Page 19 of The Lady Sparks a Flame (The Damsels of Discovery #2)

19

Q: But, pray, Mrs. B., what is the cause of the chemical attraction of bodies for each other? It appears to me more extraordinary or unnatural, if I may use the expression, than the attraction of cohesion, which unites particles of a similar nature.

—Mrs. Jane Marcet

Noises from the street drifted through a cracked window.

To Sam, the call of the coffee sellers and newsboys were the herald of the dawn, not the sun. Not in London, at least, where soot and grime coupled with damp air created a brown fog through which no heavenly light could penetrate.

He dropped a kiss on Phoebe’s forehead and ignored the sharp pain in his chest at the sight of her; naked, vulnerable, still flushed from the pleasure he’d given her.

Phoebe had woken the instant he left the covers. She’d said nothing, sitting but holding the coverlet over her chest. Her hair had escaped from the confines of hairpins and cap, her thick black locks spilling down her back, a few wisps still clinging to her face. A red S-shaped wrinkle resembling a vine stood out on one cheek.

“Good morning,” he’d said, infusing cheer into his voice, unsure of how Phoebe might respond, but knowing anything less would wound her.

Although she’d been mortified by her tears last night, he’d known what they meant. He had sisters. Tears were shed for happiness and joy almost as much as they were for frustration and sadness.

Sam had told her the tears were an honor and his pleasure to provoke. She’d rolled away and covered herself with the orange silk while he went to fetch a pail of water and some clean clouts. When he’d returned, she threatened him with delightful tortures if he ever mentioned her tears again.

Which meant he would have to mention them many times.

Now he walked, naked, to the far side of the room and pulled a sheet from where it had been covering a stack of unused wicker tables, then wrapped it around his waist.

Sam took his time while walking, assuming Phoebe was staring at his body. She’d said nothing, but Sam knew her eyes were upon him, like he knew she would avert her gaze should he swiftly turn.

Phoebe had been denied so many pleasures, small and large, she no longer believed she deserved them.

He brought back more water along with a few small apples he’d found in one of the desks and a tin of biscuits.

“I have an idea,” he told Phoebe an hour later after they folded the coverlets and then dressed.

“We don’t have time,” Phoebe said. “At least not time to enjoy it properly.”

Happiness. Was that the right word?

Unadulterated happiness lifted Sam from his perch at the window and back over to where Phoebe dabbed a cloth soaked in rosewater beneath her armpits. Her full arse shimmied against his thighs when he came up behind her and kissed the nape of her neck.

“That’s not what I’m talking about. Or, it wasn’t before you made me think of it.”

How was it her skin tasted like spring? An aftereffect of what they’d done, he supposed. Went and mixed up his senses. The floor had turned to clouds, and everything smelled like whatever soap it was she used in her hair.

Huge brass warning bells were ringing, but Sam was ready to dance to their tune, not run away. The time for sensibility and caution lay behind him. Phoebe had changed in the night from untouchable to human. Sam had never, ever imagined passion as a spectrum, but the two of them had plumbed its depths.

Bliss.

That was the word he’d been looking for earlier. Not happiness.

Bliss.

“If you’re finished panting like a hound in heat, do you mind helping with these corset strings?”

Sam obliged. “Do you know, when you look as though you’ve been sucking on a lemon, it gets me hot and bothered and thinking of sucking—Oowf.”

Phoebe had twirled round and pinched his lips closed.

“Do you know when you talk about getting hot and bothered it gets me bothered. Just bothered.”

Sam didn’t believe a word of it. A shadow of pink bloomed high on her cheeks and her eyes remained dark and interested. He allowed Phoebe her delusions and pulled his mouth back quick, bit her fingers lightly but suggestively, then turned her around and finished lacing her corset. She had been brave last night, and Sam wished to honor that.

“This corset is five years out of date,” he said when she leaned over—very nice—and picked up her dress. “Later you should stop and see Madame LaTour on the second floor for a fitting. There are new sorts of busks that are far more flexible.”

Without pause Phoebe stepped into her dress and tugged it over her arms, and he began the sad task of buttoning her while she weighed her next words.

Sam knew that’s what she was doing. Being one of those genius scientists and all, her brain was of the extremely large sort that hummed when it worked this hard.

Phoebe’s manner of calculation differed from his sister Letty’s. Whereas Letty would dive into her equations as if lost among them, tying one mathematical phrase to another, Phoebe examined the world from far away, like a hawk. Taking in variables, gathering evidence, then forming conclusions.

Kept her separated from what might influence her decision.

Like now.

“Reverting to your shopkeeping ways already, Sam?” The muscles in her neck tensed and she lifted her chin. “You’re not going to make a good impression with the noble ladies you wish to court if your conversations consist of you trying to sell them undergarments.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sam said. “Seems whatever I’ve been doing up until now is working well enough.”

“Hmmph.” Phoebe made a sound of disagreement, but said nothing more.

She would put up a fight; Sam knew it in his bones, but it would be a good fight.

A fair fight.

A fight worth getting hurt in when all was said and done.

Phoebe had lived up until now equating love with pain.

Sam was going to help her unlearn that equation.

···

Naked.

It didn’t matter that Phoebe was fully dressed and wrapped in a new pelisse, this one ready-made ( oh, the horror ) as she drifted anonymously—she hoped—through the busy morning crowds.

Clothed or not, Sam Fenley had seen her naked.

Vulnerable.

He’d seen her scars.

Seen her tears.

She really may have to kill him now.

“Smells like snow,” he said.

“Watch your step now.”

“Here, walk on the inside so your skirts won’t get dirtied.”

As he followed close on her heels along the cobbled streets, past buildings so old, they looked likely to topple over, Phoebe had to set her hand against the collar of her pelisse to be sure she was covered, so exposed he’d made her feel.

“The Fancy Footmen is around the corner,” Sam said, then reached for her arm. Phoebe stopped abruptly and backed into the entrance to a stucco building full of holes in the facade.

“Stop,” she said, biting the word almost in half.

Sam tucked his hands into the pockets of his greatcoat. Only two lapels for him and buttons carved of wood rather than brass, but the heavy indigo wool was of high quality and the coat fit his broad shoulders to perfection. A top hat so dark a blue, it appeared black sat atop his golden hair and his cheeks were red from the cold.

He was beautiful.

He was certain to mock her frailties and dismiss her fears. Wasn’t he?

“Stop talking to you?” Sam asked. A cloud passed overhead and the faintest of wrinkles remained behind when he furrowed his brow. “Stop with the plan? Stop looking at you? What? Tell me what I can do so you won’t knife me in the back simply because I survived the act of making love to you with your integrity—and my bollocks—left intact.”

This man was going to give her an apoplexy.

How could he stand to be with her in the light of day knowing she’d done something so grotesque to her body? How could he be so bloody charming and irrationally kind?

“Phoebe.” Sam looked both ways down the street, then crowded her against the doorway. The knocker pushed her bonnet forward and the brim tipped. She could see only the red wool of his scarf popping out of his greatcoat.

“I can honestly say making love to you was life-altering, and as with all life-altering events…”

“Oh, for the love of God.” She rolled her eyes.

“…I will never cease speaking of it. However”—he held his hand up when she spluttered her objection—“ however , at your request, I will stay silent on the subject until we can speak privately again. Ideally in a bed.”

“I’m not…”

The words stuck in her throat when two women walked past. One was stout and wore a ridiculous bonnet with a stuffed raven hanging to one side and the other, dressed much more sensibly, looked over at Phoebe and winked.

Winked.

Her humiliation was complete.

Oblivious to his surroundings, Sam continued speaking as if passersby had not winked at her.

“Now, we’re going stop in for a glass of gin at the Fancy while I slip some coin to your fella behind the bar, got it?”

This was the plan they’d come up with this morning once Phoebe had dressed and tried to recover her composure after last night.

They’d overheard in the pub yesterday that the bomb had gone off near Kennington Common. An anonymous letter had been sent to The London Times with a warning that more violence would follow if the Corn Laws were not repealed.

Phoebe believed if the bomb truly was set by former Omnis, there would be talk of it in the “regulars.” The pubs and bars where the Omnis used to drink.

Her plan was for Sam to buy information from the barkeep and use whatever he picked up to ingratiate himself among the patrons. Phoebe had donned a dress left behind by one of Sam’s sisters at the emporium, where the seamstress they employed had been prepared to shorten the hem and add trimmings. Phoebe planned to settle in at a table and listen for familiar phrases or stray bits of information, watching the crowd for familiar faces.

At first, Sam had outright refused.

“I would never take a lady to one of these places—”

Phoebe had cut him off. “I have worked hard to become invisible by choice.”

“What if there are Omnis in the pubs? What if they recognize you?” Sam had asked.

“Would anyone who knew Lady Phoebe Hunt believe she was in a gin hall, with a merchant, wearing ready-made clothing and drinking from dirty glasses?”

“But what if—”

“Sam. I invented a weapon that caused a man, a father, to die. I was going to sell it to the highest bidder, not out of political ideology or desperation. Out of anger. Anger at a man who can’t hurt me anymore.”

Sam had fallen silent, one hand rubbing at the down covering his chin, staring at her with eyes so pretty, they masked the brain inside his head.

“Watch,” she told him. Phoebe closed her eyes and pictured what sort of woman might sit quietly in a gin hall. Must have worked all day. Most likely there were children at home in a one-room flat who needed tending and a man nearby who needed soothing. For half an hour, this woman would clutch at this time alone harder than she held her gin cup.

From the look on Sam’s face when she opened her eyes, she’d succeeded in deepening her wrinkles, dulling her eyes, and letting her mouth fall into the lines of a woman who rarely laughed.

It was startling, then, when he set his palm to her cheek, the robin’s-egg blue of his eyes darkening to indigo.

“You are a wonder, Phoebe Hunt,” he said, brushing his thumb along the line of her jaw. “For a woman who claims not to care for anyone outside the aristocracy, you have a remarkable talent for observing the humanity of other people.”

Phoebe said nothing, neither acknowledging his words nor disputing them. Remarkable her observations might be, what she wore on her face was not a mask. She’d never had a room full of hungry children awaiting her, true. That desire, however, to hide from those dependent on her, the bone-deep exhaustion from a caste that couldn’t be described but to which women belong—that was real.

“I wouldn’t recognize you looking like this,” he said. Admiration had drained from his voice and sympathy replaced it.

Goddamn Sam Fenley and his overly large heart. Why was it him who could truly see her?

Phoebe pulled away from his touch. “Let me do what I’m good at, Sam. We don’t have time to waste.”

He’d deferred to her after that, but only in the planning.

The rest of the day, Sam treated her as if she were breakable. As if he could see the woman beneath the armor, the one who cried when she came, the one who had gone and lost all sense when it came to him.

They spent the day traveling from gin hall to pub to crowded inn; stopping every few hours at coffeehouses, where Sam tried to sober up between visits.

By the time a strip of pale gray had appeared in the east, Phoebe was unsteady with exhaustion.

“What do you think, then?” Sam asked. “Had enough for one night?”

They’d left the last pub, nothing more than one room fitted with shelves that ran round the wall at chest height. Attached to the shelves were cups an angry old woman in a ragged blue cap would fill for a ha’penny.

Both had sobered right quick. Even Sam couldn’t stomach drinking from cups that hadn’t been washed.

“I’m too tired to think,” Phoebe replied.

“It’s too far to walk back to the shop and still get a few hours’ sleep,” Sam said. “There is a doss near my house. We can buy a few hours there.”

Phoebe tried to hide her shudder.

Doss houses were scattered throughout poorer parts of the city. Many men and women did not earn enough coin to rent a room monthly. Forced by circumstances—some earned, most not—they would work odd jobs or, for the women, work as prostitutes, to make enough money for a warm meal, a few cups of gin, and a place to sleep for the night.

Those who had the most coin slept in the doss’s beds, four or five beds to a room, mattresses almost guaranteed to have bedbugs and lice. The men and women who ran the doss houses were creative in their ways to pack even more people into their houses. For only a pence, you could buy a seat on a bench with a rope hung between two walls, and when sleep overtook you, lean over the rope rather than sprawl on the hard wood of a floor. If Sam suggested it, there must be no other choice. They couldn’t risk sleeping outside. Their pockets would be picked, or a constable would wake them with the call to move on now .

“Did you ever sleep doss in America?” Sam asked.

Phoebe thought back to her travels. “Not often. Doss houses are different over there, with most of them used by laborers. They’re separated by sex, too.”

“?’S there a different name for those ones that have only women?”

“Not unless it’s a brothel,” she said.

Sam tripped over a rotted board in the walkway.

“You didn’t…”

The lobes of his ears turned cherry red. Phoebe let him sweat for a moment before answering.

“I did not. I stayed mostly in rooming houses or decent hotels. Sometimes when I went out to the Iowa Territory, I slept outside, beneath the stars. The landscape of the American west is…”

There were no words, truly, for the sight of the unbroken horizon; a sky so clear, it might have been a glass dome over the whole. The sound of wind when it careened through a canyon, the astoundingly loud roar a river made when its water turned white and brown, smashing against boulders that looked to be strewn by a giant’s hand.

Sam said nothing as Phoebe attempted to describe the scent of scrub brush and warmed sandstone, the ungainly majesty of a herd of bison, the weightlessness of living in a place where no one knew your past.

“What happens when you’re lonely?” he asked. “What about at night when you’ve a mind to set yourself in the parlor and play a hand of cards— not slapkopf—and have a coze with your family?”

“Sam,” she replied, too tired to pretend irony. “Even in England I have never, ever had a ‘coze’ with my family.”

A yawn escaped him then. He hid it behind a broad palm and strong fingers. Walking in the early-morning haze of river fumes and chimney smoke, he glowed with his healthy skin and guinea-bright hair.

On their way to the doss, they stopped at a bakery opening its window. Phoebe accepted a fresh baked roll from Sam and let the taste melt on her tongue like the most delicious of meals as they walked along the wooden walkways and cobbled streets.

“Grantham was right to worry,” Phoebe said. “Nearly everyone in those pubs was talking about how the Omnis are back and working with the anti–Corn Laws lobby.”

Sam tossed his roll in the air and caught it neatly. He’d been surreptitiously spitting his gin back in the cup for the last few hours and didn’t seem much worse for wear.

How annoying. It must be lovely to be young and fresh. Phoebe felt like a crone in comparison.

“Not all of them. Sounds like only a few of the hotheads are still around. Did you recognize the names? The ones I heard most were Aled Brew and Cai Llewelyn.

“I never interacted with most of the Omnis. They were hardworking men and women from Limehouse, Wapping, and Whitechapel. They weren’t violent per se; they were simply…”

Sam took a bite of his roll and made a sound of appreciation, but he kept his gaze on Phoebe.

She did not have to explain herself to him. She could continue walking and leave the subject behind.

“I told you; Adam had magnetism.”

He rolled his eyes. “Aye, the kind of magnetism that would overcome an intelligent woman’s better sense.”

Was he jealous?

The thought prickled beneath her skin, and Phoebe wished they were anywhere else but Farringdon in the early hours of the morning—perhaps a cozy cottage somewhere in the Lake District, or even better, out beneath the wide-open sky of the western territories. Difficult to dissemble in the blistering light of an all-seeing sun and the visceral embrace of the night in places where no other human had yet trod.

“The kind of magnetism people use as their excuse for violence.”

“Did you?” Sam asked.

This was a fair question, wasn’t it? She’d developed a weapon ostensibly to sell and get her the money to make a new life away from her father, but also because she was in pain, she wanted to inflict that pain on others as well.

“Once upon a time I did,” she confessed.

More people appeared on the street. In a few minutes, the bells would ring from St. Bart’s to let folks without timepieces know the morning hour. The coffee sellers had already packed their carts with their scalding potion and would trundle off to wherever the corner was that they’d staked their claim.

“What changed?”

A girl, no more than five or six, walked toward them, clad in a rough, homespun frock, holey stockings, and a thin shawl. She carried a basket full of wilted violets tied into tiny bouquets with dirty ribbon. An older girl, most likely thirteen or fourteen, walked with her, her own basket full of shriveled oranges.

If Phoebe bought out their baskets, she would bring too much attention to her and Sam. Besides, it wouldn’t change anything for them at all. They would turn around and go back for more dead flowers and sour oranges because that was the fate of poor girls in London.

“Tierney’s spent three months training me before I was sent out to the Iowa Territory. They thought I’d have less a chance of seeing someone I knew than if I were in a shared territory like Oregon,” she explained, watching as the girls walked together, each with their eyes on the ground, bumping into each other in a familial fashion.

The instant Phoebe set foot in America, the people’s expectations and desires hummed through the crowds, in the cries of the sailors, and the bellows of the carriage drivers. It was intoxicating.

Iowa Territory had been a huge shock. There everything not native—from towns to farming to the people themselves—were brought by White settlers from the east hoping to reinvent themselves. Starting anew meant purging the land of its Indigenous peoples, however. Each day brought the juxtaposition of settlers who treated the Indigenous like vermin but treated the people in their tiny communities like family.

“Almost a year after I came to the territory, there was a public hanging.”

Phoebe stopped talking when the girls drew abreast of them. Sam winked and tossed each of them a pence, pocketing an orange and presenting Phoebe a wilted posy.

“There was a great deal of disagreement as to the guilt of the man, with some saying he’d been made a scapegoat by the farmers,” she said. Distracted by memories, she thanked Sam and tucked the posy into the bodice of her pelisse.

“He’d been blamed for stealing livestock, but his family claimed he’d been home during the times the livestock was taken. Like here, there had been alcohol served, and a crowd gathered to watch. Unlike here, the alcohol was a type specific to the region. They called it firewater, and if you drank too much, you were certain to go blind.”

“Cor,” said Sam with a note of admiration in his voice.

“Everyone was drinking, and then one of the man’s relatives began a fight with one of the farmers. Soon they’d both drawn others into the argument and it turned…”

Phoebe had seen a prairie fire once; a sight that was both terrifying and arresting. The violence that followed in the wake of the men’s argument that day was like the prairie fire. It swept the entire crowd and burned as hot.

“I’d held myself in remove when the Omnis demonstrated, and had never seen anything like the sight of armed and angry men screaming hateful words and ready hurt, or even to kill.”

Phoebe hadn’t been frightened for herself. A dark, wounded part of her lived forever in a rage. She almost wanted to wade into the fight with a similar urge to the one she used to get before cutting herself.

“The crowd forgot why they were fighting and engaged in destruction for no reason.” The smell of smoke and sounds of shots fired had filled the streets. Profanity of both the horrific and the mundane had echoed against the buildings, followed by the sound of glass breaking as stores were looted.

“The next morning those men slept, sated after the violence while the women swept the glass from the broken windows, put paper over the windows, and carried on what needed to be done. The children had to pick their way through piles of broken furniture and glass, skip over the puddles of blood.”

Not one single man helped to clean the mess they made.

Only the smallest part of Phoebe walked the streets of London with Sam Fenley. The rest of her was back in that town, the next morning. The smell of violence had made her gag.

“Before I left for America, Violet told me this would happen, but I didn’t listen because I was angry,” she whispered, more to herself than Sam. “It’s true, though. Whenever men beget violence on other men, no matter how noble the cause may be, it is women and children who endure most of the damage. It is their livelihoods which are burned in riots, women’s bodies raped in war, children whose innocence is lost, littered along the road like ashes when the fires go out.”

Sam pulled Phoebe out of the way of a coffee seller’s cart and steered her into a row of mews behind a block of well-kept houses.

“Oh, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant,” he said.

Glory be, Sam Fenley was quoting Shakespeare.

“My father is physically strong,” Sam said. He stopped and stood facing her, taking both Phoebe’s hands into his, eyes searching her face. “But my mother’s will puts his muscles to shame. You are right. Women and children are victims in the aftermath of violence men visit upon each other when in conflict.”

“I didn’t understand that using violence as a means to an end made me into my father,” Phoebe said quietly. “I took away a woman’s husband and a child’s father.”

The truth of that sat like a coal in her chest every day. A little boy laughing, a woman holding on to her man’s elbow as they crossed the street—small gestures of love would set that coal to burning and fill her belly with shame.

“You are not your father, Phoebe,” Sam said. “You would never be that cruel.”

How did he not understand? She could be crueler than he could imagine. Every time her father had belittled her, every time his palm struck her skin, he had transferred his self-loathing and fear onto her. Like a fungus.

Phoebe wouldn’t infect Sam with this same disease.

Although her heart cried out against it, Phoebe pulled upon the last reserves of her strength, lengthened her spine, and looked down her nose at Sam. How familiar the cold felt as she numbed herself. She could say anything, do anything, and it wouldn’t touch the secret soft part of her.

“You are a fool, Sam Fenley. I suppose living in a hatbox with as many siblings as your jolly pa and sweet little mam could breed has led you to believe in such fantasies.”

Sam nodded thoughtfully. “Might be.”

“Well, why don’t you leave me alone and go back home, Mr. Fenley?” she said. “Tell your family happy endings are a lie.”

Instead of appearing affronted, Sam simply nodded again. “Or tell them yourself. One of them is standing behind you.”