Devilish Lord, Mysterious Miss

Until tonight, Lord Matthison had felt not one ounce of pity towards any of the men from whom he’d won money. To his knowledge, he had ruined three.

But tonight, he could not bear to keep one penny of that money. He had only gone to the tables to find Cora. Not to bring more misery to the child of a compulsive gambler.

He went to his room, and shrugged off his jacket, the coins spilling from his pockets and rattling across the boards.

‘I did not want that money for myself, Cora,’ he explained, sitting on a chair by the bed to tug off his boots. ‘You know I don’t need it. I’ve invested wisely these last few years.’ Somehow that admission only made this evening’s work seem worse.

‘I have ensured the girl will be safe,’ he protested, untying his neckcloth and letting it slither to the floor.

‘Does that please you, Cora?’ he addressed the shadowed corners of his room. But there was no answer.

With a groan of despair, he lay down on top of the bed, still fully clothed, and flung his arm over his eyes. If she was not going to come back, he did not know how he could bear to go on.

There was no satisfaction to be had in ruining one man, or bestowing largesse on another.

Not when she wasn’t there to see it.

He needed her.

God, how he needed her!

He felt as though he had barely closed his eyes, when he was woken by the sound of somebody knocking on the door.

Persistently.

Ephraims must still be out, he thought, sitting up and running his fingers through his disordered hair. He would have to deal with whoever was visiting himself. Probably one of the men from whom he had taken promissory notes the night before, he decided as he padded barefoot to the outer door.

However, it was not a shamefaced gambler who stood on his doorstep, but the grubby street sweeper from the night of the vision on Curzon Street.

‘Grit,’ he observed, opening the door wider to admit the rather scared-looking boy. ‘You had better come into my sitting room.’

‘Her name is Mary,’ the boy announced without preamble, the moment Lord Matthison sank wearily on to the sofa. He did not really want to hear anything the lad had to say. But he might as well let him earn his tip, since he had plucked up the courage to walk into the devil’s lair.

‘The red-head you was after. She come to Lunnon about six or so years ago as an apprentice, and has been working her way up. Well, not that she’s indentured regular, like, on account of her being a charity case.’

Lord Matthison brushed aside the apparent coincidence of that female appearing on the scene about the time Cora had disappeared. Hundreds of working girls came up to London from the country every year.

‘No one can match the stuff she turns out now,’ Grit added, staring round Lord Matthison’s study with apprehensive eyes, as though half-expecting to see a human skull perched on one of the shelves. ‘The nobs fight to get a dress wot she’s had a hand in.’

Cora had been exceptionally fond of sewing, he recalled. But then, so were lots of gently reared girls. It meant nothing. Nothing!

‘If you want to meet her,’ the boy said, after a slight pause, ‘she’ll be in the Flash of Lightning Friday night. Her friend, see, has an understanding with a jarvey wot drinks in there.And they mean to sneak out and meet him. ’Bout seven,’he finished, sticking out his hand hopefully.

‘Go into my room,’ said Lord Matthison, jerking his head in that direction, ‘and you can pick up whatever you find on the floor.’ There had been several crown pieces amongst the coinage he had won last night. Grit was welcome to them.

He sat forwards on the sofa, his head in his hands. Last night, he had thought he had got it all clear in his mind. The woman he had seen on Curzon Street could not have been Cora. He had just been drunk, and had imagined the likeness.

But now he was beginning to wonder all over again.

Take the way Grit had described her as a red-head. The woman he had chased had been wearing a poke bonnet that covered her hair completely. So how had he been so sure it was red?

As Cora’s was red.

And what about the way the bleak chill that usually hung round him like a mantle had lifted the second he saw the early morning sun brush the curve of her cheek? The way his heart had raced. As though he was really alive, and not just a damned soul, trapped in a living body.

He was not going to find a moment’s peace, he realised, until he had looked the seamstress in the face, and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she bore no more than a passing resemblance to Cora.

‘Stop worrying, Mary,’ Molly cajoled. ‘Madame Pennypincher won’t know nothing about it unless we tells her.’

‘She’ll know it shouldn’t take us so long to make a delivery.’

Ever since Mary had come back from the Curzon Street errand with her nerves in shreds, Madame Pichot had sent Molly with her on her daily walks.

Molly had been cock-a-hoop at escaping their relentless drudgery, shamelessly making use of their daily excursions to arrange this clandestine meeting with Joe Higgis, who worked out of a hackney cab stand on the corner of Conduit Street.

Mary did not begrudge Molly her snatched moments of happiness, she just did not see how they would manage to get away with taking a detour to a gin shop in Covent Garden.

‘All we have to do is think up a story and stick to it,’ Molly persisted. ‘We’ll tell her the housekeeper asked us to take tea in the kitchen, or the lady had some query about the bill.’

‘I don’t…I can’t…’ Mary felt her face growing hot. The very thought of telling her employer a barefaced lie was making her insides churn.

Molly clicked her tongue and sighed. ‘Just leave the talking to me, then, when we get back. You can keep yer mouth shut, can’t yer?’ She gripped Mary’s arm quite hard. ‘Ye understand it ain’t right to snitch on yer friends, don’t yer?’

‘I would never snitch on you, Molly,’ said Mary, meaning it.

When she had first come to work for Madame Pichot, she had existed in an almost constant state of sickening fear. London was so confusingly crowded, so nerve-jarringly noisy. She had found it hard to understand what Madame’s other girls were saying at first, so peculiar did their accent sound, and so foreign the words they used. But Molly had always been patient with her, explaining her work slowly enough so she could understand, even putting a stop to the acts of petty spite some of the others had seemed to find hilarious.

‘Anyhow, Madame ought to let us have an hour or two off, once in a while, and then we wouldn’t have to sneak off on the sly!’

No, she would not say one word to Madame about where they had been.

She would not need to.

She looked round uneasily as Molly towed her into the overheated and evil-smelling den in which her Joe liked to take a heavy wet of an evening, with the other drivers who worked for the same firm as him. Madame would only have to breathe in as they walked past to know exactly where they had been.

Molly soon spotted her beau, who got his pals to make room for the two of them at the table where they were sitting. A slovenly-looking girl deposited two beakers on the sticky tabletop in front of them, and Joe flipped her a coin.

Molly dug Mary in the ribs.

‘Say thank you to Joe for buying us both a draught of jacky, girl. Ever so generous of him, ain’t it?’ Molly beamed at him, and his eyes lit up. Sliding closer to her, he slid his arm round her waist, and gave her a squeeze. Molly giggled, turning pink with pleasure. Mary might as well not have existed for all the notice he took of her.

She reached for her beaker, and bent her eyes resolutely on the liquid it contained, feeling slightly nauseous. She could not understand what Mary saw in Joe Higgis. He had sloping shoulders and a thick neck. His fingernails were dirty, and, given the nature of his job, he probably smelt of horses. How could Molly let such a man paw at her like that, never mind encourage it?

Molly had explained that he made her laugh, and that in this miserable world, you didn’t turn your nose up at a man who could make you laugh, no matter what.

For Molly’s sake, and to avoid hurting Joe’s feelings, she supposed she ought to try to look as though she was grateful for the drink he had bought her. Besides, she thought, glancing about her nervously, if she appeared to be concentrating on her drink, she would not look so out of place as she felt.

Tentatively, she tasted it, and was surprised to find it had a lightly perfumed flavour. Gin was not unpleasant, she grudgingly admitted, taking another sip.

‘Friend of Molly’s, are yer?’ asked the man beside her, who had been eyeing her speculatively ever since she had sat down.

Mary bit down a scathing retort. She had come in with Molly. She was sitting next to Molly. What else would she be, but a friend of Molly’s?

‘Now, none of your cheek, Fred!’ Molly suddenly stirred herself to say. ‘Nor none of you others, neither,’ she addressed the other men who were sitting at their table. ‘I won’t have none of you taking advantage of Mary, just coz she’s too simple to do it for herself. I’ll darken the daylights of anyone who so much as lays a finger on her!’ she declared belligerently.

Fred raised his hands in surrender. ‘I was just being friendly,’ he protested.

‘Well, stop it!’ snapped Molly. ‘She don’t like men. They make her…’She paused, considering her choice of words. Mary stared fixedly into the depths of her drink, torn between gratitude to Molly for defending her, and sickening dread at what she might be about to reveal.

‘Jumpy!Yes,’Molly declared, ‘that’s what she is round men what don’t mind their manners. So just watch it!’

Having settled the point to her satisfaction, Molly climbed on to Joe’s lap, and took up where she had left off.

Mary felt like a coin that had been tossed in the air, unsure whether she was going to come down heads, humiliated at having her deficiencies broadcast, or tails, grateful for Molly’s spirited defence. Though Molly had only spoken the truth. Men did make her jumpy. She had not wanted Fred to speak to her, and she certainly did not want to have to answer him. In fact, she wished she could just shrink down into her coat and disappear. To conceal her confusion, she took another, longer pull at her drink.

Once it had gone down, she found her initial surge of contrasting emotions had settled down into a sort of dull resentment.

Molly had just told all these people that she was simple, and she did not think she was, not really. It was true that when she first came to London she had been confused about a lot of things. But she had been ill. She had still been getting the headaches for months after Madame took her in.

But now she wondered if some of those headaches had been due to the fact she had slept so poorly back then. For one thing, the streets were so noisy, at all hours of the day and night, and for another, she was not used to sharing a bed…

Though how she was so sure of that, when so many other things that other people took for granted were complete mysteries to her…She sighed despondently. Perhaps Madame and Molly and the others were right about her. Perhaps she was a simpleton.

In an effort to distract herself from the perplexing muddle of her thoughts, she applied herself to her gin. Gradually she felt the knot of anxiety that was normally lodged somewhere beneath her breastbone melt away. What did it matter, really, if there was something wrong with her mind? She had a good position, where the skills she did have were put to good use. And she had friends.

Joe’s friends, too, she realised, raising her head to look about the table, were not such a bad bunch, for all that they were so repulsive looking. She felt a giggle rising up inside as it occurred to her that if she had to come into a dirty, smelly drinking den, she could not have better companions than a group of hackney-cab drivers. Experienced as they were with handling highly strung creatures for a living, they had taken Molly’s words to heart, and acted on them. Oh, not overtly. But they were not speaking so loudly now as they had been doing before. They were not crowding her with their big, male bodies, and they seemed to be trying not to make any sudden movements, that might startle her.

It was…quite touching.

London, she mused, cradling her cup of gin to her chest, was turning out not to be such a dreadful place at all. It had taken her a long time, but she was slowly growing accustomed to it. The more she explored its alleys and byways, the more familiar it became, the fewer terrors it held.

She would be all right.

One day, she would…

‘Why did you do it, Cora?’ A man’s harsh voice rudely interrupted her reverie.

She looked up to see a gentleman standing over her. The gentleman. The one who had chased her clear across Berkeley Square. Same dark clothes, same forbidding expression, same angry voice.

She sucked in a sharp breath, waiting to feel the onset of that fear that usually surged through her whenever she felt threatened by something unfamiliar.

It did not materialise.

She peered into her beaker, wondering if this was why so many women grew so fond of gin. It seemed to be making her uncharacteristically brave.

Or maybe, she pondered, it was knowing that this man was outnumbered by Joe’s pals. That she was, in effect, surrounded by a burly, bewhiskered, badly dressed cohort of bodyguards.

And so she didn’t tremble. She did not shrink away. She just sat there, calmly looking up at him.

His face grew darker.

‘You have to make me understand it, Cora,’ he grated. ‘Why did you run away?’

Cora? Ah, so that was it! She must resemble…her. That was why he had chased her, shouting so angrily. He must have been waiting for…Cora…and been completely perplexed when she had taken fright and run away.

‘You have mistaken me for someone else, I think, sir,’she said gently. For she could see that he was really upset, and had no wish to add to his distress.

Yet he looked at her as though she had slapped his face.

If he had been mistaken in her, it had been seven years ago, not seven days!

She had said she loved him so much she did not care if they had to live in a bothy, whatever that was. Yet one afternoon, when nobody was watching, she had sneaked out on him. Without warning. Without excuse. Without reason. And started a new life. Here in London. Not half a mile away from his own lodgings. He might have passed her in the street countless times and not known…

Sheer rage gripped him at the magnitude of her deception. His whole existence, for the past seven years, had been based on a tissue of lies. She had lied to him. Robbie had lied about him. He had been lying to himself.

‘You are supposed to be dead,’ he hissed between gritted teeth. That she wasn’t made him feel like a complete fool. What kind of an idiot would harbour the maudlin, pathetic sentiment that a woman could ever be true, let alone from beyond the grave! Since the day she had…no, not died. Left him, was what she had done. Left him with an accusation of murder hanging over his head. But since that day, he might as well have been dead. For nothing had mattered any more.

But what irked him most was the fact that he had still wanted to carry on believing all that claptrap after he had seen her in Curzon Street. When he had sobered up, after a few fitful hours of sleep, he had been determined to deny the evidence of his own eyes, preferring to believe alcohol had fuddled his senses so much that he had imagined the resemblance, rather than let go of his insane delusion she was haunting him.

And if Grit had not been heartless enough to sell information to a man of his reputation, he would probably not be standing here now.

He had only come here to get confirmation that he had imagined the woman’s resemblance to Cora.

He had never expected to find himself looking at Cora herself.

A slightly older, careworn version of Cora, but Cora none the less.

Her voice had changed. Her accent was now almost indistinguishable from that of the other girls who lived and worked in this area. But there was still an unmistakably soft Scottish burr underlying the sharper vowel sounds, and a cadence to her speech that proclaimed her origins. The rest of her had hardly altered at all. Same fair skin that would break out in freckles at the most fleeting exposure to sunlight, same delicate features that made her face look all eyes, same mannerisms. The way she held her cup, the way she tilted her head as she looked up at him, though those green eyes, that had once blazed at him with what he had believed was the sort of love poets wrote sonnets about, were cold now. Blank.

Empty.

The enormity of her betrayal, her sheer deceitfulness, struck him all over again. There was no consolation in knowing she was not dead after all! He slumped down on to the bench beside her, in the gap that had opened up when her co-worker had climbed into the hackney-cab driver’s lap and sucked in a sharp pain. Why had he not seen how deceitful she was back then? Look at her now, calmly sipping her gin after colluding in a clandestine meeting between her co-worker and her fancy man. Abusing the comparative freedom of her trusted position without so much as a qualm! His upper lip curled into a sneer. This woman was not trustworthy! She had waltzed off with his heart and his ring…

His ring! How could he have forgotten that? That ring had been in his family for generations. It was the only item of jewellery his mother had managed to prevent his father from selling. It was extremely valuable. Far too valuable to waste on a deceitful, brazen…He grabbed her hand, determined to take it back.

Her ring finger was bare.

‘You sold my ring!’

How had she managed that? He had put up a reward, which he had been ill able to afford at first, in the hope that if it turned up, it would lead back to her. The antique ring, a blood-red ruby surrounded by tiny pearls, was such an unusual piece that he had been sure he would have heard if it had come on to the market.

She had somehow outwitted him, even in that. She must have sold it and used the proceeds to fund her flight to London. He scoffed at his own naïvety in thinking the paltry reward he had put up would have tempted a fence to turn in his supplier!

‘Why, Cora?’ he asked her again. That was what he simply could not comprehend. ‘At least, tell me why you ran away.’

If she had changed her mind about wanting to marry him, why had she not just told him, broken off the engagement and gone home? There was no need to have gone to such lengths to disappear so completely.

Mary’s heart went out to the poor gentleman who looked so bleakly baffled. For she knew exactly how he felt. At one point, her world had frequently seemed to make no sense at all. And that in turn left her feeling scared and lonely and confused.

And when she had felt like that, a few kind words, or a smile, had helped her get back on an even keel. Summoning up a smile that she hoped conveyed her sympathy for his state of mind, she gently explained, ‘I really am not who you think I am, sir. My name is Mary.’

‘How can you sit there and lie to me?’he snarled. ‘To my face! You got on your horse and rode off without a backward glance…’

‘A horse?’ Mary’s eyebrows rose in surprise. If this man thought she was capable of climbing right up on top of a horse, when she was far too timid to even bring herself to pat one—no matter how earnestly Joe promised it was quite safe—then that just proved how badly mistaken he was about her identity! The very prospect of touching one brought on waves of uncontrollable panic. Panic so strong she could smell it. The smell came flooding to her nostrils right now. She swallowed down hastily, but her heart was already pounding in her chest. And she could smell damp leaves, mixed in with the scent of horse and leather, and taste that horrid, metallic tang of blood…

‘…leaving me to pick up the pieces! Now you will not even do me the courtesy of explaining your outrageous behaviour! You said you loved me…’

His face dark with rage, he suddenly seized Mary’s shoulders, and kissed her hard on the mouth.

Mary was so surprised, she had no time to react. He had not looked in the least like a man who was about to kiss a woman.

But before she could do more than gasp, all hell broke loose.

With an inarticulate bellow of rage, Fred rose up, reached over her, seized the poor, deranged gentleman by the lapels of his very expensive coat, and hauled him to his feet.

His sudden action caused the bench on which they were all sitting to topple over, sending Mary flying backwards in a tangle of skirts. Joe, whose reactions were lightning fast, had managed to leap to his feet as the bench slid out from beneath him, but Molly had tumbled to the floor alongside Mary.

‘Quick, this way!’ Molly shrieked, grabbing her by the arm even as she herself started to scramble on all fours out of the reach of the flailing boots of the three men now struggling together where, just a moment before, they had been sitting quietly drinking their porter.

By the time they reached the door, everyone in the place seemed to have been sucked into the brawl. Glancing over her shoulder as Molly hustled her out, she saw one of the serving girls bringing her tray down on the head of a coal-heaver who had a bespectacled clerk in a bear hug, while one of Joe’s pals accidentally elbowed Fred in the face as he drew back his fist to punch a man in naval uniform. But she could not make out the dark gentleman anywhere amidst the sea of struggling combatants.

‘What a night!’ Molly gasped as they made it to the safety of the street, her face alight with excitement.

‘Are you not worried about Joe?’

From inside the gin shop Mary could hear the sounds of furniture breaking, and men cursing and yelling.

‘Sounds like—’she broke off briefly at a tremendous crash of breaking glass ‘—he’s having a smashing time.’Molly giggled as she straightened Mary’s skewed bonnet. ‘Did you see how fast he was?’ she added, dancing on the spot, and throwing a few punches at imaginary opponents for good measure.

‘I scarcely knew what was happening,’ Mary admitted. ‘It all happened so fast. One minute that man was kissing me, and then…Oh dear—’ she paused, casting an anxious glance over her shoulder ‘—I hope they are not hurting him.’

‘Well, strike me!’ Molly looked at Mary as though she had never seen her before. ‘Here was I thinking you’d be all of a quake, and all you can think of is whether Joe and the lads are hurting your beau!’

‘He’s not my beau! I just feel…sorry for him, that’s all. He seemed to think I was someone he had known once, someone who said she loved him, but then left him. That must have been why he followed me the other day, I must look very like her.’ Even sitting face to face with her, in the glaring light of the tavern’s lanterns, he seemed convinced she was his lost love. It was so sad.

Molly tucked Mary’s hand in the crook of her arm, and stepped out briskly, muttering, ‘I done the right thing, then. I weren’t sure,’ she said a little louder, darting Mary a sidelong glance, ‘but the thing is, Mary, girls like us don’t have a lot of choice.’

‘What do you mean? What have you done?’

‘It’s for your own good,’ she replied, puzzling Mary still further. ‘And it’s not as if you’re scared of him now, are you? Not like you was the other day?’

‘No,’ Mary confessed, shamefaced. ‘I was just being silly that day. He startled me, that was all, leaping out of the shadows like that…’

‘There, you see. It will be fine!’

‘What will be fine? Molly,’ Mary panted, ‘do we have to walk this fast? Nobody is chasing us now.’

‘Sorry,’ said Molly, moderating her stride to accommodate Mary’s. ‘You know I’ve always watched out for you, haven’t I?’