracle of miracles—a sausage. But it had taken him two weeks to get back, and the sausage spoiled.”
“Dreadful,” Mr. Moon said on cue, but mostly he just looked confused.
Nick knew he should stop telling the story. “We had had almost no food for a week, but the sausage stank, and furry green mold was growing on its skin. I couldn’t possibly eat it, so I threw it in the fire. I was sitting there, trying to write a letter, when a fellow officer walked by and asked what on earth that delicious smell was. When I told him, he drew his saber and plucked the sausage from the fire. Once he had, it smelled so fine none of us could wait, and we all burned our tongues.”
Mr. Moon’s mouth worked with ill-concealed disgust. “That was the bettermost thing that ever you ate?”
Nick nodded. He could still taste it, that hot burst of salt and grease and flavor after weeks of hard biscuits and empty stomachs. Soaked to the skin and less than a mile from the French lines, they had laughed, feeling warm and safe and happy.
“My parents’ chef was a genius. I grew up on delicacies. But sometimes I still find myself longing for that sausage. And I have no idea what I want for breakfast.”
Moon blinked, and Nick felt even less sane, and more guilty. This was the last man on earth he should be burdening with his troubles. Three days ago, he’d very nearly tupped the woman Moon hoped to marry. “I’m sorry. I’ll have the pound cake.”
Moon nodded, looking relieved, and went through the swinging door into the kitchen. He returned with a generous slice of cake and a dollop of blackberry jam on a plate and a steaming cup of chocolate. “That’ll be a shilling and sixpence.”
Nick paid him and took up the plate in his free hand. “I’ll be back for the chocolate in a moment.” He wished he could stop feeling embarrassed about his disability. He wished his leg would stop hurting so badly.
Instead of agreeing, Moon took up the cup and followed him to a table. He pulled out Nick’s chair for him. “May I sit, sir?”
“Of course.”
Moon tripped over his own chair getting into it. “Food feeds the soul,” he said.
“What?”
“Folk think hunger’s a thing of the body. But food is also nourishment for the spirit. ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’”
“I don’t think Our Lord meant he ought to have cake too,” Nick said bemusedly. He hadn’t expected metaphysical speculation from Moon.
Moon shook his head. “He didn’t just ask us to remember Him with our hearts. He gave us bread and wine. When we take Communion and taste that food, we feel His love for us.”
Nick had never felt much at Communion besides the dryness of the wafer and the poor quality of the wine.
“My pa was a baker,” Moon said. “My ma worked in the bakery sunup to sundown, but she always found time to bake a cake for our dinner. Sugar’s extra, don’t you see. A mother makes a cake to give a child joy, not to keep him alive. When I eat sweet things, I feel as safe and comforted as when I was a boy.” Moon laughed shyly. “Sorry, sir, I didn’t mean to knabble on.”
Nick took a bite of his pound cake. It was delicious. The taste was perfect, the texture rich and dense without being heavy. Yet it didn’t make him feel safe or comforted.
But in the end, he wasn’t upset about breakfast. He was upset about Mrs. Sparks. “You’re right. My problem isn’t just about food. It’s about everything.”
“Sounds as if you were happy over the water,” Mr. Moon said. “I’d not like to be a soldier myself, but I’m that sorry you had to give it up.”
Moon was being kind to him. Nick felt awful. On top of everything else, he had grossly underestimated the man, assuming because he was poor and awkward that he was simple and stupid. He’d been a snob. Moon was the absolute last person he deserved kindness from.
Moon leaned forward, obviously trying to look casual. “So has Mrs. Sparks said anything to you about her intentions?”
Nick felt even worse. Moon had no choice but to be kind to him. Moon needed his help. He shook his head. “Pardon me for asking, but how much are your debts?”
Moon dropped his eyes to the table. “Fifty-seven pounds.”
It was nothing to Nick’s family, but to Mr. Moon, it could mean ruin. “Don’t despair. I think she likes you.” He said it because it was the right thing to say, the thing that would smooth the situation over. He didn’t say it without thinking, precisely—but his thoughts seemed to run on a parallel track to his heart, his body. He knew Mrs. Sparks didn’t like Mr. Moon. It was disgusting to pander for the two of them. It was awful to talk as if that was all she meant to him when, in his heart of hearts, he still hoped to bed her himself.
Moon didn’t look much happier than he felt. “Do you?”
“Even if she doesn’t, I’m sure we can help you with at least a part of that amount. You won’t lose the shop.” Nick privately resolved that if he still had a reliable income when this was all over, he’d pay Moon’s debts himself.
“Aren’t you going to eat the rest of your cake?”
“Can you wrap it up?” Nick asked. “I’m not hungry at the moment, but I couldn’t bear to leave it here. It’s wonderful.”
The relief that washed over Mrs. Sparks’s face when he walked in the door eased the knot in his stomach a little. “Good morning, Mr. Dymond,” she said with an attempt at casual cheer. “Thank you for coming back to help us.” She glanced nervously at Owen. It was very clear she’d never carried on an illicit affair before.
“Good morning, Mrs. Sparks, Owen.” Nick bowed. “May I offer my assistance again? I’ve a couple of handbills my brother wants printed—two hundred copies each. Will you have time to run them?”
“By all means, sir,” Owen said happily. He looked over Tony’s drafts, asked a few questions, and went at once to work.
“I brought food today.” There was a hesitant, hopeful note in Mrs. Sparks’s voice. “There’s ham and rolls and boiled eggs, and jam and mustard. Not that you’d want jam with mustard. Oh, and Mrs. Humphrey brought me some blackberries and fresh clotted cream so she’d have an excuse to ask about Jack and Miss Jessop, and I brought it with me.” She blew a falling curl out of her dark eyes and watched his face to see if any of that tempted him.
/> It should have made him feel anxious. It did, a little. But in spite of all of that, she shifted in her chair, her legs moving below the table in some way he couldn’t see, and Nick was suddenly roaringly hungry. He wanted jam and clotted cream. He wanted to lick jam and clotted cream off her breasts and stomach. He wanted to lick her. He rapidly recited a few stanzas of Pope—not “Eloisa to Abelard” but some of the dry, intellectual stuff—to stem the flow of blood to his cock. “That sounds wonderful.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Nick gave Owen his pound cake and brought a feast back from the kitchen with him—a roll slathered in mustard and a slice of ham, and berries and cream and another roll with jam. When he sat down across from Mrs. Sparks, he could see by the purple stains on her mouth that she’d eaten some berries already.
He put a spoonful of berries and cream in his mouth and watched her reading the Times. The taste was obscenely sensual, the berries’ skin breaking open against his tongue and spilling tart sweet juice, the cool cream sliding down his throat.
She was a fidgeter; he’d noticed it before. She leaned her chin on her fist as she read, which led to leaning her mouth on her fist, which led to biting her knuckles, which led to tugging on her lower lip, which led to—her heart-shaped face flushed crimson when she caught him watching her. Nick’s senses sharpened even further. He had to have her. It didn’t matter what he had to do, how he had to lay himself open, he had to have her.
“I was thinking,” she said. “Would you be willing to write something for the Intelligencer about Badajoz? Or if you have some letters from friends, or something of that sort—people love to get war news that isn’t dry official dispatches, or a reprinting of the London papers’ reprinting of the Portuguese papers.”
He didn’t want to. “Badajoz isn’t news anymore.”
“This is Lively St. Lemeston, not London.” She smiled at him. One of her front teeth was stained a light purple. Her left canine turned slightly to the side, making it look pointier than the others. Why was that suddenly erotic? “We define ‘news’ broadly. Besides, everyone is interested in you.”
It was a small enough thing, he supposed. And if it helped sell papers, and renewed interest in the Dymonds, maybe it would strengthen Tony’s position in the town. “I’ll try,” he said. “But it might be rubbish.”
She smiled again, that pointy tooth catching at her lip. “If it’s rubbish, we won’t print it, that’s all.” She pushed a pen and some discarded correspondence across the table at him, and moved her inkwell to the center of the table. “You can write on the back of that.”
He was so far gone that dipping his pen in her inkwell seemed scandalous. He made himself stop glancing up at how she leaned on the table and focus on the paper before him.
Twenty minutes later he was still staring at it. Anything that he wrote about Badajoz would only result in more people telling him he was a hero and then asking about his leg.
When civilians thought of war, they thought of battles. But war was more than that. It was long marches and laughter and empty stomachs and pretty Spanish girls and cards around the campfire. It was knowing that the man beside you was ready to give his life for England, and for you. As an officer, it was fighting to keep your men’s spirits up, to tell them you were grateful for their efforts when they felt forgotten by God—and by an England that wouldn’t even send them decent shoes.
He remembered his speech to Mr. Jessop about the pro-war government, and how good it had felt to speak his mind.
He wasn’t a politician. He wasn’t a soldier anymore, obliged to publicly support the conduct of the war. He was, at this moment, a journalist, and his only responsibility was to the truth. His truth. He could say whatever he liked.
At that thought—anything you like—the pressure and panic rushed back, the fear that choosing for himself meant choosing wrong. Everyone in town would read these words. His family would read them.
And there was Tony to think of. What if this article damaged his little brother’s campaign? Perhaps he should write a stirring account of Badajoz after all. He could do that in his sleep, and it would sell papers just as well.
But it was all one: the food and the article, the way he couldn’t make Mrs. Sparks believe he wanted her and the way he couldn’t manage to speak when Tony tried to talk to him.
He hadn’t written Tony a word from Spain. When Tony had asked him point-blank about the war, had tried to be a brother to him, Nick hadn’t had a thing to say. Tony deserved honesty.
You faced down the French guns, he told himself. You can face down this. And painstakingly, slowly, he began pulling words out of the quicksand in his mind and setting them safely down on paper.
Mr. Dymond hadn’t spoken for hours. He simply wrote, slowly and carefully, his eyebrows a dark thoughtful line. He looked so straightforward, that open face and aristocratic, athletic body, and he was such a mystery. Of course another person’s heart was always a mystery, but his very openness shut her out somehow, said, You can have all this, don’t ask for more. She was wild to know what he was writing. Only the knowledge that he’d show it to her, and her own hatred of being interrupted when she was writing, kept her silent and focused on her work.
“I’ve got your handbills run off, sir,” Owen said.
Mr. Dymond started.
“But let me know early tomorrow if you’ll need more copies, as we’ll want to reuse the type for the Intelligencer.”
“I’ll do that, thank you.” He turned to Phoebe. “What are those?”
She glanced up from the pile of letters she was sorting as if she hadn’t been sitting there waiting for him to speak to her, painfully attuned to the sound of his voice. “Local contributions to the paper.” She broke into a nervous babble. “Why will people send in this rubbish? Listen to this. ‘On Saturday the 31st of October, Tommy McLaren, eleven years of age, of Slaugham, and deaf since the fever last spring, saw an adder transform into him and then back.’ That poor child, as if he doesn’t have enough new problems without people trying to make it out he has an affinity with adders! How does anyone even know that adders are deaf? Have they asked one?”
“Him?” He smiled at her elision.
She flushed, knowing it was common and uneducated to call the devil by that emphatic pronoun. She dropped another letter on the discard pile. “If we published every time someone’s grandmother had the ague, the paper would be fifty pages.”
Owen finished his cleaning and saw himself out with no more than a curious glance at the two of them. Her run of words dried up. Mr. Dymond took a deep breath. “Mrs. Sparks—”
“Thank you for coming back today,” she blurted out. “I’m sorry about the other day. It was ridiculous and unkind to snap at you. You must do this sort of thing all the time, but I—I was nervous, I suppose. Of course a man like you needn’t have bothered with a woman like me if you didn’t want to.”
“Don’t. Don’t disparage yourself for my benefit.”
“But—”
“You were right. What you said was right.”
There was complete silence in the room. Outside, a crow cawed, sharp and startling. “You mean,” she said. “You mean you were only pretending.”
“No!” His blue eyes glinted with a kind of desperation, as if he were chasing after words and couldn’t catch them. It touched and confused her. For all her lacks, Phoebe had always been able to find words. “I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all. But I have before, more or less. And I don’t think it would look much different from the outside. I wanted you. I wanted things to go well between us. I wanted things to go smoothly, so I wouldn’t have to—” He broke off in frustration.
“So you wouldn’t have to ask for anything?” she suggested.
He looked as if even nodding was a struggle. “And that…fear…it…I wanted it to go smoothly because I wanted you. But it has a life of its own.”
This wasn’t the conversation she’d imagined. It surprised her the way only the mystery of
another person’s heart could do. He looked more closed off than she’d ever seen him, and she was wildly grateful for it. She felt her way carefully. “Like being at a party?” she asked. “You spend so much time trying to look as if you’re enjoying yourself that you forget to actually do it.”
He nodded with relief. “Precisely. Half the time I don’t even know what I want. This morning I couldn’t decide on what to eat for breakfast.”
She frowned. “Isn’t that normal? Sometimes I can’t either, especially when I know I’ve to go out to the grocer’s if I want anything other than stale buns.”
He ran a hand through his hair, a quick sure motion. “It’s the having to choose. If all I have are stale buns, I’ll eat them. But if I’m at dinner at home, and the table is full of platters and bowls and everything smells splendid and all I have to do is help myself—sometimes I barely eat at all.”
He leaned back in his chair, his strong frame and confident bearing a stark contrast to the black uncertainty he said he felt. She could hardly credit it. He took a deep breath and said, “There’s something wrong with me.” He watched her face closely, evidently waiting for her to be shocked.
She thought about what he’d said. “Did your mother ever tell you what to eat when you were small?”
“Oh, my mother told us all how to do everything. When she was there.”
“Did she ever make you feel guilty about taking the wrong thing?”
He blinked, looking amazed at her insight into such a small, simple thing. She shouldn’t want to laugh; it was heartbreaking. But affection flooded her, a giddy feeling. “When I was small, we couldn’t eat anything with sugar,” he said. “Only honey, because sugar was slave-grown. Then we couldn’t have game at dinner because game in London was all poached and the Gaming Laws were destroying the countryside. We even gave up meat for a year when I was eight. It was noble, I know that. I’m glad I didn’t eat blood sugar. It was the way she did it. The way anything”—he slowed, as if only now seeing her point—“anything I asked for was an indelible stain on my character.”
