Page 18 of Blueprints, Battlelines and Ballrooms (Tales from Honeysuckle Street #4)

Chapter Ten

All through the workday, Johannes cast sidelong looks at his employer to try to determine if he had made some career-ending mistake.

But Mr Holt behaved as usual, revealing no sign of pleasure or displeasure with his work.

Still recovering from his chill, he occasionally spluttered into his handkerchief while he set tasks, appraised drawings and calculations, and made comment.

No accusation came. And why should he, Johannes, feel any guilt?

Florence was not a young maid under her father’s protection.

She was a widow, her own woman. Or at least she had been, for a time.

He had only confessed his burgeoning feelings.

He had merely asked leave to call on her in a different capacity.

She had kissed him .

When she had not appeared in the office by two o’clock, he accepted that the Society for the Appreciation of New and Old Architecture would not be meeting that week—or, perhaps, ever again. Johannes packed up his pens and slipped them into his leather folder. At the door, he ran into Mrs Holt.

‘Heading home, Johannes?’

‘I’m going to drop in on the hotel first,’ he said, shrugging on his coat.

‘Your parents’ inn?’ she asked.

‘Inn? I’ll admit, it’s not as fancy as the one in Mayfair, but I wouldn’t quite call it an inn.

’ Perhaps all accommodations were called inns in Australia.

Perhaps that was all they had over there.

‘The Hotel Aster,’ he explained, as Mrs Holt frowned.

She opened and closed her mouth a little, like she was chewing over his words.

‘Not the main one, the smaller one in Park Lane. It’s on my way home, so my father asked me to call in and check on things.

He often asks when he is busy, and with my sister nearing her confinement, he’s relying on me a little more.

’ Johannes put on his hat and, with a nod of farewell, set off into the city.

He trudged through the slush of melted snow, dirty with soot and grime, to try to shake his melancholy, but to no avail.

With his misery still clinging to his coattails, he made for the hotel.

It was just after five o’clock by the time he stepped into the foyer of the Park Lane Aster.

Guests were gathering in the dining room.

There seemed to be more of them than usual, even for this time of year when the weather was warming up.

Some would have a drink or take tea before heading out to the theatre or another show, while others would dine at six o’clock and turn in early.

Many of the tables were filled with well-dressed couples and small groups, and one very large gathering filled up the back of the room.

A banquet had been assembled from smaller tables, stretching all the way from below the windows to the far wall.

Men in fine suits gathered around the table, packed so tight the backs of their chairs rubbed against one another.

‘Are they all staying in rooms?’ Johannes asked the concierge Matteo.

‘The large group is just dining,’ Matteo said. ‘They did not have a reservation, but we were able to accommodate them. All lords and gentlemen, by the looks of things.’

‘Peers? Don’t extend them credit. Make sure they pay their bill before they leave.

’ Johannes scanned the guest register. Not full, but almost. Father would be happy.

Park Lane was becoming almost as sought after as Mayfair.

Johannes cast another glance into the dining room, then set off to do the rounds.

Father had a fixed way for how he liked things done. His way. Normally, the rigid order of tasks, numbers to collate, and questions to ask of staff soothed Johannes, but tonight, falling into familiarity grated. Too much automation gave too much space to thought.

That kiss. Full of life and passion. So eager that, for a deluded tick of the clock, he’d thought he wasn’t alone in his longing.

That a tie bound them together. That all it would take was for him to unlatch his feelings, and she would be free to meet him.

More than passion or lust, it had been a kiss to come home to.

She’d felt like she belonged in his arms. So why had she pulled away?

Why would she run? He should not have expected to come anywhere else than second place, but to lose to a dead man?

That was an injury that smarted. No matter how hard he tried, he could never match up.

But that was him. Always second. Always behind.

Rounds finished, information gathered, questions answered, and papers signed, Johannes settled down in the dining room.

He ordered a drink in the hope that it would swallow a bit of his brooding before he returned home.

The tables of couples had emptied out, and the group of gents was talking and laughing louder than before.

Their plates were almost empty, and dozens of wine bottles lined the length of their table.

Maybe he’d hang around long enough to make sure they paid.

Matteo was good, but a little support never hurt.

He was grumbling into his second gin sour when Florence appeared, as if he’d pulled her straight from his frayed thoughts. Not the woman from the night before, but just herself. Wearing her simple house dress and with a spot of ink smudged on her cheek.

He kicked out a chair. ‘Would you like a drink? Tea, gin, champagne? We have the second best of everything here.’ He tipped back the last of his drink. ‘Must be why I like it so much.’

‘I wanted to explain. Why I left you last night.’ She lowered herself into the leather.

A bellicose laugh rose from the table of gents, and the rest of the group soon joined in. Johannes bent across the table so he could hear her better.

‘When I was with George, I was very much in love. But sometimes he… he wandered. And I know he still cared about me. I just couldn’t be what he needed.’

Sharp indignity stabbed him in the stomach. ‘I wouldn’t do that to you,’ he snapped, the gin making him churlish.

‘You say that now.’ Florence ran her fingers over the table edge. ‘But you would. And I wouldn’t blame you. Because sometimes, I…’

Shouts flooded across from the group, louder than before. Someone burst into song, and a few beats later, all of them were joining in, as loud and raucous as the supports at one of Elliot’s football matches. Johannes beckoned Matteo over. ‘Who are these men?’ he asked.

‘A dining club,’ Matteo said, his voice slightly raised against the noise. ‘When they reserved tables, they called themselves one name, and now they’re referring to themselves by a completely different one. Bullerdon? Bullerton?’

‘Buller…’ The word struck an anvil of dread in him as he sought to form the name more completely. ‘Bullingdon?’

‘That’s the one. Call themselves Bullers. All men from Oxford.’

‘Bullingdon? Men from…’ Johannes dropped his glass as he rose from his chair. ‘Get them out. We need to get them out—’

Did the tinkling laugh or the crack of glass come first?

The first note of destruction and the pure merriment the man took from delivering it blended so seamlessly into one that Johannes would never be able to split them later.

The group went from raucous to a frenzied storm in a breath, from singing some song to chanting it so loudly that it smothered the crash of plates and the crack of wood as chairs and tables were upended.

The few remaining guests screamed, and Matteo ushered them to safety as they dashed from the room.

A bottle sailed up and collided with the chandelier, the crystal whining with pain as it fragmented and shattered.

Three men climbed onto a table, still singing.

One kicked at plates, another guzzled from a champagne bottle, a thin line of liquid trailing over his chin and dribbling onto his coat.

He let the last few drops land on his outstretched tongue like a gluttonous oaf in a novel or play, then hurled the bottle with a careless swipe.

It crashed against the windows, shattering glass and bending the frame.

‘Not the windows!’ Johannes pleaded—and groaned at his own stupidity.

A man who stood on the table smirked, bent low to swipe a teacup, then spun it in his hands like it was a cricket ball.

With a deft arch and roll of his arm, he lobbed the cup at the glass.

The calls and shouts and caterwauling bounced off every wall, and between the cacophonous echoes came a bleating, mocking, not the windows, not the windows .

With each taut, they lobbed something else at the glass: a cup, a champagne flute, a bottle.

Anger butchered his breath, and Johannes clenched his fists, taking a menacing step towards them.

Matteo grasped his arm and pulled back hard. ‘Sir, you can’t. They’re lords and the sons of lords.’

‘They’re destroying everything!’ he cried.

‘And if you wallop even one of them, they’ll destroy you. No good will come of it.’

Johannes pinched his eyes shut as a man raised a chair, then swung it high in the air. He turned away, his mouth thick with anger and bile, wrapped an arm around Florence, and pulled her into the lobby.

‘Call the police,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell them what we saw. Why aren’t you stopping them?’

‘I can’t.’ Another crack and a crash. Johannes sank onto the bottom step of the staff staircase. ‘They won’t get here in time.’

‘Don’t you know their names? Can’t they arrest them?’

‘They could. But they won’t. There are two sets of rules here. One for us. And one for men like that.’

Florence sat beside him. A few loud cheers erupted from the dining room before morphing into the same song they had started with, some bawdy tune full of bad rhymes and innuendo.

One by one, the men filed out of the dining room and stumbled into the street, hollering and leaping over one another as they left.

Johannes couldn’t summon the dignity to raise his head. Instead, he watched their shiny toes and blackened heels parade past him as hate, useless and bitter, writhed in his stomach. One paused before him. Bank of England notes fluttered to the floor.

‘Sorry about the damage, old chap,’ the voice above the notes said. ‘Sometimes we get a bit carried away. This should cover things.’ A hundred pounds. A hundred and fifty. Two hundred. Far more than what the damage and the meal were worth, yet also wholly inadequate.

His breath stuck in his throat. Johannes rose to his feet, his fists clenching and unclenching by his sides.

‘I know this one. His father’s a judge,’ Matteo mumbled to him.

All he could imagine was levelling his elbow and straightening his arm to send the pathetic lump of flesh before him into the wall. The slightest flinch told him the other man was imagining it, too.

If he’d been a bolder man, a man with a name, he might have done exactly that.

But he was only Johannes Hempel, son of a man from the streets, with a family name that had money and clout, but none of the right connections. He crouched and grasped at the notes. ‘Don’t come back here,’ he muttered, blinking back tears as sharp as glass.

The voice laughed. ‘We won’t,’ he said, and the last of the shining heels strode out the door and into the street.