Page 1 of To Sketch a Scandal (Lucky Lovers of London #4)

When it came to such concepts as “following rules,” Warren Bakshi was a hit-or-miss sort of chap.

Take market day, for instance, which was Warren’s responsibility in his family of two.

“Thank you so much, Mr. Singh,” he sighed as he loaded his basket.

This cheerful, round-cheeked stall owner was about the same height as him, but Warren angled himself so he was looking up, appreciative, loyal, willing even, should it come to that.

It wouldn’t with Mr. Singh—Warren knew his audience—but the bloke was receptive in his own quiet way.

He blushed and waved a hand like the low price Warren had negotiated was more than standard, perfectly normal, nothing he wouldn’t give to any fellow with an old mum to care for back home, smoldering eyes and smile aside.

It was best to leave this sort of exchange quickly with deals in hand.

This was the market, after all, not the molly bar where he worked in the evenings when his domestic duties were exhausted.

There he could smolder and seduce and then carry on for as long as it was fun for all parties, through a drink and a chat and maybe all the way into one of the back rooms if they felt like it.

It was risky, though, to push chaps like this—ones who might not even understand why they liked Warren so much—too far too often. Rules of the game.

But today, Warren had one more rule to break before he went home, and he’d do it most affordably with a little help.

He leaned over the stall like he did over his bar, avoiding the baskets of vegetables as best he could and looking up like the two of them were conspirators.

Everyone liked to feel like they were in on something naughty.

Though the ability to feel that way himself had dulled after years of debauched living, he sure knew how to whip it up in others.

“Say, do you happen to know the best place to buy…” Warren rolled his eyes demonstrably.

“A cheap sort of a sari? It’s for someone who won’t, ah…

” He jerked his head to a couple of white women at the other end of Mr. Singh’s stall who were eyeing an obviously overpriced, premixed curry powder instead of simply asking him about his well-sourced collection of proper spices.

“Someone who won’t know the difference, and I don’t want to spend too much. ”

Not precisely an earth-shattering concern, but it didn’t matter what the subject was when Warren pulled out all the stops like that.

Mr. Singh swelled with the happiness of helpfulness, laughing and pointing past stalls overflowing with baskets of early-autumn produce, barrels of oysters, and fat towers of dusty flour sacks, to a stall that fluttered ostentatiously with bright fabrics and cheap incense holders.

Though it was run by a family on Warren and Mr. Singh’s side of the neighborhood, it was getting more traction from fashion-hungry wives like the ones with the curry powder than savvy shoppers like Warren.

“Thanks, mate.” At the bar, he’d call the bloke love , but from the blush his words elicited, he might as well have. He added a friendly wink, setting himself up for another good price next week. “You really are the best.”

If Mr. Singh suspected that Warren had implicitly lied about whom the sari was for, he did not show it.

But was it really much of a lie, in the end?

As he went to the cart to secure a piece of the mass-produced “Oriental” garbage that English socialites were positively manic for these days, he wasn’t convinced and didn’t trouble himself over it.

After all, when he showed up draped in the sari himself for the upcoming drag party at The Curious Fox, most of his friends were no different from these housewives: they wouldn’t know the difference between a beautiful, hand-woven piece and a cheap knockoff.

Dress-up wasn’t his passion—he was more interested in how to get clothes off .

Thus, while he’d happily break society’s rule about whether he ought to attend such parties, he wasn’t about to break his budgetary rules over anything he had to put on .

“Will you hold it for me?” he asked after he’d charmed the woman at the next market stall (he only bedded in one direction, but could flirt with anyone) and selected a sari that was decidedly low-quality, but still boasted pretty colors. “Just till tomorrow? I get paid tonight.”

The seller agreed, and Warren went on to finish his shopping and other errands.

The postbox was his last stop on the way home.

Once he got the box unlocked, he followed the rules: keep his eyes slightly averted to the rows of other boxes and the harried commuters in their bank collars and work boots so he could not see the return addresses.

He felt, rather than saw, that there were three pieces of mail in the Bakshi box.

Bills, he figured, but he did not check, practiced at the art of slipping the post into his market basket without looking even once.

That was the rule. And it was one he dared not miss.

He went home to the little house he shared with his mother and two other widows who’d gone in with them on the rent.

Warren was strictly dedicated to the budget, but no amount of frugality could have allowed a then-sixteen-year-old Warren to keep the house he’d grown up in once his father died and his older brother, Harry, ran off to “make the family fortune.” With prudence and cleverness, though, they’d at least not had to leave their tidy neighborhood entirely, nor put themselves in the hands of Christian missionaries who offered food and shelter for prices far more existential than anything you could find at the market.

Pleasantly mechanical with habit, Warren went to the kitchen and unloaded his shopping on the well-organized pantry shelves.

Its sections for everything from flours and cheeses to oils and spices were labeled and marked by name with swirling doodles of different animals creeping through the letters.

Bored one day while Mother was recovering from one of her fainting spells and frustrated when he could not find what he was looking for in the pantry, he’d organized the shelves and put up the silly labels in a whim so childish, he’d certainly have destroyed them by now if not for how pleased the women had been when they found them.

So now, half a decade on, flour remained arbitrarily associated with a monkey perched atop the stacks, spices with an elephant spraying flavor from her trunk, oil with the turtle who balanced the bottle on his back, and so on.

Mother and the other widows in the house were seamstresses.

The other two worked the sweatshops, but Mother could not, so it was as common a sight as anything to find her stooped sturdily at the foot of her fabric-draped dummy in the downstairs sitting room, fingers nimble on the custom order, and talking in bright, rapid Punjabi to Mrs. Ahuja, one of their neighbors.

It seemed impossible to imagine that mother needed the neighbor here, not just to sew, but to keep an eye on her.

Mother was always bright and nimble and sturdy. Until the moment she wasn’t.

After finding a stopping point in work and talk, she sprang upright to greet him, slim but not frail, aging but not stooped, with still more black than gray in her pinned-up braid.

Though her status was lesser than it once had been, she had always remained as tidily groomed and fashionably dressed as life and work allowed.

She fussed over some imperceptible imperfection in the fall of his jacket, trying similarly to fix something about his rakishly-long hair.

The jacket he permitted, but he leaned out of the way when she came for the hair.

She smiled and rolled her eyes toward Mrs. Ahuja.

“Always so vain,” Mother said.

“He has every right to be.” Mrs. Ahuja winked. “And my granddaughter very much agrees.”

“Is that so?” Warren said lightly, as if he’d not heard that one before, not from her nor from any other of the myriad neighbors with marriageable daughters and granddaughters who were always eyeing him with secondhand interest. He didn’t have much money, but neither did they, so appearing charming and responsible made him a decent catch anyway.

In theory. “Well, tell her I’m flattered, but that there’s only room for one woman in my life. ”

He put a hand to his heart and smiled winningly at his mother, who pursed her lips at this too-true joke he’d told perhaps once too often.

Still, she didn’t argue. Hearty complaint and begrudging acceptance seemed to go in cycles, but this week, she was resigned to the idea that he might follow through with his threat to stay a bachelor forever.

“Do you have the post?” she asked, changing the subject before Mrs. Ahuja could go on and embarrass them further.

Warren handed her the letters with a dutiful flourish. They sat together on the sofa, Mother resting the letters face down upon the skirts of her day dress.

This habit, born of Mother’s difficulties in crowded spaces like post offices, had begun back when there was still hope of news about Father’s lost ship, one of the last the East India Company sent out from London.

She had not wanted him to have news before she did.

It was silly now that Father’s death was long-confirmed and their box contained mostly advertisements, bills, and the very occasional letter from Warren’s wayward older brother, but they maintained the ritual nonetheless.

They did not count aloud anymore, but on the third heartbeat, she turned the letters over.

“So, what have we got?” Mother held up the first piece of mail. A bill from the druggist, for her medicines. Not unexpected or extravagant. It was set aside to be dealt with.

Then she picked up the second piece, a little postcard without an envelope.

“Oh, Warren!” she said. “You should look into this.”