by Bonnie Dee
“For meals only. I’m not attempting to take anything from anyone. I swear.”
“Why should I believe you when every word you’ve ever spoken to me was a lie?”
“Yes, I lied to you,” Jody stated bluntly. “But I’m not lying now. It truly is coincidence we chose the same ship. If you want to ask me anything, I will answer with the truth.”
Belmont continued to stand over him, clearly judging him and finding him utterly lacking as he had every right to. Jody recalled Lassiter doing the same when one of the lads did not bring in sufficient take. Such a lazy boy would not eat that night. Now Jody feared he would not be allowed to partake of any more of Belmont’s company. The fellow would deliver more well-deserved cutting words, then walk away.
Instead, Belmont dropped into the chair across from him. “I received the package you dropped through my mail slot. I suppose you tried to make amends in your own way. So… Tell me about Jody Smith. Who precisely is he?”
Jody abandoned his high-tone accent and slipped into his natural cant. “Been thieving since I was a lad. Used to nick pocket handkerchiefs, wallets, purses and such. Then I did some second-story work. My boss heard me mimic a swell and thought I might pass to hoodwink the rich.”
“That would be a Mr. Lassiter?”
“Yeah.” He glanced up to gauge Belmont’s response, but the man’s normally expressive face was shuttered, his gaze cool and serious. There was no touch of the warmth Jody had grown to love in such a very short time. How he ached for it to shine on him now.
“Smith is your actual surname?”
Jody shrugged. “Never knew my parents. My first memories were stealing food and finding odd corners where I could keep warm and safe. Lassiter took me in when I was a tyke, gave me a place to live and a name. Smith’s as good as any.”
A flash of emotion chased across Belmont’s face. Jody couldn’t bear if it was pity. He quickly added, “I’ve done all right for meself. Got money in my pocket and a ticket to someplace new. Couldn’t ask for more from life.”
But he could ask for more and wanted to as memories of the time they’d spent together raced through his mind. If only he might return to those days of make-believe when he was good enough to be with an honorable man like Cyril Belmont.
Jody turned the conversation away from himself. “Why are you on this ship?”
“A ticket to someplace new,” Cyril repeated Jody’s words, “where I can become someone other than Lord Belmont. I shall seek my fortune with the work of my hands like any other immigrant.”
“Except you have an education, proper speech, and some money. You’ll likely find yourself a comfortable position. A man like you will always do well in society.”
Cyril paused and frowned. “Given your background, I believe I understand the reasons behind your actions. I can forgive your chicanery in trying to extract money from me.” He leaned closer, and Jody inhaled the warm, woodsy scent of his cologne. “But we lay heart to heart, exposing the most private parts of ourselves, and still you lied. I thought what we shared was real. I wish you might have trusted me with all your secrets then. Now, it is far too late.”
Jody dug his fingernails into his palms. He’d never before given two figs about lying. Guilt and shame were brand-new feelings that scraped his throat like fish bones.
He swallowed the pain. “I’m sorry you had to see me again to tear the scab off your wound. I shall keep to steerage after this so we won’t cross paths again.”
“That would be for the best,” Cyril said quietly. “You have a right to a fresh start, as do I. However, you must know if I see you ingratiating yourself with any well-to-do passenger in an attempt to commit fraud, I may be forced to expose you.”
Jody pressed a hand to his chest to stanch the fresh wound in his heart, and quickly stood. “I promise you will not find me where I don’t belong again. Good evening, Lord Belmont. And goodbye.”
Belmont rose too and extended his hand. For the merest flicker of a moment, Jody thought Cyril would touch him, shake his hand at least, or perhaps stop him from leaving. But he dropped his hand and merely said, “Good day.”
Jody returned to the bowels of the ship, shedding his dinner jacket, tie, and waistcoat before reaching the lower deck. No need to advertise he owned a few nice things. There were plenty who would be happy to relieve him of them.
It felt good to slip into his old patched jacket with the frayed cuffs, a suit of armor to protect him from his high-flown fancies, and a smelly, scratchy reminder of who he was and exactly where he belonged.
Chapter Fourteen
Cyril’s hands twitched, reached, retreated empty, because of course he wasn’t going to grab hold of Toby—no, Jody—and stop him from leaving. His throat was so tight, he could barely mumble, “Good day.” What was the point in prolonging their meeting? Nothing could happen between them. Not again. He would not allow himself to be such a fool as to trust a conman twice.
Yet, Jody’s story about his past sounded believable and brought Cyril to a better understanding of what had created such a lack of conscience or morality. A street boy turned robber and confidence man. One could pity the circumstances of Jody Smith’s impoverished life and forgive him his sins, but could Cyril trust him enough to dare allow the man close again?
No.
Definitely not.
Only an absolute fool would entertain the thought as he paced his stateroom from porthole to door and back again.
The entire incident had felt like a dream. Cyril half wondered if he’d suffered some sort of fevered hallucination. But he knew very well that Jody was flesh and blood. Hadn’t he smelled his sweat and felt the heat radiating from his body?
And the man was so close to him now.
Only a few decks below.
He could probably find him again if he tried.
What would be the harm of a shipboard encounter, a torrid affair before they reached port and parted forever? Cyril’s body insisted there would be no harm at all, but his head knew better.
He slept little that night and, the following day, attempted to remain occupied by briskly walking the deck and admiring the tumbling waves and changing color of the sea.
Not even tending his struggling orchid seedlings, failing to thrive in the artificial light he offered, was sufficient to distract from the tug-o-war tearing his mind in two. By late afternoon, his resolve to pretend Jody was not on the ship began to crumble.
Following dinner, Cyril gave in with a curse. He donned a worn shirt and plain gray waistcoat before taking metal stairs down to the steerage accommodations. There were no stewards to stop his progress, and within minutes, he entered the noisy gathering room for the third-class passengers. No gilt-trimmed artwork, crystal chandeliers, or soothing classical music here, but there was an upright pianola on which someone played a tinny folk tune. Filled with unwashed bodies, the crowded space smelled much like the stock pen it had once been. There were no liveried waiters circling the room with trays of beverages, but bottles of homemade brews were passed hand to hand, mouth to mouth. Despite a babble of conversations in half a dozen languages, there was a cheerful camaraderie charging the air.
Cyril hovered in the doorway, ready to flee back to the quieter, familiar world above. He did not belong here. Surely, everyone could see how out-of-place he was. Only his determination to find Jody spurred him on. If he found Jody, would the man look on him with surprised delight or exasperated dismay?
Cyril took a few tentative steps into the room. Immediately, a swarthy man staggered into him, pushed by another drunken man bellowing that he’d gone and finished off all the gin. Cyril stepped out of the way, only to tread on the shoe of a short woman with frizzy brown hair. Rather than cry out, shrink away, or beg pardon for being in his way as gently bred ladies might, she glared at him and hurled curses in French. Cyril was fluent in the language but did not know the epithets she spewed. He apologized in both French and English. The woman snarled an unintelligible res
ponse before returning her attention to the wine bottle in her hand and the fellow she was flirting with.
As Cyril pushed his way through the throng, he stopped apologizing for every bump and jostle. He listened in on snatches of conversation in the three languages he understood. One passenger worried his uncle in Brooklyn was no longer alive as the family hadn’t heard from him in many months. Another wondered how he was going to afford the trip from New York City to a town in Wisconsin and prayed it wouldn’t take too long to earn the train fare.
“Dieter! Wo bist du, Sohn?” These panicked words came from a woman wearing a face-framing head scarf, dark dress, and long apron. Although there must have been other German speakers, no one paid attention to her plaintive cry for her lost child. Tears glistened in her gray eyes, which fixed upon Cyril since he was the only person acknowledging her presence.
She rushed to him, grasped his arm and poured out a torrent of words too quickly for him to comprehend.
“I’m sorry. Slow down please. Have you lost your son?” he asked in German.
“Ja! Ja!” Her head bobbed up and down. “Mein Kind ist verschwunden!”
Disappeared.
“How long has he been missing?” Cyril slowly cranked out each word, wondering if he’d conjugated the verbs correctly.
He listened to her reply and gleaned that the little boy had shown great interest in the workings of the ship. His mother feared he’d found his way down to the engine room or perhaps snuck upstairs to try to get a look at the captain’s bridge. She feared going to either of those off-limits locations by herself and didn’t expect a crew member to help with her dilemma.
“I know he has fallen overboard and drowned,” Mrs. Muller moaned in German, working into a greater panic.
“Beruhige dich,” Cyril soothed. “Calm yourself. I am certain all will be well.”
She clung to his arm as if he were a life raft towing her to safety as they left the boisterous gathering.
Cyril suggested another search of the steerage accommodations. He and the distraught mother walked a corridor lined with cabin doors, calling Dieter’s name. Passengers who loitered in the hallway or open cabin doors listened to their description of the blond, blue-eyed child and promised to keep an eye out. Although plenty of children raced up and down the hallways playing games of tag or “can’t touch me,” none had seen or played with the lost Dieter.
“Belmont?”
The sound of Cyril’s name brought him up short. He turned to behold Jody Smith, standing head and shoulders above a cluster of boisterous youngsters.
Jody frowned. “What the devil are you doing here?”
“Helping this woman find her lost son.” Cyril told part of the truth. “Have you seen a blond boy about nine years old?”
Jody glanced at the giggling, yelling children. “Several.”
“Paler blond than these. Platinum, from Mrs. Mueller’s description.” Cyril introduced Jody to the German woman and explained about her son’s obsession with the mechanisms that propelled the ship.
“A lot of places for a child to get into trouble onboard a ship,” Jody agreed. “But likely he’s exploring to his heart’s content. He’ll find his way back when he’s ready.”
“I was about to ask a crew member to request a ship-wide search,” Cyril added.
“They’re not likely to go to much trouble for an immigrant’s child. To them, it’s no more than losing a halfpenny.” Jody rubbed his unshaven jaw, drawing Cyril’s attention to the sharp cut of it. “Tell the lady to stay here. He may be playing hide-and-seek nearby. Meanwhile, you and I will go to the boiler room and have a look.”
Cyril was glad to have some of the weight of Mrs. Mueller’s expectations off his shoulders. He explained the plan and left her nodding. Jah. Jah!
Jody guided him to a stairway. As they descended the steps, the throb of the great engines grew louder, reverberating into Cyril’s eardrums and his very bones. Smothering heat and a lack of oxygen increased by the time they reached the entrance to the boiler room. Cyril sweated through his clothing and could scarcely draw a full breath of the choking heat.
Cyril joined Jody to peer through a smudged window in the door. In the furnace room, burly stokers shoveled coal into flaming ovens. Their figures were silhouetted against hellish orange, their shirtless bodies shining with sweat and burnished gold as they ceaselessly fed the great dragons.
Jody tried the handle to find the heavy iron door unlocked. “Doubt a kid would have the strength to open this door. But since we’ve come this far, better have a look around.”
Despite the deafening pounding of the pistons turning the huge turbine, several men noticed Cyril and Jody’s entrance. A bald fellow with a handlebar moustache halted in steering his wheelbarrow of coal to the firemen. “Oy! What you two doin’ ’ere? Get out!”
Cyril cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Looking for a lost boy. Have you seen a blond child?” He indicated hip high with one hand.
The coal trimmer scowled. “Don’t be daft. Get on with you before you get hurt.”
As if to illustrate his point, a shower of sparks shot out of one of the furnaces. The stoker tending that fire didn’t flinch or pause in his rhythmic work, as if the cinders pelting his skin were no more than fireflies. “Lost kid, eh? Not down here, or he’d be put to work.”
Several of his mates chortled at the joke and added similar comments. “Oh yeah. He’d be chuckin’ in coal with his wee hands.” “Fleabottom might toss in the kid just for laughs.”
“Shut yer hole or I’ll have your pay docked!” the trimmer retorted.
Jody turned to Cyril. “I think the lad would be more interested in the ship’s wheel. I say we go up to the helm.”
Cyril backed out of the room, happy to close the door on the laboring firemen and outrageous heat. It shamed him that the sight of those heavily muscled, half-nude men had made him harden. Becoming aroused at the sight of their labor was wrong in every way, yet there it was, rigid proof in his trousers, which he tugged at his waistcoat to hide.
He exhaled a breath. “When one is sipping tea and listening to a violin trio in the gallery, one does not think of what takes place elsewhere on the ship.”
“No. One doesn’t,” Jody said dryly. “Nor does one think much about people packed four or more to a cabin below deck.”
Cyril thought of his accommodations, not the most spacious stateroom, but comfortable enough for a single man and his botanicals. How much he’d taken for granted in his life. Even when he’d worried about finances or how to settle his estate, he’d never been truly in need—not in the manner Jody had been. A child left to survive alone in a slum was almost beyond the scope of comprehension. No wonder Jody had fallen prey to a ruthless robber who’d taught him the ways of larceny.
Occupied by these heavy ruminations, he followed Jody’s unerring path to the deck and all the way to the stern, where water streamed behind the ship in a wake of white foam. Cyril glimpsed something else white too—the dandelion-fluff hair of a child in the shadow cast by a great iron spindle of heavy chain.
Young Dieter leaned on a railing, his body extended over it to a precarious degree as he watched the wake.
“What did I tell you?” Jody muttered. “Easy to read as the Sunday paper.”
Cyril felt a jolt of relief as if it were his own lost son he’d found. Afraid to startle the boy, he called quietly, “Dieter, deine Mutter sucht nach dir. Komm mit mir.”
The lad hopped off the railing and whirled to face the stranger asking him to come with me. He seemed on the verge of scurrying away.
Cyril realized his mistake. Of course, the child must have been warned by his mother about trusting strangers. He held up his hands, palms open. “Deine Mutter,” he repeated.
The boy’s eyes flicked from side to side, searching for an escape route.
“I mean you no harm. Your mother has sent me,” Cyril explained in German and smiled kindly.
Jody
clapped his hands to get the boy’s attention and jerked a thumb toward the nearest door. “Get back to yer mum, little weasel, or you’ll be thrown overboard.”
Dieter shifted from foot to foot, eyed the door, and suddenly made a dash for it.
“Wait!” Cyril shouted, but the child disappeared into the stairwell, and the door closed behind him. “He’ll get lost down there. Why did you frighten him?”
“The lad’s not stupid. Found his way up here, didn’t he? He can go back the way he came. I’ve given him a good scare, so he’s not likely to venture here again.”
“He’s a mere child! We should deliver him to his mother’s care.”
“The boy will be fine.”
Cyril stifled his annoyance, recalling that Jody had lived a rough-and-tumble existence. Naturally, he believed kindness or gentleness equated weakness.
“Nevertheless, I believe I’ll make certain Mrs. Mueller and her son are reunited.”
Jody’s hand on his arm stopped him. “Wait. He’ll be with her and gone into one of them cabins before you ever get there. You won’t be able to locate either of them. Stay a moment here with me.”
God help him, he couldn’t refuse the naked longing in that invitation. Certainly, Dieter would be just fine, and it couldn’t hurt to linger here with the man he’d gone to find. The weight and strength of Jody’s hand on his arm burned through his cotton shirtsleeve. Jody’s hand kept him from moving, but, oh, how he craved that restraint.
“Why were you down there? Were you looking for me?”
“Yes.” Cyril forced his gaze up from Jody’s shirtfront to meet those astonishing indigo eyes. “I told you I wanted to sever our acquaintance, but I wanted… I want…” He drew a breath. “I want you more.”
Jody nodded slightly. “I want too. I want very much.” He moved closer until they were one shadow in the night. His breath touched Cyril’s face, and Cyril lifted his chin, expecting a kiss.
Instead, Jody whispered, “I think of you constantly. Have since we met. Want you so badly, it shivers like a fever. I’m sick for you, and nothing makes it go away.”
