The Pretender (17 page)

As they walked away, she glanced over her shoulder to see the woman clutching the coins in her hand and staring after them as if Simon had just saved her very life. Judging from the number of thin children clustered about the flower seller's skirts, Agatha had to wonder if perhaps he had.

A generous thief. How perfectly Simon.

He stopped again. Agatha followed the direction of his gaze, but saw only a child, a soot-blackened little fellow who sat on the ground, dozing against the wheel of a vendor's cart, apparently too weary to eat the bruised apple he had obtained.

Agatha looked up at Simon. He didn't seem touched so much as taken aback.

"What?" she asked him softly. "What do you see that I don't?"

"Myself." The word came so quietly, she scarcely heard it.

She looked back at the boy, at the brushes and rags that he had carefully entwined with his legs to prevent theft of them while he rested. On closer inspection she could see under the soot to the gaunt hollows in his cheeks and the deep shadows beneath his closed eyes.

"Are you truly a chimneysweep then?"

"I was." He seemed to shake off the spell of memory to glance at her. "I'd not fit now, you know."

Agatha looked back down at the child. At Appleby, the local sweep was a prosperous man whose many sons, large and small, helped with the family business. There was no comparison of those laughing children to this thin, exhausted boy.

"Is it very hard?"

Simon shrugged. "It's grueling work, but I'm sure he feels he's lucky to have it."

Still, the memories swamped him. The tight flue, the choking soot, the pace of chimney after chimney, some so hot the bricks would leave blisters on his hands, some so cold with disuse his bones would ache. The endless climbing until he could scarcely stand at the end of the day. The hollow hunger when his masters had decided not to pay him for some imagined flaw in his work.

Lost in recollection, he was barely aware of Agatha leaving his side. Then he realized that she bent over the sleeping lad, gently touching his shoulder.

The boy blinked up at her in confusion. Simon could only imagine his thoughts. Most ladies would flick their skirts from his vicinity, but never kneel and touch him. In her cream velvet spencer and matching bonnet, Agatha must look like an angel to the little sweep. Simon rather thought she did himself.

She took the lad's grimy hand between her own with not a thought for the condition of her gloves. Simon thought he saw folded paper pass into the child's hand. It must have been pound notes, for the little lad's blue eyes grew large with disbelief, although he was careful not to look down or in any way betray what he had in his grasp.

Still, Simon thought it likely that the boy would be ducking into the nearest dark corner very shortly to examine his prize.

Agatha smiled encouragingly at the boy, who gazed back at her with near worship.
Yet another conquest,
mused Simon. She did rather collect them with her ready kindness.

She returned to Simon's side. "Shall we buy something? My appetite is quite invigorated by all this attractive produce. Perhaps some of those lovely greens to have with our dinner?"

She turned to the lettuce vendor, but Simon stopped her with a hand to her arm. "Why did you do that?"

Her soft brown eyes shifted away. "Because when I looked back at him, I saw you as well."

He let her go then, unwilling to let her see how her simple answer had touched him. As he watched her spirited haggling with the vendor as if she'd not just given ten times the amount away without a thought, he had to admit finally to himself that the main cause of his growing distaste for his former friend was less anger over James's probable betrayal and more anger over James's treatment of this singular woman.

They walked on together, Agatha commenting on things that Simon had stopped noticing years ago, and Simon providing explanations to her endless curiosity.

Simon bought her a bit of honeycomb from the beekeeper, and Agatha shared it with him. He made her laugh when he shuddered at its sweetness.

Still, for her, the taste brought back Appleby and summer in the orchards, and the apple-blossom honey that she'd had on her toast every morning of her life.

Her heart stung from homesickness, although the last thing she wished to do was return right now to place herself in unfriendly hands. There was so much to see and experience in London.

And there was Simon.

Simon was surprised by his own reaction to being back at the market. He'd not been back since his youth, for fear of reliving his guilt and pain.

But although so much was the same, the same sounds and smells and sights of his childhood, he didn't recognize a soul. Well, it had been twenty years, and the life of a street merchant was a short and hard one.

Yet now he felt himself relax inside, as if this were a place where no one expected anything from him.

These folk worried about war, to be sure. But fighting on the Peninsula was a distant thing next to feeding themselves and their families for the next week until Market Day came round again.

Perhaps that was what he needed, to focus upon the immediate, short-term goal. Getting to the root of Agatha's secrets would be a good start.

"Tell me about where you grew up, Agatha."

"If you'll tell me about how you came to be a thief."

Her retort was swift, and she smiled as she said it, but Simon knew she was serious. He'd get nothing from her without sharing himself first. "Very well."

"I agree. You tell me your story, and I shall tell you mine." She stuck out her hand to shake on it.

Simon smiled. "A deal in Covent Garden is never sealed unless the hagglers spit into their palms first."

"Ew." She looked at her palm as if wondering if it would ever be the same afterward, then raised her hopeful gaze to his. "Must we?"

"No, we may pass on that this once." He shook her hand firmly. "But this deal is binding, nonetheless."

She nodded, and they turned to make their way onward through the labyrinth of stalls and carts.

"Very well, then. I saved a rich man's son from kidnapping, and he rewarded me by—"

He almost said "sending me to school" but stopped himself at the last moment.

"—by teaching me everything he knew about locks, and safety boxes, and making my way through the tightest fortification."

Agatha seemed a bit doubtful. "That was a reward?"

"It was for a boy who kept starvation at bay by spending his days climbing chimneys and his nights sleeping in alleys."

"What about your mother? Where was she?"

His mother had been closing the door on her child, desperate to feed them both, but not desperate enough to entertain her "visitors" in front of her son.

He could still see the shame in her eyes as she pressed a copper into his hand for his next several meals and pushed him from their grimy room night after night. And it still made him ache.

"My mother was… lost to me by then."

Agatha's gentle hand on his arm pulled him from that memory. "I'm sorry, Simon. I lost my mother when I was young. I know the pain never truly leaves you."

Simon shook his head, a quick, fierce rejection. He didn't want her mistaken sympathy. "She was not dead yet. Not then. Not until I—" He looked away for a moment. "I think perhaps she wished it, sometimes, but she kept up the fight nonetheless. I'm sure she thought that someday it would be over, that she would no longer have to whore for her survival and mine."

He waited for her scorn. It did not come. Her eyes were as gentle as a doe's. Loneliness spiked through him, accompanied by a sudden craving for her warmth. Why couldn't this woman be someone different?

An ordinary sort, without secrets. A woman without ties to a man who was fast becoming Simon's enemy.

Agatha was watching his face. Simon looked away. "Where was your father?"

He looked at her carefully and decided to take a chance. It was a calculated chance, not an effort to reveal his true self to her. Of course not.

"More to the point,
who
was my father? As a boy, I imagined all sorts of men were my father. Gentlemen, lords, even the King himself."

She said nothing, but neither did she show distaste. He continued.

"But my mother never had custom from any but the lowest of men, if they had the coin. Rat catchers, ragmen, the goose boy. That was the source from which I most likely sprang."

"Simon? Why were—"

"Your turn," he said roughly.

"Oh. All right." She walked beside him in silence for a moment.

Was she preparing to lie to him some more?

"I have lived always in the country, until I came to London for Jamie. My home is a beautiful place. Especially in the spring, when the apple blossoms make such a perfume one becomes almost drunken on it. Then, just before summer, the petals fall, and for a few magical days, it snows flowers."

Simon smiled at the fancy. She looked at him a bit warily.

"You find that silly and notional, but it's quite true. When I was young, I used to gather the petals into a pile, just as we did with leaves in the autumn, only smaller of course."

She smiled into the distance. "Just enough for one small girl to fling herself into and be buried in pink snow."

Simon couldn't help it. He was charmed by the vision of tiny, chubby Agatha leaping into the flowers. "Were you always such a creature?"

She glanced at him, one brow raised. "What do you mean?"

"Running wild in the country as free as a fawn."

She nodded. "Oh, yes, for a while. Then, when I realized that I wasn't safe at all, I stayed properly close to home."

"Why weren't you safe?"

"Repulsive Reggie is the son of a neighboring lor—landowner. He's a horrid man and he was a horrid boy." She walked in silence for a moment. "He caught me alone once when I was a child. I couldn't have been more than eleven, so he would have been about seventeen."

Simon didn't want to hear this. He didn't want to know that the little girl of his vision had not had a life that was all apple blossoms.

"I was running wild, just as you said. Staying out in the orchards all day, swimming in the brook in my knickers."

Her pace slowed, and Simon found himself pulled nearer by the way her voice dropped to a whisper. She was looking down at her hands, toying with the orange he had bought for her.

"I didn't realize he had been watching me. Following me, possibly for weeks. I was very young, but I appeared… well, older, you understand? I wasn't tall, but I was quite mature."

Sick dread began to twine like poisonous vines in Simon's gut. A child-woman, still lost in a child's world while a man watched her with lust in his black heart.

"Did he know your true age?"

She seemed startled that he spoke but nodded. "Of course. We've known each other all our lives."

The bastard. If Simon let her continue with her story, he was very much afraid he'd have to kill someone. Someone named Reggie.

"Be that as it may, he cornered me one day in the ruins. We've an old castle there—well, not really. It's simply the shell of an old manor, but I used to think of it as a castle. I played there often. He knew I'd be there eventually, I suppose."

She abruptly handed him the orange and turned to look at a display of dried figs. Simon looked down at the sticky fruit in his hand. She had thoroughly mangled it as she had told her story, although her tone had been almost casual.

Agatha returned with a packet of the figs, seemingly quite repaired. Should he ask her to continue? He had no right, but he thought if he didn't learn the truth, no matter how terrible, he might never rest again.

But she continued on her own.

"He sprang upon me, and pushed me to the ground. Then he tore my bodice… He was so much larger there wasn't a thing I could do. He held me helpless as he… touched me."

She paused to tuck the figs into her reticule. When she turned back to him, she was a bit pale but calm.

"It must have only lasted a few moments, but it seemed like hours. He would have gone further, I think, but my screams frightened him. I can be very loud when I choose to be. And Reggie always was a coward."

She fell silent then, and they walked on. It was as if there was a circle of privacy around them even as they moved through the crowd.

Simon was quiet as well, but his was an enraged silence. The child, assaulted and betrayed, had grown into a woman who was still being used and dishonored.

Simon had always thought that James had agreed with his stance on prostitution. Yet here was evidence to the contrary. A woman, kept by James for pleasure, whom he had made clear he had little feeling for.

"You don't have to marry a woman, Simon. You don't even have to love one."

Yet Agatha loved James. It was in the gentle way she called him Jamie. The way she focused her considerable determination on finding him.

Was James really any better than Reggie?

Agatha turned to him, her smile a bit shy. "I never told anyone before, not even Jamie. I don't know why I'm telling you. Perhaps it is because I think you know something about people like Reggie."

Simon met her gaze and nodded. There was no denying it, so he didn't bother.

Satisfied, Agatha continued walking. "I never felt truly safe again, although it is better since I came to London. The world had become a darker place for me."

She took a deep breath. "There is foulness walking this earth. When this foulness touches you, it changes you. You lose something precious. If you are strong, you may gain wisdom as well, but mostly, you simply lose."

It was as if she'd read a page from his past. Simon felt a twinge of something that felt suspiciously like gratitude. A man wasn't supposed to put these things into words. A man was meant to soldier on.

For the first time, he saw that a woman might have her own strength, in that she wasn't afraid to speak her heart.

And sometimes, his.

Agatha couldn't believe that she had told Simon about Repulsive Reggie in the open marketplace. It was mortifying to think that she might have been overheard.