Page 16 of The Lady Sparks a Flame (The Damsels of Discovery #2)

16

I could trust a fact, and always cross-examined an assertion.

—Michael Faraday

The farther they got from the station, the less Phoebe resembled the daughter of a marquess.

“We are heading toward Clerkenwell,” Phoebe said, checking over her shoulder. “Do you have someplace in mind?”

Sam held out a hand to help her over the hole in the walkway, but Phoebe had already hopped ahead as a woman might do if she were annoyed with her husband.

Huffing a laugh, Sam picked up the pace to keep at her side.

“Don’t laugh,” she reprimanded. “I can blend in so no one recognizes Lady Phoebe Hunt, but you must help.”

“How shall I do that?” Sam asked, not in the least upset that Phoebe had given him an order.

“Just stop…” Stop what? Being so bright and beautiful? Sam Fenley exuded charisma the way Faraday cages gave off lightning.

“Look at you,” Sam said, oblivious to Phoebe’s musings as he dodged the crowds doing their shopping for supper. “Looking straight ahead rather than down your nose, moving aside so a man might have the right of way. No one would know it was you from far away.”

Phoebe bit her lip to contain her pleased smile. “I told you. I’m good at this.”

“You are better than good,” he replied.

She tripped over the compliment. How did Sam do it? Phoebe got a headache thinking of something nice to say, yet this man who, from the outside, had less than her, was able to hand compliments out freely.

As though it felt good to be kind.

As though being kind did not mean being weak.

Before they turned another corner, Sam yanked Phoebe backward and steered her to the street running perpendicular to them.

“If we go too far west, we risk the chance of running into someone who knows me.”

Three twisted lanes over, Sam stopped short in front of a warped oaken door. Above the entry hung a painted sign in the shape of a rooster.

“The Hairy Cock ?”

“Paint’s peeling. Welcome to the Hearty Cock, milady.”

“Don’t call me that, even in jest.” Phoebe held on to the handle and peered over Sam’s shoulder. “Who am I?”

This had to be the worst of situations they could find themselves in. The former head of a semiautonomous government agency and a friend of Prince Albert—both noblemen—were looking for her right now, convinced she had something to do with another killing.

Unconvinced, obviously, that she had changed enough or worked hard enough to erase the mistakes she’d made.

Still, despite the danger and the possible ramifications this would have on his welfare, and possibly his life, Sam Fenley continued to be so. Goddamned. Cheerful.

If she wasn’t falling in love with him, Phoebe might kill him.

Wait.

What?

“We’ll be fine,” Sam assured her, chucking her under the chin. It was a measure of Phoebe’s shock that she refrained from elbowing him in the gut for that.

“You are a shop girl from a bookstore on Brompton Street and I am me, because even this far over to Farringdon someone might know me.”

Phoebe nodded; unsteady on her feet.

“Shop girl,” she croaked. “Bookstore.”

“Aye.” Sam’s smile faltered. “Are you unwell?”

Yes. Yes, she was unwell. That must be it. Perhaps she’d contracted a tropical disease that ate away at her brain.

“Do I look unwell?” Phoebe asked. How could one tell if a person’s brain was being eaten away?

“You look as though you’ve bitten something sour. Or been given beet soup.”

Perhaps this was the reason Phoebe had such a ridiculous notion. She had eaten something sour.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I have eaten something sour and that is why I look this way. There is no other possible reason for me to look this way. Is there?”

Sam bit the corner of his lip, concern creasing the skin above his nose.

“Let’s go inside and have a sit-down,” he suggested.

Wonderful idea. She would sit, her stomach would eventually empty, and the outlandish idea she might lo—all outlandish ideas would disappear.

···

Sam brought Phoebe into the pub and settled her in a corner by a cheerful fire. There were one or two other couples in the great room, and a group of older women in the snug; a back room for women to drink without fear of uninvited attention.

Only after he’d brought back their drinks did Sam continue.

“Phoebe, a shop girl wouldn’t clean the rim of her glass with a handkerchief.”

A familiar spark of irritation lit her eyes.

“A shop girl from a bookstore on Brompton Street would know to do such a thing,” Phoebe said. “She wouldn’t wipe her chair or the table before she sat, and as you can see, I refrained from such.”

“True.” The exhilaration from their escape still bubbled in his veins. “Don’t recognize anyone here, but it doesn’t mean they don’t recognize me. Here’s the story. We wait here until Fenley’s Fripperies is closed. There will still be a few people working, but I’ll send them home with pay and tell them…dunno, tell them it’s a saint’s day. They won’t correct me, because who speaks against a day off with pay?”

Phoebe sipped at her lemonade and squelched a grimace. “Do you know some argue holy days off should be paid because it isn’t the worker’s fault they aren’t working on holy days, it’s the owner’s decision to close the factory.”

“Bosh,” Sam said. He sipped his ale and swallowed a curse. This tasted like warm piss. He wondered if the barman had given him the weak stuff because it would look bad for him to complain in front of a girl he was courting.

“Hmmmm. I seem to recall your broadsheet railing against the exploitation of workers,” Phoebe said. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, no?”

Sam scoffed. “?’Tisn’t the same at all. I pay my workers well, see to it they have the means to send their children to day school, and make sure no women are unsafe in their job.”

“The landowners who benefit from the Corn Laws claim they use the profits to feed and house their tenants, send their children to Sunday schools, and keep them from having to leave their families and slave away in the dirty, dangerous city,” she countered.

Sam opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. Phoebe was right. The landowners who exploited their workers did use such excuses.

He’d never considered giving pay on holy days. No one did. However, simply because no one did it, didn’t mean it was a bad idea. Sam chewed on this thought while Phoebe sipped at her ale.

Behind the wooden screen that separated the snug from the rest of the pub, women laughed; one of them too hard. A racking cough bounced off the walls and ceiling, followed by sympathetic murmurs. The coal fire crackled, and three old men in a corner debated the outcome of a bare-knuckle fight in a desultory manner, mellowed by ale and age.

Sam regarded Phoebe across the table. “Tell me. What do you believe in? In one breath you speak of ghosts and curses. In the next you talk about workers’ rights. Before we leave here, you will have made some snide remark about commoners and their willingness to sit in dirty chairs and drink from dirty glasses.”

She pursed her lips as though in thought, but mischief sparkled in her eyes.

“I am a woman of many facets, Mr. Fenley.” She paused. “And it isn’t only the nobility who objects to drinking from dirty glasses. I would venture to say even the merchant class might object to filthy—”

“All right. Note taken.”

“I…” Despite the clouds, the sky had been enormous in Cumbria, stretching overhead like the silk of a parasol, shades of gray and blue, sometimes green, or purple even. So vast and clean. Inside the pub, though, the windows were rarely given a cleaning; the soot and fog from outside left its trace on the sagging glass and everyone inside.

Phoebe might also appear small and dirty in this setting, but the Cumbrian sky had found its way into her pores and caused her skin to glow like the inside of a mussel’s shell. She would taste like enamel and salt if he set his tongue to her skin.

“I believed in him, at first.”

Sam blinked at the confession. “Believed who?”

“Adam Winters. My former…the former head of Omnium Democratia,” she clarified. “You may laugh at the stupidity of a socialite aristocrat falling for a rough-and-tumble radical, but I believed in their mission.”

How odd.

“You’re a republican at heart? Yet you call me a mercenary for turning mansions into flats?”

“Adam said in his speeches universal suffrage should include women.” Phoebe’s slightly abashed expression hardened. “As soon as he stepped in front of a crowd, it was as if some unseen chemical reaction occurred. When he spoke, any suspicion that he didn’t believe what he was saying disappeared. Everything Adam told us sounded…achievable. And right and fair.”

While the Chartists believed each man deserved a vote regardless of whether they owned property and rallied to end rotten boroughs, Sam remembered Greycliff saying the Omnis, led by Adam Winters, went even further than the Chartists. Granting women suffrage was radical in the extreme.

“I was angry at my father, convinced of my own intelligence—” Phoebe broke off with a bitter laugh. “I didn’t understand how much privilege I possessed, despite my father’s treatment. I wanted to be considered equal to a man, even if he was a bad and faithless man. That this bad and faithless man lied and never considered me an equal, never genuinely believed in my science or in me? Well. I learned an important lesson about trust from him. I should be grateful.”

“ I should like to beat Adam Winters to a pulp,” Sam said, surprising himself with the vehemence in his voice.

A blush turned her skin the color of a sunrise, reaching from her temples to the neckline of her dress. The dress was too fine for her to pass as anything other than a gentlewoman, but Phoebe had kept her inside-out pelisse around her shoulders and somehow managed to look a little less regal than usual.

She said nothing but rolled her eyes up and to the side. Sam considered teasing her even more but was distracted by her flush and how it set off her fine eyes.

If she had been a shop girl…

The tiny seed of an idea, a terrible idea, a truly awful idea, went and planted itself in his head. The idea that if Phoebe had been a shop girl, they would not have to hide. Sam could walk down the street with her, laugh with her, court her.

He might even come to…

No. Oh, no. That seed was a rotten seed giving root to a rotten idea. Sam wanted comfort and peace. Quiet and simplicity. Not a hurricane in human form.

Hoping to change the direction of his thoughts, Sam finished his ale in two gulps and hurried off to the bar to order more. Because Phoebe was not a shop girl and Sam never would be courting her, he took the opportunity to warn the barkeep against giving him another half-pint of donkey piss.

Outside the fog turned to mist and then to a desultory rain. By unspoken agreement, he and Phoebe stopped teasing and fell into an easy silence.

Listening to the hum of precipitation on the roof and the occasional rusty laughs from behind the wooden screen, they nursed their drinks along with their secrets.