Wilful Impropriety (43 page)

“That’s the second train,” Ben says, and urges the horse to speed up.

John still looks mad. I did him a disservice, thinking he didn’t want to kiss me because I was the wrong color. But he’s a fool to think that there’s better out there for me than a common footman, or even that I’d want someone else.

“I skipped to the end of the book,” I tell him. “They go to Australia. Mr. Micawber and Aunt Betsy and Little Em’ly. They find the courage to leave and go to someplace entirely new.”

Steam rises over the trees as the train draws near the town. Ben has to stop the wagon because a cart has overturned in the lane outside the church. “Better run,” he advises, puffing on his pipe. “You won’t make it otherwise.”

John grabs my bag, swings down to the dirt, and helps me climb down. We dash through the mud. The train blasts its whistle and the brakes squeal as it slows down. When we come to the station I reach for my pocket, but John is already pushing coins under the ticket window. He presses a green cloth purse into my hand.

“It’s all I have,” he says. “Two years of saving my pay. It’ll take one person farther than two.”

The train shudders to a halt outside. The rain slants down harder, trying to drench the passengers stepping up to the cars.

“I don’t need your—” I start, but can’t finish. I can’t finish because John is kissing me. Here, in the train station, with the ticket clerk gaping at us, John is kissing me with both his hands on my shoulders, his breath hot and sweet like jam. It’s the kind of kiss a lover gives his beloved when he thinks they’ll never be reunited again. I push against him just as hard, this silly and handsome boy who has done so much for me.

“All aboard!” calls the conductor.

John breaks away, takes my hand and drags me toward the exit.

“I have my own money,” I try to tell him. “Use yours for yourself and come with me.”

“It’s a gift! Don’t argue with me.”

He practically lifts me up the steps and pushes me into the arms of the conductor. I try to jump right back down, but the conductor says, “There now, missy,” and blocks the way. Perhaps he’s had unfortunate experiences with young women leaping off. The train is moving already, carrying us further down the tracks with clatter and smoke. I dash into the nearest carriage and push my way past a startled elderly couple.

“Excuse me!” I drop the window open and throw some banknotes down to John. “I don’t need your money! Come with me!”

Befuddled, he watches the money twist in the rain and wind. He grabs at a sodden note. “Where did you get this?”

The train speeds up with a burst of noise and strength.

I toss more money. “It’s mine! Come with me! Come to Australia!”

John picks up another note. Behind him, the station master is gaping in astonishment. I think John is going to remain behind, to stay with the world he knows, but then he grins and he scoops up another note, runs and plucks up another. His cap flies off and the air drenches his face.

Maybe nothing good can come of this—a white boy and a brown girl, fistfuls of stolen money, the world waiting to disapprove. Maybe Australia will always be just a word, and we’ll never get further than East London.

But he’s running, running for me, running for our future, and I go back outside to the stairwell and help him hop aboard.

I have never told anyone this before, and I never will again. Just this once, for posterity’s sake, I shall be frank regarding my origins, and I shall tell you how it is that an illiterate woman of low birth became one of the most prominent surgeons in all of London. And how that selfsame woman took another woman to wife.

My mother was an opium-den owner’s daughter, whom he sold at various intervals to well-heeled customers seeking other diversions in addition to the pleasures of the poppy. She died when I was twelve, and I could see my fate written in my grandfather’s eyes. He would sell me, too, to the highest bidder.

That was the day I became, for all intents and purposes, a boy.

I left my grandfather’s den, dressed in boy’s clothes, my hair shorn as fashionably for a boy of my age as I could manage with shears and a tarnished mirror. Though I could bind my budding breasts and sew pads into my clothes to give myself more of a boy’s shape, there was little I could do about my fine and slender hands. For the next few years, I took what rough work I could, glad for the blisters and scars if they would prove me more a man than my fellows.

There was enough Englishman in me, thankfully, to pass, though more than one sneakthief or pickpocket commented on the yellow tint of my skin in certain lights. Still, few dared to challenge me, especially after I beat Billy Jenx fair and square in a boxing match down by the docks when I was sixteen. For a time after that, I ruled the roost, and the name of Jonathan Wells (as I called myself) was known far and wide in the Whitechapel rookery as one to fear.

I soon got the eye of a deliveryman who was looking to offload some of his clientele onto someone reliable and hard, someone known and feared but who wouldn’t necessarily cause trouble himself. At first blush, it was honest work—but the deliveries became increasingly odd. Butcher-paper-wrapped jars I was forbidden to open, parcels sodden with what could only be blood. My pickup points were odd, as well. I hoofed it all over London, most often meeting shady characters around cemeteries or sanatoriums. I never once questioned my buyer, a surgeon of high repute in Kensington. The work was easier than any I had done before and paid a bit better, too, and if the parcels seemed questionable, what difference did it make to me? I was merely the messenger boy.

Usually, I went to the surgeon’s office for my deliveries. His man would meet me at the back door and take the parcels with the barest of nods, and my purse. But one day, the seller, a new chap who insisted I meet him out near Nova Scotia Gardens, told me I was to take the parcel directly to the surgeon’s house and I was to wait for his reply.

I went to the new address with definite interest. I often peered through the iron fences at fancy houses, glimpsing a life through the windows that I could scarcely imagine. Girls in beribboned dresses, their long curls sliding over their shoulders. Gentlemen with their frock coats and impeccable white gloves. Velvet-covered furniture and clean-burning whale-oil lamps. Curios and whatnots my light fingers could make short work of, had I but a few moments inside. Plenty of the boys out on the street spat at this new money, pretending that they didn’t want any of it for themselves. They especially made fun of those who managed to claw their way up out of the rookeries and establish themselves as merchants or clerks or whatever other (mostly) honest trade they might find.

I took a piss at these men myself in the gin palaces and at the baiting pits, but secretly, I couldn’t help looking into their windows, gazing at a magic future I wished I knew how to enter.

So it was with great curiosity that I went to the front gate of the surgeon’s house and rang the bell, as I’d been told. Normally, these things were done at back gates and in side alleys. That I should go to the front gate was even more curious.

The footman who came looked a little askance at me until I showed him the parcel with its address and note.

He nodded and brought me in by the front door. I removed my cap and dusted my coat and trousers as covertly as I was able.

The man led me into a sort of parlor or study—I wasn’t sure which. Books lined the walls. I settled into a leather chair which gave off the pleasant smell of cigars and brandy. “Please wait here,” the man said. He looked down his nose as if daring me to steal anything.

He needn’t have worried. Everything looked much too heavy to lift, much less stow away in my jacket. Except perhaps for a few heavenly smelling cigars in the humidor on the desk. I eyed the door and the humidor. Just as I was reaching, I heard the door open. I slipped back into my chair.

I expected the surgeon’s dour face—though I’d no idea why I assumed him dour, I’d never seen him—and so was surprised when a young lady bustled into view. She didn’t see me—I suppose my stillness and the drabness of my clothes helped me blend in a little too well. She wore a gorgeous sapphire-blue silk gown, the sort of color I remembered seeing in the opium den of my childhood. I had honestly missed such color; it reminded me of my mother in one of her lovely gowns—how she lit every room she ever entered. The gown was offset by a diaphanous lace chemisette that both covered and revealed tantalizing hints of her bosom. But it was her slender white neck that held my gaze, the way her braided chestnut chignon rested so regally upon it.

Any man would have been fascinated. I certainly was.

The girl still hadn’t seen me. She reached for the humidor and lifted a couple of cigars from it, looking toward the door as she hastily stuffed them into her chemisette.

Then she saw me and started. She drew herself up, masking her surprise with an unapologetic glare that would have turned me to stone had she the power to do so. Her eyes were as blue as her gown.

“It’s rather rude to spy on a young lady without introducing oneself,” she said.

I raised a brow, but couldn’t help smiling. “Some might say it’s rather rude to steal one’s father’s cigars.”

The stony facade cracked then. “You won’t tell Papa, will you?”

But before I could say anything further, her papa was admonishing her from the doorway. “Wilhemina Constance Grace!”

I stood from my seat at the sound of his voice, lodging my cap firmly between side and elbow.

She blushed and fingered the chemisette where the cigars were hidden.

“I won’t tell,” I whispered, “if you save one of those for me.” I winked at her.

She allowed me a small smile, as her father moved into the room and came to face us across his desk.

“How many times have I told you, this is no place for a young lady. Off with you, Willie!” he said.

“Yes, Papa.” She cast a thankful gaze on me as she hurried with silken steps from the study.

Dr. Grace didn’t bother to sit down. “Yes, yes. You’ve come with some papers for me to sign, eh?”

I wasn’t sure what I’d expected him to do. I supposed I’d had some idea that he might be polite, that he might actually see me. It’s perhaps more shocking that I even held such notions, considering the fact that he was neither polite nor particularly interested in me.

I handed them over. He snatched them and signed them perfunctorily with a too-wet pen. His signature ran in great blotches across the page. He grunted and blew on the ink. I noticed he had a cut on his lip above his mustache on the right—his body servant must have cut him shaving. I’d hate to be the one who’d done that.

“No one must see or hear of this,” he said as he handed the dry pages back to me. “I’m paying good money to keep this quiet.”

For the first time, he assessed me. “You can keep this quiet, can’t you?”

I didn’t like the directness of his gaze, but I didn’t lower mine. I’d learned not to flinch too much with these gents—in the end, it only led to misery for me. “As well as them who sent this paper will let me,” I said.

His hand shot across the desk and gripped my collar. He pulled me toward him. His face was inches from mine. It felt as if I could see every pore of his skin. A twitch started under his left eye that I couldn’t look away from.

“Now, see here, you . . .” he spluttered. Sweat beaded his forehead, and his pupils were oddly dilated. His nostrils flared red, rather like a deer or a rabbit run too hard in the chase.

He seemed more like fragments of a person than someone real. That made it easier for me to glare at him and say with no small amount of frost, “Unhand me, sir.”

I think he saw me then for the first time. He loosened his hold and I stepped back, adjusting my collar.

“I will swear my own secrecy and delivery of the items on schedule,” I said. “I can do no more than that.”

“That will be good enough for now. See you do it.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I smoothed the documents and shoved them back in their packaging. Sometimes I wished I could read. At others, I was grateful I couldn’t. This time, I wasn’t sure which I’d prefer, but something told me I didn’t want to know what this surgeon was up to.

“And never come in by the front door again, do you hear?” he said. “Use the servants’ entrance. You’ve only to ring the bell by the door and the servants will let you in. Surely I needn’t remind you to be discreet when you make a delivery.”

“No, sir.” I said.

He nodded, then turned his attention to the papers on his desk. I took that as my signal to leave.

A silent butler met me at the door. He showed me through the house, and I marveled at its magnificence. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Willie to grow up here in this beautiful house with that dreadful man. I hoped, at least, that if her mother still lived, she was kind.

We went out a door and the butler motioned me down the steps. He shut and locked it behind me without a word. I drew on my cap and adjusted it, pulled my coat collar up against the cold. Around a corner, a bleak alley led to a hansom-clogged thoroughfare.

And Miss Willie Grace, desperately trying to stamp out her cigar, fanning smoke away from herself and spluttering in the process. I grinned.