Kisses and Scandal (Survivors)

by Galen, Shana

  “I suppose because it took some time for my coffee room in Wapping to turn a profit,” he answered. “But I’m learning that London is not Wapping.”

  Having only a passing familiarity with Wapping, as her ship had docked there and she’d passed through it on a coach on the way to London, Raeni could not offer much insight. “It seems to me that London is a city of debutantes. My...” She caught herself before she referenced her father. “I have been told that there is a Season where young women are presented and attend dozens of balls so they might attract the attention of eligible suitors.”

  “I’ve heard the same and understand it is one of the busiest times of year for the modistes and tailors in the area.”

  An idea had occurred to Raeni, but she was not certain she should share it. Her father had not liked it when she showed too much cleverness. But Mr. Gaines was nothing like her father. “Then forgive me if I am too forward, but perhaps the best way for you to go about introducing your new business is to behave like a debutante and have a big come out.”

  Mr. Gaines became very still, and Raeni worried she had said something wrong. “If that is a ridiculous notion, then I apologize—"

  He held up a hand. “It is not ridiculous. I wonder I hadn’t thought of it myself.” He stood abruptly and paced across the room to the window and back again. “An opening celebration,” he said, his speech rapid and filled with obvious enthusiasm. “We will offer free food and coffee to encourage people to come to the shop and the coffee room. Once they have been here, they will return again. They will tell their friends.”

  “That is the general idea.”

  Mr. Gaines grasped her hands and pulled her out of her seat. “Miss Sawyer, you are a genius.” He swung her around, and she laughed as much from surprise as from the contagion of his own joy.

  It was the first time she had laughed in months, not since she had learned she’d been sold and decided to run away. After the difficult days and nights in London she had felt as though she might never laugh again. But it seemed a natural thing to do with Mr. Gaines smiling down at her and spinning her around. She was pleased she could be of some help to him after he had been so kind to her yesterday.

  She smiled up at him, staggering a little from dizziness when he ceased spinning her. He caught her with a hand on her waist before she could knock over a table, and she caught her breath as he held her just a fraction longer than necessary. His smile faded and his look turned intense.

  He wanted to kiss her. She knew that look. And she wanted to kiss him back. She tilted her face up in invitation just as she heard the footsteps. Mr. Gaines must have heard them as well because he released her suddenly and stepped away from her, putting a good foot between them.

  “Ah, Alfred,” he said. “Good morning.”

  Raeni turned to smile at Alfred, who looked confused to see her there. “Do you want to look at the sales from yesterday, Mr. Gaines? Or if now is not a good time—” His gaze slid to Raeni.

  “Now is just fine.” He nodded at Raeni. “Miss Sawyer, please finish your breakfast. You still have three-quarters of an hour before your work day should begin.” He nodded at her, formal now, as though he hadn’t just spun her about the room.

  As he started away, she spoke. “Mr. Gaines.”

  He stopped and looked back at her.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go to your office and begin now. I have some ideas for the event we discussed. I’ll make note of those and then begin the filing.”

  His brows rose. “I’d be very interested in hearing your ideas, Miss Sawyer. Perhaps over a light meal this afternoon?”

  She could not keep allowing him to feed her. “You needn’t—”

  “It’s settled then. I will see you later today.” And he strode away. Raeni watched him go and put a hand to her lips, wondering what it would have felt like to kiss him. It was probably best if she never found out.

  THE HOURS BETWEEN BREAKFAST and his midday meal seemed interminable. Thomas approved the accounts, discussed matters big and small with Alfred, took his carriage across Town to sample the tobacco from a new distributor and then finally returned to Bond Street about half past twelve. He was hungry for food and for Miss Sawyer’s company.

  He sent Alfred to order a meal for two before walking through the shop and the coffee room. Both were busy, but business could always be better. He started up the stairs to his office, tapping on the door before entering. Ridiculous to tap on his own door before going inside, but when he’d entered yesterday afternoon, after Miss Sawyer had gone home for the day, he’d detected her subtle scent in the air. That light floral scent and the progress she’d made organizing his desk changed the feeling of the room, making it feel not so much like his space but their space.

  He entered, and Miss Sawyer rose immediately from his desk. She smoothed the apron over her dress. He’d noted this morning it was the same dress she’d worn yesterday, which was not unusual, but she had not laundered it to remove the stains. She did not strike him as the sort to be slovenly, especially as she had a clean apron over the dress. So why had she not cleaned the dress? Did she not have the means?

  “Mr. Gaines, I have placed the documents most needing your attention on the desk. I haven’t gone through all of them, but from what I have seen, these are the most pressing.”

  He glanced at his desk, noting his piles of papers seemed smaller. “Thank you. I’ll look at them later. I have a tray of sandwiches on the way. Let’s sit at the table, shall we?”

  She smoothed her hands over her apron again. “Sir, you do not have to feed me. I can continue working while you eat or I might assist Mr. Miller downstairs so you might have privacy, if you prefer.”

  Thomas could tell it would be no easy task to find out the realities of her current situation. She was obviously averse to his charity. “What I prefer is to have the pleasure of your company and to hear the ideas for the opening celebration.”

  “Of course. I have them here.” She lifted a paper from the desk. He took a seat at the table, prepared to listen. The door opened and Mary carried a tray in.

  “Put that here, Mrs. Poole.”

  “Yes, sir.” She gave Miss Sawyer a surreptitious look. Thomas knew the staff was probably gossiping about his relationship with Miss Sawyer. He was always careful to keep relationships with his employees separate from romantic relationships. The last thing he wanted was his staff gossiping about Miss Sawyer. But then Thomas had never been romantically interested in any woman who had worked for him before. If his choices were to let Miss Sawyer go or skirt the boundaries of his own rules, he would trespass just a little.

  While Mary set the tray down and arranged the items on the dining room table, Thomas decided to do what he could to take control of the staff’s gossip. “Miss Sawyer, go ahead and share the ideas you’ve noted for the opening celebration.”

  “Yes, sir. I made a list of possibilities. Shall I go through all of them?”

  “Tell me your favorite.”

  “Oh.” She looked down at her paper, seeming uncertain. He could see she had written enough to fill two sheets of paper. Curious that she should be able to read and write so well. He had taught himself when he’d arrived in England as slaves in America were forbidden from learning. As the law was intended to keep slaves in their place, the situation was the same in the islands of the West Indies. And that meant she could not have been a slave. She had mentioned organizing papers. Whose papers?

  “I suppose my favorite is to have a celebration in the evening. I like the idea of having a string quartet playing and candles lighting the coffee room.”

  Mary made a sound and Thomas arched a brow at her. “You don’t like that idea, Mrs. Poole?”

  “No, sir. Bond Street is deserted at night. Once the shops close, most people go elsewhere for amusement.”

  “The Greedy Vicar is still open,” Thomas pointed out.

  “But we do not want to compete with a pub,” Miss Sawyer said. “Mary
is right. I didn’t realize this area was not trafficked in the evenings.”

  Another clue that she was not from London. Anyone who’d lived in London for long knew Bond Street was to be visited during the day.

  Miss Sawyer tapped her paper and pursed her lips in obvious thought. “What would you say to an event in the late afternoon then? Clerks and shopkeepers might stop in before they started home. Businesses might close early or we could stay open a little later so the owners could have a look and perhaps a pastry after locking up for the night.”

  “I think it’s brilliant.”

  Mary nodded in agreement. “She’s a clever one, Mr. Gaines.”

  “That’s what I thought, Mrs. Poole. Give my compliments to the cook, won’t you?” It was a subtle way of dismissing her, but he thought she had heard enough to dispel rumors that there was anything more than business matters between himself and Miss Sawyer.

  When Mary had left, Thomas indicated the other chair at the table. “Sit and eat. We can discuss your other ideas later.”

  “Thank you, sir, but I am not hungry.”

  He sat back and crossed his arms. “You brought your own meal with you then?”

  “No.”

  “Then you bought something from the coffee room?”

  “No.”

  “Miss Sawyer, I do not know how it is you came to work for me, but now that you do I feel somewhat responsible for you. I am certain you think you have put on a good show, but it’s quite obvious to me you have no means at all. If I don’t feed you, I doubt you will eat. And now that I get a look at that dress in the afternoon light, I am beginning to think I might need to clothe you as well.”

  Her eyes blazed with indignation. “I do not need a man to feed and clothe me.”

  “No doubt you do not.” She was obviously strong and capable. “But you could use a bit of help right now. If it makes you feel better, I can deduct a portion of these meals from your wages.”

  Her brow furrowed.

  “Or,” he suggested, “you can consider it part of your position. If you’re to be my clerk, you must look the part.”

  “Your clerk?”

  “Clearly, I need one, and you must be dressed appropriately. I’ll send for a seamstress.” He pulled out a pad of paper and made a note before tucking it into his coat pocket again. She stared at him as though uncertain what to think.

  “As for sharing a meal with me, it’s part of the job. We will discuss work. Or, if you prefer, consider it a kindness. Poor Mr. Gaines has no one to dine with.”

  She snorted in a most unladylike fashion. “I very much doubt that.”

  “Do you? Sit down and tell me why.”

  She hesitated for one long moment before finally taking the seat opposite him. He passed her a plate with several sandwiches on it and then filled his own.

  “I suppose I find it difficult to believe that a man like you should want for company.”

  “A man like me? Success is more likely to breed enemies than friends, especially when your skin is the color of ours.”

  “I didn’t mean because of your success.”

  He paused before taking another bite of his meal. “Then what did you mean?”

  She looked down. Had he embarrassed her? He couldn’t think how.

  “I meant a man like you.” She gestured to him, but he shook his head, still confused. “A man as handsome as you,” she finally clarified, her words quiet and strained.

  Thomas could not stop himself from smiling. She thought he was handsome. Perhaps he was not the only one who was interested in more than talk of opening celebrations.

  “I might say the same about a woman like you,” he said. “You’re very beautiful and yet you haven’t married or found a man to take care of you.”

  “I don’t need either. I can do just fine on my own.”

  “I believe it.” He considered her for a moment and then finally asked what he’d wanted to since he’d first seen her. “What is your Christian name, Miss Sawyer? Do you mind telling me?” He could have asked Alfred, but he wanted her to tell him herself.

  “Raeni,” she said. “That’s the name I was given.”

  He cocked his head. “Rainy? Like the weather today?”

  “No, R-A-E-N-I. Where I come from, it means ‘like a queen.’”

  “Like a queen,” he mused. “That’s fitting. And where is it you come from?”

  Her gaze met his directly now. “Where is it you come from, Mr. Gaines?”

  He blew out a breath. “I suppose we all have our secrets, Raeni. And call me Thomas. At least when we’re working together up here.”

  “Thomas? That’s nice. Why did your parents give you that name?” Obviously, she did not intend to press him for his secrets. No doubt she did not wish to share her own.

  “I don’t know. I never knew my father and my mother died from a fever when I was still young. I remember her, but if she ever told me why she gave me my name, I don’t recall.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize your parents had passed.”

  “Yours are still alive?” He said it casually, hoping to lure her into telling him more.

  But she was not so easily misled. “I think it would be better if we discussed the opening celebration further. I had some ideas for the food.”

  THAT NIGHT AT HIS TOWN house in Cheapside, Thomas finally closed his ledgers when the clock chimed midnight. He should have been exhausted. He’d been working long hours, but there was something invigorating about a new business venture. The endless possibilities and the unforeseen struggles engaged him like nothing else.

  He reached for the stack of mail that had been sitting at his elbow, neglected, and thumbed through it. One envelope stopped him, and he opened it and smiled. It was an engraved invitation on vellum, as fine as any one of the houses in Grosvenor Square would send out. The event was no less exclusive—an invitation to the Dark Ball.

  The Dark Ball was held every year by the more prosperous Negroes in London—merchants, bankers, business owners. When Thomas had come to London he had joined several Negro societies and had heard of the coveted invitations to the Dark Ball. The date and location changed yearly as did the invitation list. The stated goal was merriment, but the underlying goal was for the parents of young women to find suitable husbands for their daughters.

  Of course, the races could and did intermarry, but these marriages were easier for the lower classes. A black woman or man of some means who wanted to marry someone of a similar station risked a lifetime of disapproval from narrow-minded white families. The Dark Ball brought wealthy Negroes together.

  Thomas was pleased to be invited, but he had no illusions as to how the night would progress. He would be flooded with attention from mothers who wanted him as a husband for their daughter, and though he might dance with a few women who were interesting and whose conversation he enjoyed, there would also be many spoiled and pampered young ladies he would have to endure.

  Unless...

  Thomas smiled. Unless he arrived with a woman on his arm. Then he might ward off the worst of the husband-hunting mothers and have a chance to dance with someone whose company he enjoyed.

  He knew just the lady.

  Four

  The next few days were a blur for Raeni. Now that she was fed regularly and the pounding in her head and the gnawing in her belly had dissipated, she was able to focus on organizing Mr. Gaines’s office. He had only dined with her once or twice, and they had limited their conversation to the plans for the opening celebration, but he still made sure she was fed at least two meals every day. She always brought food back to the church for George and Alice.

  Raeni had received her wages for her first week and she might have left the church and found a room to rent, but she’d chosen to buy food and other necessities for herself and George and Alice. Alice had found some work ironing. The conditions were difficult as the irons were hot and heavy and the room where the women labored often grew unbearably h
ot. But she would have her own money very soon and then all three of them could leave the church and be on their way to making their own place in the world.

  “What do you do with George?” Raeni had asked Alice as they were walking to their prospective positions that morning. George was strapped to Alice’s back in much the way Raeni had seen slave women in the sugar cane fields carry their babies.

  “I’m allowed to keep him on me back,” Alice said. “And if he falls asleep, there’s always a basket where I can tuck him in for a wee nap.”

  Raeni was glad she did not have a child to look after. It was hard enough for Alice without the added burden of George, though certainly Alice did not see him as a burden.

  Now Raeni stretched her back, then realizing she’d been sitting at the chair at Mr. Gaines’s desk for several hours, rose and moved about the room. She stopped before the window and watched the well-dressed ladies streaming in and out of Madame LeMonde’s. Several students from Mrs. Sinclair’s School of Dancing and Social Graces were milling about, the girls smiling and pretending not to be flirting with the boys.

  Raeni watched them and wondered what their futures would hold. She did not know what her own future held. If she had not fled Jamaica, she would probably be with child by now. That was why her father had sold her. One of his friends wanted a slave who could keep house and tend to his personal needs. Raeni had slept in her mother’s room until the age of ten. Her father had often visited when Raeni was supposed to have been sleeping. She understood what men’s needs were, and she would not be sold to a man she did not know to become a mistress like her mother.

  She supposed in Jamaica it was the most she could hope for. Her brothers had been sent to England to study with the understanding they would return and take over the plantation. Charles Sawyer had an English wife and children, of course, but she’d heard him say his white son had no intention of living among heathens. And there was also the matter of her brothers’ skin. They looked like true mulattos—their color a creamy brown. Her father had thought they might pass for Englishmen who had been in the sun much of their lives.