A House East of Regent Street

by Pam Rosenthal

  Anything or anyone.

  She could still feel the moment when her little theater piece had turned itself upside down. She’d become choked by bitterness and envy, hating Jack’s young lady with a cold, paralyzing, and all too real passion that took her breath away.

  Quite spoiled his fun for him, she had. Spoiled her fun too, for she’d been planning to teach him something quite new – force him to learn it, more like. But when the moment came – well, she’d be damned if she’d teach him to use his tongue to good advantage when the one who’d be benefiting from it would be the young lady.

  Her mouth twisted. For in the end, which of the two of them was the one left wanting more?

  So in the long run Philippe had been wrong. Yes, she’d once lost someone. But no, she didn’t have anybody to take care of her.

  Oh, she’d manage. Christine and Bernadette would help her. They’d plan it this afternoon over coffee and those petits fours. She’d walk to Christine’s house, pass just a bit out of her way, and return the key she’d been carrying about in her reticule for… how many days was it now?

  It was the decent thing to do. Leave the key in the entryway, where it had given her such a turn to see him that day.

  The Housemaid’s Room in the Garret

  When had he finally figured it out? There’d been no blinding flash of revelation, no single stunning moment when everything changed. Quite to the contrary, the knowledge had crept up on him, during his lonely days’ wandering, from room to room and up and down the stairs.

  And at night, too, in his dreams. He’d had some miserably troubled nightmares at first – pain, catastrophe, and of course the gargoyles. But as time wore on, his dream-self learned to ignore the obvious horrors, to search instead for a guide and helper. The little blue-eyed cat padded into view, peering at him from corners of dream rooms, stroking its flanks against a dream newel post. Sometimes it stood mewing, high up on the dream staircase, as though it wanted him to follow.

  “All right,” he’d told the cat one night. “All right, I’m coming.” The next day he’d climbed to the top of the house.

  To this tiny room. Rusty iron bed, straw mattress, one small high window, walls all mildew and crumbling plaster. Tin basin, cracked chamber pot. The memories had been faint – he’d had to keep calm and still, until they lost their timidity and agreed to take recognizable shape.

  But now he could see them plain as day. He sat at the foot of the bed, eyes intent on a pair of figures: the boy at the door, nut-brown face and hair in a pigtail, the rest of him all grin and swagger and clearly the worse for drink; the girl with long black curls spilling across the pillows, covers pulled up to her neck. Her blue eyes were huge and dark; her skin almost translucent, lit from within by frightened desire.

  Heartbreakingly young, caught motionless in time – did they exist, except in memory?

  He didn’t hear her footsteps on the stair until she was almost in view.

  “I came to return the key,” she said. “And then just to… to take a last look. I beg your pardon. I didn’t know you’d be here.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then, “You have as much right to be here as I do. Come in if you’d like.” He waved his hand at the bed. “Sit down.”

  “It’s a very small bed,” he added. “I didn’t remember that. Well, of course, I didn’t remember any of it, until – I don’t know – yesterday, perhaps…”

  She sat next to him.

  “But you remembered,” he said. “You recognized me.”

  “The moment I laid eyes on you.

  “I imagined you so often over the years,” she continued. “Even when I didn’t know if you were dead or alive, I imagined you, I couldn’t help it. I’d see a man about your age and height, and with a certain look in his eye, and I’d think, well, it could be Jack, couldn’t it? I’d look a bit closer; no, it wasn’t you, it never was you. But I was always on the lookout, so to speak.

  “Until last June when I saw the engravings in a print shop window, the portrait of you as the very model of a British naval hero” – Jack waved his arm, as though to dispel the vexatious image – “and the battle picture of you saving Lord Crowden, with the burning mast… and… and…

  “Well anyway – her lip trembled – “I thought it could be you. Alive, by God. And when I saw you downstairs, I knew immediately.”

  “I thought you were offended,” he said, “by how I was staring at you. Bloody indecent, the way I was staring.”

  “I was glad of that – though it would have been better still if you’d recognized me. Still, why should he, I asked myself. And what good would it do anyway? Probably you forgot me as soon as you left here the next morning.”

  It hadn’t, in fact, been easy to forget that night. Nights in his hammock, he’d think of anything at all – rather than try to reason it out, understand whatever it was he should have known how to give her.

  But what good would it have done? The moment was lost, she was lost. Perhaps if he’d been brave enough to say something of the bewilderment he’d felt. But as he hadn’t, the only thing to do was make himself forget her. For… for twenty-two years he’d kept her out of his mind and even out of his dreams.

  “How bad was I that night?” he asked. “You can tell me; I’m prepared for the worst.”

  She laughed. “Not the worst. But pretty… rudimentary, I should say. Boyish, energetic, selfish – and also sweetly and terribly confused and ashamed of your own lack of… um, finesse. It was my fault, really. Some of the girls – and the madam too – warned me you weren’t the best choice for my first time. But you were the one I wanted.”

  “You chose me?”

  “The girls in the house would laugh at me,” she told him, “the way I’d stare, if I was working anywhere nearby, when you came to the house with your mates. ‘Ho, Jack,’ I’d hear one of the other sailors calling to you, and I’d stop my scrubbing or hauling and just, just stare at you…

  “They told me it was clearly time I had a man in my bed, and anyway, wouldn’t I like to do some easier work than charring?

  “I’d make more money, too, and have some nice things for myself. You’re a pretty girl, Jenny, they told me. You could do well for yourself.”

  “Jenny?”

  “Yes,” she told him. “Jenny.”

  “Jenny.” He tried it out and then he tried it out again. “Jenny.”

  She paused for a moment before continuing, smiling faintly, her eyes wide, as though she were seeing far into the distance. “‘All right,’ I told Mrs. Allen. ‘Yes, all right I’ll do it, but only if it’s him the first time.’ She laughed at me too. Well, she wasn’t a bad sort, there’s lots worse a girl could work for. And there wasn’t much that went on that she didn’t know – she said the girls told her you were even prettier with your clothes off, and that you could go on forever. ‘He’ll be anything but gentle,’ she warned me, ‘and not what anybody would call attentive to a woman’s finer nature. No, he’s not the right one, your first time, Jen,’ she said. ‘The girls’ve spoiled him – they let him pump into ’em as long and hard as he likes.’

  “But I didn’t care. And not, lord knows, because I was under any illusions about the profession I was entering, nothing like that. It was simply that… well, when I’d see you winking or grinning or larking about – or clattering down the stairs to catch up with your mates heading back to the docks – just the seeing would create such a singular feeling in me, and that feeling was what I wanted. I became stubborn, wouldn’t budge. With the result, finally, that instead of sending you to Beatrice’s room that night, they sent you to me.”

  “I remember that part,” he told her. “Mrs. Allen told me specially about the bargain I was getting; it wasn’t every day that a customer got to have a girl totally fresh like that. She gave me more to drink, free of charge, and repeated how sweet and young and beautiful you were. She meant well, I think – I expect she was trying to educate me about a woman’s finer nature. But she
frightened me out of my wits. I’d never had a virgin, that’s for sure. I wanted to refuse, but it was a challenge – a dare, like, and a confusion. I didn’t know what to do. I was scared I’d break something.”

  “You were supposed to…well, to do something on that order,” she said. “And you did. I don’t know if you remember that.”

  “I remember taking off my clothes and getting ready to jump into bed with you. You were watching me, you looked a little scared but mostly calm… and… and happy… and trusting. God help us both, you trusted me, and I never felt so naked in my life… until last Friday, anyway, in the red room… You looked at me and you smiled and I pulled the cover off you and… did I say anything? I remember I wanted to say something…”

  “You mumbled something. I chose to think that one of the words you used was ‘pretty.’”

  “Well, I was going to be gentle and sweet and kiss you…”

  “You did kiss me. One time. Almost on the mouth.”

  “Before I climbed on top of you and forgot to be sweet or gentle. That’s what I told myself afterwards, anyway, that it was all the drink in me made me forgetful, when the truth was – and I knew it when I saw you looking up at me –that I didn’t know how to be equal to what you needed. Going to sea at twelve, like I did, a boy can learn to be a man among men, and be honored for it too. But to be a man with a woman? I don’t mean the basic mechanics,” he added hastily, “well, that was no problem, you know…”

  She nodded.

  “Right,” he said, “Of course you know. And when I woke up the next morning,” he continued, “You weren’t there, and I didn’t know if I was glad or sorry.”

  “I had to work. They hadn’t hired a new housemaid to replace me yet. You were still sleeping when I went downstairs to light the oven, and by the time I had a moment to myself, you were gone. Which made me sad, but not entirely surprised. I’d heard your mates calling for you, after all. And then, of course, I was so awfully tired, having spent the night just looking at you while you slept.”

  “You deserved better.”

  “Yes, I know. Philippe taught me that, and over the years, I became brave enough – and even happy enough – to feel the… the…”

  “The anger, Jenny?” It was painful say it. But remembering how she’d looked, the night she’d called on him at his lodgings – her back so straight, her eyes like the last embers in a heap of ashes – he knew that no other word would do.

  She nodded slowly. “Yes, the anger,” she said, “at life, you know. Even at myself sometimes.”

  If an inner hurt, he thought, could be as sharp as a boatswain’s lash, it would be what he was feeling, hearing her speak of being angry at herself. Because he was all too familiar with that sort of anger.

  And he also knew that if he allowed himself to lose her again, he’d never stop feeling that same anger.

  Her hand had slipped into his. He grasped it for dear life.

  “I didn’t understand it at the time, of course,” she said, “but now I can see that I wasn’t only wondering if you were alive, I was wondering if you were… well, if you were really who I wanted you to be. Or if I’d simply taken all that fierce need to love and be loved and used it to create a happy, beautiful imaginary lover named Jack? Or was Jack really…?”

  Sadly, he didn’t know the answer to that question.

  And so, all he could do was ask a question of his own.

  “Would it be all right, Jenny,” – he relaxed his hand a bit now, not to let go but to match the warm press of her fingers – “if I tried… if you gave me leave to try… if I spent the rest of my life trying… to be that man for you?”

  Too late, he realized that he ought to have gone down on one knee, hopefully the good one. But her solemn, whispered “yes” was as good as if he had – for him, and for the shades of the two beautiful young people, no longer trapped in lost time, smiling their farewells as they faded from view.

  With a houseful of large, beautiful rooms below them – not to speak of a large and well-sprung specimen of Elastic Bed – one might think it foolish that they chose to spend the rest of the day, and the night as well, on a thin and moldy straw mattress, in a horrid little room lit only by a guttering candle.

  On the other hand, one might think it inevitable.

  It was odd, however, Jack thought, how unusually talkative he found himself. Perhaps because he’d spent the week alone – that or the entirety of his life. In any event, he kept thinking of things to ask her. Silly things, he supposed, but…

  “Did you mean it, back in the red room, when you said I was, you know, the rare sort of man…”

  “…who likes to give a woman pleasure? Of course I meant it – well, you’d quite convinced me of it by then. Though” – how was it that he’d never noticed that shallow dimple in her cheek? – “I shouldn’t object to a bit of additional convincing.”

  An extremely long kiss followed. A highly mobile kiss, his mouth beginning hot and eager on hers, then straying sideways to that dimple, before he made his way down her neck, breasts, belly, to end the journey, sometime later, quite convincingly elsewhere.

  “Ha! Even surprised myself that time.”

  “You didn’t surprise me, Jack.”

  But when the first stars showed through the small high window and she began gently disentangling his arms from around her, he surprised himself again by the urgency of his protest. “Wait, where are you going? You’re not leaving, are you?”

  “Not leaving” – she kissed him softly – “just going downstairs, luv. There are some cakes we can eat, and I’ll get us some water to drink. Oh, and some lubricating ointment, if that’s all right.”

  Only she didn’t. She brought the rest of the butter, still fresh from the cool kitchen larder where she’d tucked it away last week. Giggling as she slipped back into bed, “I don’t mind if we smell of it, do you?”

  And even after the candle had burned itself out, as he basked in her touch, her belly sweetly curved against his side, he still seemed to need to speak of his astonishment. “I don’t know how long I sat in this room before you came. Well, I could see the two of us so clearly, just as we’d been. You so innocent and me with hardly a scratch on me… Oh, no, Jenny, don’t cry, I didn’t want to make you cry.”

  “I’m all right…s-sorry…it’s just, well, the years we lost… they’re all gone…”

  “They’d be gone anyway, even if we’d had them together. We’d still be lying side by side, preparing to sleep…”

  “You want to sleep?”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to. I’ve got my limits, you know.”

  Which wasn’t really a bad thing, he thought contentedly. And she seemed to think so too, for when she spoke next, he could hear the beginnings of a smile shaping her voice. “I may be too excited to sleep. I’ll probably stay up all night looking at you.”

  “You needn’t. You’ll be seeing quite enough of me. Tomorrow, and the next day and… well, as long as we two shall live, I expect. Every night, in this large, solid house. Of course, there is a problem facing us…”

  “Only one problem?”

  “Only one. To decide which bedroom shall be ours, and which, if there should be a family…”

  “I like that problem. I shall give it some thought. You know, I wouldn’t have been a good madam. I’d have worried so about the girls, their heartbreaks, and whether it would come out all right in the end…”

  He kissed away a few more tears. “Go to sleep, Jenny dear.”

  They stopped in front of the mirror in the entrance hall the next morning to check their reflections. She straightened her bonnet, he his neck cloth.

  “Not bad.” He smiled – a private sort of smile this time; the grateful nation could take care of itself.

  “Not bad at all,” she agreed. “Quite attractive, for a couple entering their later years. Jack…”

  “And Jenny. Common names,” he said.

  “Wonderfully common.”


  Common. One hears the word sometimes, rattling through the language in phrases as various as common law, common sense, the Book of Common Prayer.

  But as neither Jack nor Jenny was the sort of person given to pondering the mysteries of language, they merely smiled for the pleasure of a moment held in common. Before they walked arm in arm, out the door and down the steps of their house – say rather their home – into a busy street, in a no-longer-fashionable neighborhood, on a brisk and sunny London autumn morning.

  Also by Pam Rosenthal

  The Edge of Impropriety

  The Slightest Provocation

  Almost a Gentleman

  Excerpt from The Edge of Impropriety

  Winner of the 2009 RITA for Best Historical Romance

  Marina had to smile at the picture Jasper made when she opened her front door to him. He was silent, but the pained little wince at the corner of his mouth spoke volumes as he stepped slowly into her front hallway. His muscles were stiff and sore, she thought, from helping the old lady yesterday.

  How charming he’d been, how resolutely he’d put his shoulder against the clumsy old cart to move it. Softly, she put her arms about his neck to draw his head down for a kiss.

  Usually they’d hurry each other up the staircase, but tonight, in the pool of moonlight coming through the high window, they kissed gently, tentatively.

  “Oh lord,” he whispered, “what must you think of me, so broken down and rickety? Perhaps I shouldn’t have come.”

  “On the contrary,” she replied, “I’m delighted. And especially that you arrived so promptly.”

  He groaned. “Took a cab. First time. Other nights I’ve walked. Well, other nights I’ve run, actually, at least part of the way.”

  “Good for you, to indulge yourself in a cab for once. You can run again some other night and I shall enjoy imagining it. But if you can get yourself up the stairs tonight…”