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Sixteen

Eliza had heard that women generally weren’t allowed in coffeehouses.

That certainly seemed to hold true for this particular house.

There was a small group of men in deep discussion at a back table and the man behind the counter.

All of them looked up sharply when she and Simon entered.

Simon guided her to a corner table near the front window and then went to get them two cups.

He put two coins on the bar as he spoke to the man.

Whatever he said must have set him at ease, because a few minutes later he poured two cups of coffee from a press machine and pushed them across the counter toward Simon.

“Coffee, milady.” Simon set her cup in front of her and took his seat.

She smiled up at him, catching a shimmer of amusement in his eye.

Whatever effect the gin had had on her had worn off in the excitement of meeting Mr. Brody.

She was glad for that because she didn’t want to forget a moment of this night with Simon.

In the time since they’d left Whitechapel, he’d regained some of the carefree attitude he’d had at the music hall.

She wondered if this is what he was like most of the time, when he wasn’t worried about gang leaders and brawls and whatever else seemed to constantly plague him.

Bringing the hot drink to her mouth, she blew gently and took a small sip of the bitter liquid. “Ugh.” She tried not to make a face but probably wasn’t very successful given the grin he gave her. “Is there no sugar?” she whispered.

“I fear we’re on thin ice with the proprietor as it is,” he said.

A quick glance at the counter confirmed the man still hadn’t recovered from her presence. He kept sending harsh glances their way.

Simon took a drink of his coffee to no ill effect, so she determined to persevere.

“Now, about your father.”

“I’ll tell you about him if you tell me about Mr. Brody.”

He shook his head, his gaze on the window and the deserted street beyond. “Believe me when I tell you that you don’t want to know any more about him than you have to.”

“But I do,” she insisted. When he glanced at her, she added, “To be fair, it’s you I want to know about. However, I sense that Mr. Brody factors into your past.”

He set his cup down and held it between his hands, his thumb tracing the rim in a way that held her mesmerized. “He does. What do you want to know?”

His blue eyes were deep when they met hers, like the sea on a gray day.

His Whitechapel accent had retreated, but he also wasn’t using the accent he used at Montague Club.

She sensed this was the real him, a mix of the two that elongated some of the vowels and clipped a consonant or two.

It was like him, a blend of who he had been and who he was striving to become. “Everything,” she said.

The winds between them had shifted in the hours since they’d left Mayfair.

In the beginning he’d seemed almost determined to keep distance between them.

Little by little that gap had lessened. Now the winds circled around them, pulling them in close together over the table, their voices low and intimate.

“You asked about why we left the foundling home…Mary woke me one night. She told me that we had to leave. She looked frightened and I didn’t question her. I hated it there. By then we’d been moved to the workhouse. I didn’t see her very much and I detested the work.”

“You didn’t go to school?”

“Some. Enough to read and do basic arithmetic. But by then work took up most of my day.” He held up his hands and she leaned forward, caught by the sight of his fingers.

White strips of scar tissue covered the pads of his fingers and the beds of his nails, particularly near his pointer and middle fingers. There were also scars on his thumbs and palms.

“What work did you do?”

There was a sardonic tone to his voice when he said, “I was naughty more often than not, so I got the task of unraveling the old navy ropes that were sent down.”

“Why is that a task?” She looked up at his face.

“Oakum. They dip the fibers in tar and use it to line the boats to keep the water out.” He glanced at his fingers and turned them over, clenching his hands as if to hide the evidence of his abuse. “The hemp is razor-sharp and cuts like paper.”

She hoped the abject horror of imagining such an existence did not show on her face. Instead she took his hand, wishing in some small way to relieve him of the memory.

“How old were you when you left?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Don’t know. I’d been at the workhouse for at least a year, maybe more. Eight or ten years old, I expect.”

A horrible feeling overcame her. “Simon, do you know how old you are?”

He didn’t react for a moment, his gaze taking in her face. Finally, he said, “No, I don’t know. It never seemed important.”

She couldn’t imagine never celebrating a birthday. In their home, birthdays had always been celebrations. They hadn’t had much, but there would always be special treats of sweets and gifts. “What’s something you can remember? Some event that happened when you were young?”

He paused for a moment, nibbling the inside of his bottom lip as he thought.

She’d never envied a lip so much in her life.

It sent tingles down her arms to imagine him nibbling her lip in that way.

“I can remember when Prince Albert died. I wasn’t at the workhouse, so I wasn’t yet seven—they sent us all there at seven years old—but Mary was already there. ”

Prince Albert had died back in ’61. She quickly did the math in her head. “If you were only five or six years old, then that makes you twenty-two or twenty-three years old, maybe?”

“That could be.” He didn’t seem to have a particular interest in the topic for himself, but he asked, “How old are you?”

“Almost twenty.” She’d be a wife by her birthday. Pushing that from her mind, she asked, “What happened when you left the workhouse?”

“We lived on the street for a while. I started out doing odd jobs. Then we fell in with a gang of pickpockets. That’s how we met Brody.

I nipped the billfold of one of his men.

Would’ve got away with it but one of the bastards tripped me and sent it flying.

He tried to beat me and I held my own enough that it impressed Brody.

After that night we slept on the floor of his office.

When we were older, I roomed with the other blokes and he trained me to be a punisher. ”

“Is a punisher…is it just as it sounds?”

“I was his hand of justice. One of them. Much like the blokes that hemmed us in earlier. If someone wronged him, then I made it right.”

He didn’t say more, but she could see the weight of those words on his face and in his eyes. His shell wasn’t as hard as he wanted it to be. She took his hand where it rested on the table. “That’s when you decided to leave?”

His gaze jerked away from her and to the window for a moment.

She sensed there was more to the story, but he was finished talking about it.

“Your turn. Tell me about your father.” His gaze settled on their hands.

He turned his over beneath hers, and her fingers settled between his.

She loved the rough texture of his skin on hers and the way he made her hand feel small.

She wanted to press him for more, but it was only fair that she reveal more of herself to him first. It’s not as if he’d show up at a dinner party one night and spill all their secrets to the ton .

Even if such a thing were possible—their attending the same dinner party—she trusted him to keep her secrets.

“My mother fell in love with my father, Charles Hathaway, when she was an actress in Chicago. She was young, close to my age, and he was handsome and rich. One can assume he was more idealistic then, to have attracted her attention.” It was the only way Eliza could explain it to herself.

The man she knew now was nothing like that.

She could not imagine her mother ever having her head turned by Mr. Hathaway as he was now.

“She became his mistress, though she claims that he promised to marry her. Do you know the Hathaway name?”

He nodded. “It makes the newspapers here some. An old family from New York, if I remember correctly.”

“Yes, apparently they were one of the original families. Today they own half of Manhattan. You can imagine his parents were not enraptured with the idea of welcoming Fanny Fairchild into their family. I don’t know what happened precisely, but he moved her to New York.

He bought her a house and gave her a small allowance, but he eventually left us to rot, house and all.

Mr. Dove is not our true father. He’s someone my father found to marry her…

or at least pretend to marry her…” It hadn’t occurred to her that the marriage might not be real until just this moment.

Mr. Dove had died when she was very young.

She didn’t even have any proper memories of him.

She had met his relatives a few times over the years.

They trotted down to Manhattan from upstate sometimes to make it appear as if they cared about his children, but there was very little communication.

What if the whole marriage had been a ruse?

“Are you all right?” he asked. He squeezed her hand gently.

“I just had the odd thought that I barely know who I am.”

He chuckled at that. “No, not you, Miss Dove. You know more about who you are than anyone I’ve ever met.”

That name didn’t set right with her suddenly. It was wrong because it wasn’t real. Nothing was real but her own name, and she wanted more than anything to be real with him. “Call me Eliza. Please?”

“Eliza.” The name rolled over her skin like a caress.

She couldn’t hold the intensity of his gaze, so she looked down at their hands. His nails were short and well-kept, but there were small scars on every finger.