Page 17 of Lady Isla and the Lord of Rogue (Merry Spinsters, Charming Rogues #6)

Chapter Ten

Isla’s knees finally gave way, and she collapsed in the chair across from him.

“Jem. Is it really you?” She spoke in Romani.

He set down his mug, a look of incredulity on his face. “You still speak our language?”

She nodded. “Of course.”

“You’ve turned into a lady.” He shook his head.

Isla fiddled with the cord of her reticule. “Yes. Well. What else might I have become?”

“I meant, of course, a fine lady.” He cleared his throat. “A toff.” His eyes pierced hers. “But then we knew that your father was a marquess, and that you were taken in by the Quality.” Somehow it sounded like a reprimand.

“Yes.” She searched his face for a hint of recrimination or judgment, but it was neutral. He lifted his mug again, drank, and set it down.

A slight feeling of ill-ease assailed her .

Was this truly her Jem? Jem, who’d been her heart and her soul.

The person sitting in front of her was a stranger. Indifferent. Detached. As if none of their shared memories mattered. As if they had never happened. Not anymore. Not now that she’d joined the gadje and become a ‘toff’.

Isla shivered. Where do we even begin?

“How have you fared?” she asked at last.

“Good.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Well enough.”

A pause. Twenty years of silence stretched between them.

“What happened after I left?”

“I ran away.” He took a swig of his ale. “London, to be precise.”

Isla searched his face anxiously. A thirteen-year-old boy, alone in London. A Gypsy, orphaned, and not a penny to his name. There was only one thing such a boy could do. She shifted uneasily in her chair.

“And then?”

He shrugged again. “Lasted a fortnight before they threw me into Newgate. Got caught pickpocketing a toff on Oxford Street.”

Isla gasped.

“Stroke of fortune, that. Met a man there. Mr Berkenwell. A blacksmith, locked up for fraud. But he got out, and he paid to get me released. Took me in as an apprentice. Learned the trade. Kept my hands clean.” He spread his hands in front of her, and she noticed he had grime under his fingernails.

Isla let out a shaking breath.

“But once a Gypsy, always a Gypsy.” A wry smile tugged at his lips. “Restlessness is in our blood, you know. After a while, I left the forge and went back to my roots.” He leaned back. “I’m in the horse trade now. More lucrative, too.”

She met his gaze. “I’m glad.” She wanted to ask so much more. Things like: If you were in London, why did you never look for me? Why did you never come to our meeting spot? I should have been easy to find… and: What happened to you that you became so…indifferent?

Maybe it was Newgate. Or life that had hardened him.

Maybe his brush with the criminal world had been greater than he’d let on.

For there was a toughness encasing him, a sharp-eyed, calculating shrewdness in his eyes, even as he sized her up.

It wasn’t the glance that a friend would give to his long-lost friend, as they finally reunited.

Maybe he wasn’t Jem, after all.

She almost wished he wasn’t.

But all these doubts were cast into the wind with his next words.

“And you, lelori ?” A little smile played about his lips. “I see life has treated you well.”

Isla gasped. “You do remember. You used to call me that.” Only Jem had ever called her that. It had been his secret pet name for her.

“‘Course I remember.” He leaned back lazily, and there was a mocking glint in his eyes. “I remember everything. My little lelori. We were quite a pair. You used to sing and dance with Vanya while I collected the coins.” He smirked. “Not only from my tin box. ”

A steep frown appeared on Isla’s forehead. “What do you mean?”

“You know. While a toff will throw in a meagre half farthing, there’s so much more to be had from his plump pockets, if you have the finger for it.” He grinned and twirled a coin between his knuckles. He sounded almost proud.

She looked at him with a furrowed brow. Since when was Jem proud of stealing? “But Vanya said?—”

Vanya had given Jem the thrashing of a lifetime when she’d caught him pickpocketing. “This is what gives the rest of us a bad name,” she’d scolded. “You make an honest living using your own hands, through whatever means possible. You do not steal. Ever.”

Maybe Jem was referring to that first time, during a performance, when Vanya had caught him. Isla didn’t know how often he’d done it after that. She knew he’d done so, secretly, never admitting to it. For they had been hungry, and Vanya’s rules had often come second to survival.

Yes, that was what he must mean.

Isla’s brow cleared.

“Everything in this world revolves around blunt,” Jem continued. “You got some? Life is sweet. You got none? You must see how you go about getting some using whatever means possible. That’s all life is.”

“Yes, well, I think things are slightly more complicated than that.”

He crossed his arms behind his head and leaned back in his chair.

“It’s because our world is divided into the haves and the have-nots.

Call it karma. Call it fate. The will of God.

Whatever. You,” he nodded at her, “have brazenly crossed the line back and forth between the haves and the have-nots, only to return to the haves, where you were born after all.”

Isla nodded.

“But the rest of us ain’t so lucky.” He uncrossed his arms, rested his elbows on the table, and leaned forward, his eyes gleaming. “We ain’t so lucky at all. It would seem only right that the haves would help the have-nots. Don’t you think so?”

She looked at him in confusion for one moment, before the penny dropped.

He was asking her for money.

“Oh.” Her fingers cramped over her reticule. Her purse was inside with her pocket money. She opened it with shaking fingers and shook the contents out on the table.

A purse with some coins, an enamelled flask with hartshorn salt, a silken handkerchief, and the pocket watch that Teddy had given her.

He studied the items with interest.

She picked up the purse, which was plump. Rather than shaking the coins out on the table and counting them, she shoved it across the table towards Jem, without meeting his eyes. “Here, take it.”

He took it, opened it, peeked inside, smiled, and bowed. “My lady.”

“You can also have the flask.”

But he’d picked up the pocket watch and was regarding it with interest.

“Not this. It was given to me by, by—” Teddy!

Teddy was here, and she’d forgotten about him entirely. She turned, and there he was, at the table in the corner, patiently drinking his third cup of tea.

A feeling of such relief swept over her, she felt almost dizzy.

She turned back to Jem, more resolute. “You can have the flask and the handkerchief. It is real silk, but you can’t have my pocket watch. My betrothed gave it to me. In fact, he is here with us.”

Jem cast a glance in the corner, placed it back on the table and shoved it back to her. “Ah, of course, if it’s a present from your future husband, then I’ll not touch it.”

But he swept up the other items, and they disappeared into his pockets before she could blink.

Teddy must have seen them glance in his direction. He got up, dusted his trousers off, and came over to their table.

“There he is, the husband,” Jem said with a vague smirk.

“Teddy.” Isla looked up at him, glad that he was here. “This is Jem Fawe. Jem, this is Lord Thaddaeus Linwood.”

The two men eyed each other with open curiosity.

“Please. Don’t let me disrupt your conversation. I see you have much to catch up on,” Teddy said easily.

“I think we are done,” Isla said, getting up. She held out her hand to Jem. “It was… good to see you again, Jem. After all this time.” She searched for more words but couldn’t, for the life of her, think of anything else to say.

He took her hand and bowed over it with a flourishing movement. “Lady Isla,” he said in a mocking tone. “It was a pleasure.”

Teddy helped Isla into the carriage. She leaned back and closed her eyes.

“Interesting sort of fellow,” Teddy observed as the carriage set in motion. “The pattern on his shirt was most interesting. Seems to have something to do with horses.”

“He is a horse trainer,” Isla said.

“Ah. I heard that many Gypsies have this occupation. Seems suitable. I confess I have little skill when it comes to horses. The creatures keep wanting to bite me whenever I get too close.”

Isla didn’t answer.

“I do invariably better with machines than with animals.” He paused. “Isla?”

Then she burst into tears.

And it wasn’t the delicate, ladylike kind of weeping, either, but loud, messy sobbing, with nose running, breath hitching, and all.

Teddy looked utterly at a loss. Most gentlemen were, when faced with a crying woman. They never quite knew what to do. Ignore it? Offer a handkerchief? Pat her shoulder awkwardly and murmur something soothing?

Whatever they chose to do, it was nearly always the wrong thing, adding a fresh layer of misery to the one already in tears.

But Teddy, thankfully, did the right thing.

He switched to her side of the seat, moved closer to her, so that his shoulder almost touched hers, gently nudging her. And Isla understood. He was offering his shoulder.

She turned toward him and buried her face in his shoulder.

And wept.

Teddy didn’t say anything at all. He did not attempt to console her through words, nor did he ignore her sadness.

Instead, he pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to her quietly.

Isla took it and blew into it loudly.

“I beg your pardon,” she said in a wavering voice. “I don’t know what has come over me.”

“I suppose one cannot help but get rather emotional when one is suddenly confronted with a childhood friend one hasn’t seen for over twenty years,” Teddy commented.

“It is completely understandable. If I were in your shoes, I would probably do the same. In fact,” he added after a short pause, “I feel like bawling right along with you out of mere sympathy. I think I need the handkerchief back, if you please.”

That remark elicited a watery laugh from Isla, so that she found herself crying and laughing at the same time.

“I’m afraid I made your shoulder all wet.” She dabbed at it with her handkerchief.

After she’d thoroughly dried her face and blown her nose, and felt more composed, Teddy asked carefully, “So I gather he wasn’t who you expected?”

Isla sighed. “I don’t know what I expected.” She pondered on her words, only to retract them. “I suppose that’s not true. The harsh truth is that he didn’t come up to my expectations.” She looked at him with troubled eyes. “Is that so terrible of me? ”

“In what sense didn’t he meet your expectations?”

Once more, Isla had to ponder over this.

“He was no longer the Jem I used to know.” A deep sadness filled her.

“I suppose that is only natural, as we knew each other when we were children, and even though we had a close bond, it would be na?ve to expect a person to remain unchanged, both physically as well as character-wise, as they grow up. I made that mistake: I expected him to stay the same.”

But even as she uttered those words, she realised they were not the truth. What she had really hoped, deep down, was that their connection had remained the same; with the same sincere, child-like trust and light-hearted friendship and outlook on life.

Even though he’d felt familiar—his appearance, the way he spoke, some gestures, even—she hadn’t felt any friendship towards the Jem Fawe she’d met. There had been a chasm between them, as deep as the gorge Dante wrote about in his Inferno . They were strangers to each other.

And yes, even when he called her by the endearment that was reserved only for her, she had been glad that he’d remembered, but she hadn’t felt any closer to him.

And that was why she’d cried.

She’d mourned the loss of a friendship that she’d hung on to all her life, ever since she’d been a little girl.

As the carriage pulled up in front of Algie’s town house, Teddy hesitated before descending. “I think you need some time alone this evening. Shall we postpone tonight’s theatre visit? Shakespeare will not go away, and Hamlet will be there tomorrow.”

Isla looked at him thankfully. “Thank you for understanding. You have been an invaluable support today.” She pressed his hand.

Teddy looked at her warmly. “Always.” He did not release her hand. “There is something I want you to know, Lala.”

She looked at him inquisitively.

He drew in a deep breath. “I love you, Lala. More than I can properly express.”

Isla froze.

“I just need you to know that.”

Isla searched for words. “I—I—I don’t know what to say.

” Something told her that that was probably not what he’d hoped she’d say at that moment, but her mind had momentarily shut down with emotion.

It was simply too much. First Jem, with his entire lack of emotion, now Teddy, who exhibited too much.

She drew a shaking hand over her brow.

Teddy nodded. “I know. You need not say anything at all.” He released her hand gently.

She turned towards the townhouse, but shortly before she reached the door, she turned to him. “I am very fond of you,” she said in a low voice, so low that he had to bend down to understand her. “But…” She searched for words. “You must give me time.”