by Judith Ivory
"Come on," Nancy said when she came down for the third time. "I can see you moving to it. You don't have to do anything you don't want to, but come dance with us, dearie."
Winnie was susceptible enough to the girl's coaching that she leaned forward in her chair, wanting to get up, shy, uncertain. Then Nancy grabbed her at the elbows, Mick planted his palms squarely under her bum, and Winnie was levitated up onto the tabletop.
She straightened herself, turned, and looked down. Heavens, a tabletop again! The room below her was crowded, hardly an inch between people to move. Full of faces … strangers … who suddenly applauded a lady who would play their game. A lie-dy who 'ill ply, a man's voice called out.
And the music pounded; the crowd stomped. Winnie stood there a moment, dumbfounded, while the other dancing feet around her made the table hop under the soles of her shoes, making the rhythm of the music shake up her legs. She could feel it.
Slowly—to please everyone, then she'd get down, she told herself—she allowed herself to be moved by all that was going on around her. When she took her first step, the men and women below her hooted good-naturedly.
"Come on, duckie! Let's see whot you're myde uv!"
Yes, her mother would have reveled in the attention, the same attention that embarrassed Winnie. She blushed. She looked for Mick.
He was just below, leaning back in his chair, precariously balanced and perfectly confident. His face smiled up at her, ready to accept anything she wanted. He'd get her down, if she asked for help. Take me away. He'd clap his hands in time to her movement, if she let loose and danced.
She shifted on her feet, making small, halfhearted movements, listening to an Irishman at an old English piano play a French bouffe song that had been turned into a fine East End rhythm. Her feet moved a little more earnestly. Then she raised her skirt enough to watch her own toes.
She danced—not like the others, not without restraint—but as she danced by herself sometimes at home, with demure little steps. But the music wasn't really for that, so she matched it a little better. Her steps grew daring. She made a little kick, then a small twirl, then a crossed-over step that became a kind of deep curtsy, from which to recover she had to swoop herself up; she ended with a spin.
When she found Mick's face again, he was laughing, enjoying himself: enjoying her. He liked it. And his laughter, her own movement, her own feelings as she did it, these made her feel light—not the large, sometimes cumbersome woman she was, but light on her toes; light in her mind.
She must have been interesting to watch, because after a few minutes, Nancy and Marie and the other two stepped back and the whole room began to clap. Winnie was flustered when she realized they clapped to the music for her, encouraging her to turn and move and leap. Well. All right. She did it.
She danced. She danced down the tables then back. She kicked a beer over on purpose. The splash was perfect. It went with a jangle of the piano that made the little crowd roar with approval. She danced till her dress was sticking to her, till her hair was coming down in strings. She even kicked her foot high once and showed her legs—that was a truly popular step. The men—it seemed all the men in the room—made such a fuss. More than the commotion they made for Nancy or Marie or the others.
When she looked for Mick, he winked at her, wiggled his eyebrows, then dropped his gaze again and watched her legs the way he could. She would swear that the glow on his face was from pride and possessiveness and anticipation. His. She felt like his, and it was a good feeling. And he, oh, he who was the finest man in the room; he was so hers. The tallest, handsomest, friendliest … warmest, earthiest…
Anticipation. Her stomach rolled over again in that way it had weeks ago now, when she'd stood on a table in a room alone with him. Then more so, when he'd pressed her to a wall. She grabbed her skirts as the music went into a cancan again, raising them to shake them to the tempo and see how high she could kick. The whole tavern roared. The other men, no doubt, thought the whole thing saucy, a devilish good time, but when she saw Mick's face, it was something else. To everyone else, it was rollicking. But to him—she could feel it—he was watching a change happen, watching her do what she could sense in her blood: ease up.
Anticipation, she thought again. His gaze followed up her body once more till their eyes held … and, oh, the heat in his stare. His eyes, his lovely smoky eyes—green yet not, gray yet more—they wouldn't let hers go. Their intensity promised something.
What? Oh, what? she thought. She gave him a questioning look, saying wordlessly, Why do you stare at me like that? Her heart felt gay all at once.
Nancy grabbed her. "Your hair is falling down." She tried to repin a piece that lay on Winnie's shoulder, then leaned to her and said, "Take off your jacket and blouse, dearie. No one cares here, and it's cooler. You have plenty on to cover yourself. Take it off or at least unfasten the collar."
Practical advice perhaps, but no, thank you.
Except, well, the collar. Yes. She let Nancy fiddle with it. Yes, it would feel good to release the high neck. Winnie tried to hold her feet still long enough for the girl to ease the hooks of the boned collar up her throat.
The fabric fell free, and Nancy quickly untied the little jabot and undid a few top buttons for good measure. Air found the moisture on Winnie's skin, cooling her. It felt wonderful.
"Come on, dearie," Nancy chided as she pulled at Winnie's coat, a little mutton-sleeved bolero that was showing dark, damp splotches. "Gawd love us," Nancy said, "but you have on more clothes than a nun on a winter's night. Here." She peeled the coat from Winnie's arms, turning her around as she did it, three hundred sixty degrees.
When Winnie faced the room again, she was oh-so-much cooler. And freer.
Nancy pinched two fingers' worth of blouse, pulling it from where it stuck to Winnie's chest. "If you get rid of this, your arms won't be so hot."
If she got rid of her blouse, she'd feel naked—despite, it was true, a camisole over a corset over a chemise corset liner over a ruffled bust-improver. She wore too much.
On her own, Winnie unbuttoned the sleeves of her blouse and rolled them back. Oh, to have air on her arms! She danced more and harder, till she had to stop from asthma. She took a break, stepping down.
Her blouse was wringing wet. She could see through it to her skin and her corset liner where its ruffles came up over her corset to show in the low V of her camisole. A fine lot of good her blouse did her.
"Are you stopping?" Mick asked. "Do you want a drink?"
"No, and yes, please!" The wheezing eased a little. All she had to do was rest, then she could go back up again. Oh, she never wanted to stop.
When he turned and pushed into the crowd, she put her own fingers to the buttons up the front. She popped them through the buttonholes, one, two, three, four… She tapped her feet and hummed as she did it. Winnie took off her blouse and lay it over Mick's chair.
Yes, much better. And her arms weren't completely bare. The wide neck of her chemise, after all, ended in the little cap sleeves. She stretched her neck, her long neck, and put her hand to her bare throat. She felt exceptionally good, if a little tipsy. She was slightly drunk, she realized.
Not so drunk though that, as she stood there alone, she didn't know it when a man came up and flirted with her. He actually flirted with her! And she flirted back. Not because she liked him—she couldn't have remembered a single detail about him, if asked. He said his name, and she promptly forgot it. No, she flirted with him to see if she could and because, with Mick gone, she wanted to practice for when he came back. And because she was full of herself.
She wanted to crow. Goodness, she was having a good time as her mother used to. And so far it hadn't killed her. How grand! Oh, how grand it was simply to do what she felt like doing! How grand to be alive tonight!
* * *
Chapter 21
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"Coo, ain't you fancy tonight," said Charlie behind the bar.
Mick smiled as
he ordered another ale and shandy, trying some of his old patter with Charlie. It didn't work any better with him than it did with anyone else.
Oh, his mates were nice to him. He liked them; they liked him still. He laughed and talked to them, just as always. But when he tried to talk like them, it sounded wrong. Not for them, but for him. He didn't like his own voice when the same words came out that, a month ago, would have passed by his ear unnoticed.
A part of him must want to be a gentleman of some sort, he decided. He liked the new way he sounded; he even liked his new manners to some extent. He enjoyed bringing a sense of refinement to his life.
He might become a kind of gentleman after all. He'd spoken to Milton, asking him what other occupations the butler thought Mick might be able to do, and the butler had encouraged him with a few interesting ideas. He could work in a shop, maybe own one someday. He could go into service; at the right house with the right pay, this had the advantage of fine living arrangements. There were other things he could do, none that caught his fancy, but Mick was fairly certain he could find something to do with his new self that suited him.
It was a little daydream these days that he'd do something that suited Winnie as well. They'll go off, find a little cottage, and live together forever as man and wife. Why not? He was honest and hardworking and smart. She could do worse, and she fancied him, he was sure of it. Of course, the two of them together, really together, wasn't a practical idea, but it certainly made a good daydream.
Standing at the bar now, waiting for his drinks, Mick turned to watch the room again, to watch its endless mixture of people and find Winnie among them—at which point he found himself staring at Why-not: Winnie, with her damn blouse off, talking to a toff out slumming.
Mick had seen the man come in. It happened occasionally. An upper-class fellow wandered over from Covent Garden after an opera or such, looking for a little … mud. The bloke was chatting Winnie up, probably thinking her a tavern wench. Ha, he was in for a surprise.
Mick, though, got a surprise, too. Winnie answered the fellow in a friendly manner, instead of with her usual tartness, and, of course, the moment she opened her mouth and her sweet, soft voice came out—the smooth-as-cream upper-class tune in it—well, anyone could see the fellow's response from across the room. The man liked his surprise.
Mick didn't like his: Suddenly Winnie and the toff over by the dancing stage were having a fine old talk, two peas in a pod. She was laughing with the man, smiling at him, wagging her finger at something he said.
Charlie put the drinks down, a thunk-thunk, as Mick turned and left them behind.
He cut straight through the crowd, shoving people, using his size to get through. Damn it, he didn't like the way the man nodded and leaned toward her.
As Mick came up to them, the arsehole asked her, "So, having a little 'outing,' are we?" We? He and Winnie were no we, and Mick was about to tell him so.
He could have saved himself the worry. The second Win saw him, her face lit. She turned toward him, ignoring the other man. "Where are the drinks?" she asked.
He didn't have them. She laughed. Never mind. She grabbed Rezzo's beer from him, took a swill, then wiped her lips demurely with her fingertips. All was forgiven. Mick was confused. What had just happened?
Then more amazing: Winnie leaned forward onto her toes and planted a quick, damp kiss on his cheek. As she clambered back up onto his chair, then the table, he was left holding his face where her wet, cool mouth had touched him. Stunned. Oh, Win…
She began her dancing again. He laughed. A madwoman. Mad to dance. She couldn't get enough. She was too eager to be about her own entertainment than to be bothered with a toff out on the town. Mick let it go. She danced. He watched. So did the toff, he noticed. So did a lot of the men. Who wouldn't? Whenever she'd stop long enough to get a drink of water, the fancy fellow, though, tried to make conversation.
Mick listened to him ramble, paying less attention to what he said than how he said it. He put bloody into the middle of everything: hoo-bloody-rah, abso-bloody-lutely. When he asked Winnie to step out front with him "where it isn't so noisy," Mick interceded. He put his hand over the fellow's reaching arm and said, "Not bloody likely."
The man looked at him. Mick realized he assumed they were the same, two toffs wanting the same bit of wild skirt, a lady out for a good time. Hell, the man couldn't have been more wrong about everything, though it made Mick frown at Winnie. Something was different about her, something nice, something he liked. Though somehow it worried him, too.
Then she became reassuringly the same. With all the starchiness she was capable of, Winnie said to the man, as if he were insane to have imagined differently, "I'm not going anywhere with you." She looked perfectly startled to have to inform him of the fact.
Thank you, loovey, Mick thought.
The fellow accepted her decision, though he handed her a quinine, which Mick might have complained about if he hadn't forgotten his own drinks at the bar and Winnie hadn't looked so thirsty. While she drank it, in under a minute, the toff mentioned he was in London for a horse auction, obviously trying to impress her.
Mick folded his arms. Hell. In the minute, offhand, in passing, they talked about breeding horses—for Ascot as opposed to good carriage horses—what it took to breed good hunting dogs, and where to buy a Van Dyke, whatever that was.
Winnie could talk to the fellow about these things. She knew all about them; she had lived in his world. Lived there still to a degree. He said to himself, She's the daughter of a marquess, for godssake, Mick. You're thinking you'll just up and marry a marquess's daughter? Then what? Haul her off to the country in a donkey cart? If you can find a donkey cheap enough?
What was so god-bless special about her anyway? Yes, she was quite the classy lady. Sweet, kind to people; kind to him. She was about as intelligent a woman as he'd ever known, and he liked that about her. He liked that she was sensitive and careful, even if she was so careful sometimes she made herself crazy. And pretty, Lord, she was pretty to him—in a unique way that no other woman could duplicate.
A smooth-skinned, strong-featured face. Very English. Beautiful coloring. An elegant height. Substantial. With pretty little breasts. A fine, grand bottom. And, of course, the damnedest legs a man might ever know. Lord, he'd like to see those legs, bare again, just one more time before he died.
He loved Winnie's body. It was odd, but Mick could no long remember if he'd always liked this shape in a woman, then Winnie came along and filled the bill. Or if he liked this shape because it was the shape of Winnie Bollash.
When he came down to it, he just didn't know. It was a mystery to him why he liked her so well, why he wanted her. A mystery usually summed up with the phrase: I'm in love with the woman.
And there it was, for better or worse. His worry. He was in love with Winnie—with Lady Edwina Bollash—a lady he couldn't carry off and have forever. It was going to break his heart to leave her. But he was going to have to, and that was a fact. He was going to have to leave her to the likes of the toff.
By midnight, the crowd had thinned enough that in a cramped, crowded way, couples, now most of them to one degree or another drunk, clung to each other in what might have been called dancing. That section of the floor swayed again to the music, slowing along with the girls who moved more languorously on the tabletops—only three survived: Nancy, a girl named Lolly, and Win, his sweet Win. Mick didn't know if Winnie were aware of it or not, but her own movements had become willowy, softly undulant. Sultry. He was riveted.
The lordly fellow hung on, too. He wouldn't leave, and he wouldn't stop staring. It hadn't bothered Mick that any man in the room looked at her, not up to this point. He was damn proud to know her, to watch her make herself happy in a way that didn't hurt anyone—in a way, in fact, that made a lot of other people damn blissful. The men in the room were pretty much mesmerized by tall Win moving her long body.
Now, though, even though the upper-class fellow was
being perfectly polite about his interest, Mick wanted to throttle him. For no good reason at all. Or no, for the simple reason that he had the good taste to watch the prettiest woman in the room dance better than anyone else. Winnie certainly had a way of moving to music. She'd said it was Strauss in her blood, but tonight it was gypsy. Sweet gypsy Win.
He realized after a while that he and the other fellow were standing shoulder to shoulder, watching her, though his own shoulder was a good six inches higher.
The other man noticed, too. "Can't help but observe," he said, "we both have good taste." Then he asked, "Is she yours then, mate?" He didn't own the word mate; it wasn't his. He was being chummy, trying to adopt the vernacular of the place—possibly because he'd noticed Mick had command of it.
"Yes," Mick said. It was simpler than explaining.
Then stupid Winnie, fresh from huffing and puffing her way off the table, stepped down and chimed in, "I'm not his. I'm not anyone's." She looked right at Mick when she said it, as if he should contradict, but how could he? She wasn't.
The fellow arched a self-important, condescending eyebrow at Mick and shifted his gaze to her, smiling. "May I buy you a drink then?"
"No," she said cheerfully. "I'm drinking with him."
"I could buy you something much fancier. I'm a baron's son." The awkward announcement, if it were true, was meant to convey he had money, connections, a way of wooing beyond the Bull and Tun.
Mick told him, just as cheerfully as Winnie, "You could be the son of a whore, and no one would care."
The other man jerked, blinked at him. Mick half-hoped he would rise to the insult. He would have been happy to level the arsehole. He hadn't hit anyone in years, and tonight felt like a splendid night for it. He was angry over something—over something larger than a stupid nob making eyes at Winnie. Still, whatever it was, he'd be only too happy to take it out on a mouthy fellow with more gall than a monkey pulling his own tail.
