Lady of Spirit Read online

  “They must o’ come fer a taste of yer apple dumplings, m’pretty,” a harridan cackled as she pushed her penny at the baker’s wife she’d done business with for all of her life.

  “Aye, me dumplings is famous, luv, just ask m’ old man,” that equally ancient dame laughed, glancing down smugly at her formidable bosom before she dropped an extra biscuit into the paper for the compliment’s sake.

  “Hoo!” cried a clothing vendor, pointing a lady’s pink chemise at the vehicle in his glee. “Look who’s got lost! Eh, lads, Windsor Palace’s t’other way!”

  “Ain’t you the card though,” a triple-chinned owner of a soup-and-stew cart bellowed. “Never listen to ’im,” she shouted, to the pleasure of her customers. “I’m right ’ere, gents, ’er Majesty ’erself at yer service! Move over, Georgie, and give the gents some room.”

  But it was doubtful the gentlemen heard her disrespectful reference to their king, for even though the woman had a voice so loud it caused the surfaces of her soups to ripple when she roared at her own wit, they could scarcely hear her above all the laughter and talk and all the boastful, pleading, and promising calls of all the tradesmen crying all their wares together. Even the driver of the curricle scarcely heard his companion, close as he was, when he gasped and then when he gave a sudden shout.

  Certainly the young woman, mesmerized by the vision of the fallen pasty under the cloth, heard nothing but her own interior dialogue. The scents around her had turned mere hunger into something profound and painful in its intensity. She noted the pasty had suffered a few cracks and bruises in its escape from its rack, and as she studied the black stains it bore on its crust from its travels, she told herself that it would be best to leave it, if not for honesty’s then for her own health’s sake. Anything rolled on these well-trodden cobbles would be carrying plague at worst, stomach distress at best, she reasoned. Yet still she could not help but see that withal, it was whole, even damaged it was beautiful, and it was free and it was there for her taking. She stopped thinking then.

  She stepped closer to the barrow. She wavered. Then she inclined one shoulder, as if in a subtle shrug. She began to list very slightly to that side. And her arm, as though of its own volition, began to reach down and toward the truant, hidden meat pasty.

  And then she felt a firm hand clap on her shoulder and clasp it hard, and she looked up to see a man grinning down at her. If her heart did not precisely stop then, her breath certainly did, as did her brain, abandoning all its complex duties so that she could at least remain standing and not sink to the ground in a dead faint.

  The gentleman on the seat of his high curricle muttered a swift curse and threw the reins to his startled tiger. Then in one swift motion he was down to the ground, and seconds later at the side of the young woman who looked as though she were about to fall dead at the feet of his erstwhile passenger, who was now just standing and beaming at her companionably. The older gentleman put out his hands to hold the stricken young woman upright, but at his touch she seemed to come to her senses. He could feel her shoulders stiffen in his clasp and she wheeled about and gave him such a look of bright, blazing, wild indignation that he let his hands drop to his sides again.

  “I found her. This is Miss Dawkins,” the younger gentleman explained triumphantly, and then went on as she turned in amazement to face him. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere, Miss Dawkins. Your landlady said you might be out shopping here today. I say, don’t you recollect me?”

  The young woman shook her head, and then seemed to let out all of her breath in a long sigh. Her face, which had gone white as chalk a moment before, now blushed pink, but when she spoke, it could be heard that it was not pleasure or coquetry which had made her color up, but suppressed violence of feeling.

  “Ah yes,” she breathed in a low, well-modulated voice and refined accents, which could be heard clearly, since all those in the vicinity had quieted, the better to hear this interesting drama unfold. “It is Lord Malverne, is it not?”

  “Ooo ‘Lord,’ is it?” a middle-aged female whispered, poking her companion in the ribs, whereupon, “Aye, ‘Lord,’” he agreed, and the sound of the word repeated at once by most of the enthralled spectators set up a long low moan that the young woman could swear caused prickles to stand up on the nape of her neck.

  “Oh, good, you remembered me,” the young gentleman replied, oblivious, but then, seeing his former companion wince, he added hastily, “Oh, and this is my cousin, Lord Colin Haverford, Earl of Clune.”

  At this, an excited babble immediately broke out around the trio, and as the circle of interested parties grew, some even pushing to get closer to the players of the impromptu drama, the earl frowned and put up his hand. But before he could speak further, his young cousin, seeing his look of exasperation, went on to say hurriedly:

  “Ah, but here’s no time and place for introductions, you’re dead right, Cole. It isn’t a social matter. The crux of it is, Miss Dawkins, that I’m devilish sorry I got you your position lost, for I told them again and again that you wasn’t after me for my money or to marry me, and they wouldn’t listen, is what it was, you see. But I heard they dismissed you from your post—it was the earl here who told me of it, and made me see that it was bad of me not to set you up nice and right and tight again. So here I am, and if you’ll give me your hand on it, I’ll get you a new position, and everything will be fine again.”

  “Oohoo,” spoke up the baker who had once drawn his own designs on the young woman, and who’d just abandoned his barrow and shouldered through the crowd to see the show that he discovered was featuring her. “I’ve got a nice tight position for you here as well, lovey. And don’t care if you’re after my money, luv, you’re welcome to it, if you give me more than your hand on it, that is.”

  A great deal of laughter greeted this, and the earl said quickly in an undervoice, as he saw the young woman’s cheeks grow feverish, “Good grief, Theo, this is not the place to speak. Miss Dawkins, if you will be so kind as to meet with us, at your pleasure of course, we may yet remedy this matter.”

  “No,” Miss Dawkins blurted, and several onlookers applauded as a few others cried encouragement.

  She was so mortified by the enraptured audience she’d drawn that she seemed to see the gentlemen through a fine red veil. When the young gentleman had accosted her, she’d been sure she was about to be arrested for the theft of a meat pie, and the only thought that she’d been able to muster was that it was amazing how a thief-taker could have known what her ambitions were before she’d even done the terrible deed. But a moment later, when the other gentleman had held her steady, her nerves had calmed enough for her to comprehend just who the original young man was. A sense of brilliant relief had flooded through her. Then oddly, she’d felt an immediate reaction which was the opposite of her original gratitude that he knew nothing of her nefarious designs on the pasty, for it was an overwhelming sensation of outsized affront that she experienced.

  He’d never voiced the denunciation she’d expected to hear. He hadn’t even thought of the crime he’d inadvertently aborted, so this anger at an accusation that was never made, except in her own mind, was, she dimly perceived even then, nothing to do with him. It was only her own guilt crying out, too loudly, for concealment, but it was no less profound for all that.

  Then too, as she at last registered just who the gentleman was, and began to remember all her grudges against him, he began spouting embarrassing nonsense that made her very real distress seem banal, and made her a figure of fun for the world to see. He had offered her a post, but then it was only right that he do so, for as he said, in all honor, he owed her one. And she needed such help badly; indeed, she had been entertaining little dreams of glory these past sleepless nights in which just such an apology and precisely such an offer were tended to her. But right now it wouldn’t have mattered if he offered her a throne, or a kingdom, or even a plate full of fresh meat pasties. All she wanted now was to be let alone, to be
away at once from all the sniggering spectators, and the scene of her intended crime.

  “I mean…I meant,” she said in confusion, “we cannot speak now, not here, in this place. Please, you know my direction, can we meet later? Oh, we must meet later,” she cried, staring round at all the interested crowd. “Please.”

  Then she turned away blindly, pushed her way through the throng which had surrounded her, evaded the baker’s open arms, and fled into the crowds.

  The two gentlemen remaining might have found themselves in some difficulty, able-bodied though they were, if the crowd had decided the pretty young miss had a real grievance against them. But though the baker felt she should be avenged, a fair portion of the female audience held that she’d had a fair offer and given them a rare set-down, and so it was the gentlemen that ought to be supported. While they debated this theme, and fringes of the crowd shredded off to find better amusement, the two gentlemen returned to their curricle and drove off.

  “Old!” was all that the earl said, shaking his head.

  “She wore her hair differently,” argued his young cousin nervously, “and devil take it, Cole, but she was a governess. How should I know how old she was? Who looks at a governess? Damn it, I ain’t a queer nabs, and they ain’t like females exactly.”

  “Old!” the Earl of Clune muttered again, and though his face was black as thunder, so dark that even his tiger felt pity for his young passenger, the earl would not venture another word for all the ride home.

  *

  When the sky began to dim and the crowds to dissipate, beginning to head home to taverns or rooms or alleyways, and the vendors began to dispose of the last of their goods so as to lighten their barrows for the homeward push, the old, the destitute, the very young, and the infirm haggled for the last rags and crumbs. The young woman returned to the pasty barrow in time to see the proprietress auction off the last of her merchandise. But of the several pies offered, none of them was the one Miss Dawkins had almost carried off, for that one was gone, neither on the table for auction nor lying, where it had first enticed her, half-hidden on the pavement. Someone else had doubtless spirited it away. Seeing that, she was too dispirited to even bid on the other pasties, inexpensive as they were. For now that her temper had cooled, she could see that she had been punished for her evil intentions.

  Her desire for a free but ill-gotten gain had cost her dearly: she’d lost a dinner and a chance for employment together. And while she might have been able to afford the one, she very much doubted she could bear the expense of the other much longer.

  “’Ere,” said the weary proprietress, looking over the heads of the small collection of her last motley, ragtag customers to the lovely, sad, aloof young woman who was gazing at her so solemnly from a little distance away, as though she feared venturing closer. “’Ere,” she said roughly, gesturing with the small, cold, broken brown pie she held out in her work-reddened hand to her, “take it. That’s all right, dearie, pay me next time.”

  “What? Oh. Oh, no, thank you,” the young woman said, surprised, ashamed.

  “Don’cha want it?” the vendor asked, amazed.

  “No. That is…oh dear,” said the young woman, and then since she didn’t know how to accept charity any more than she knew how to look for it, she shrugged her shoulders and, smiling sadly, turned and walked away, with a great deal of dignity but little else, for the second time that day.

  2

  Miss Victoria Eliza Dawkins paused on the landing of the fourth floor of her lodging house to catch her breath. She was a young and reasonably agile female, but the stairs were steep and the stairwells seemed to grow increasingly narrow, winding more tightly around the core of the house as they ascended, as if the rooming house were the interior of some giant snail’s shell. But since even in times of broad daylight they were dim and dank as well, she started at a shadow and then quickly stepped up the last stairs to the last floor, where her own room hugged a corner directly beneath the eaves.

  She let herself into her room and bolted the door behind her at once, and then dropped her reticule upon a small dented dressing table and then sank to the only other article of furniture in the room, her bed, to regain her breath at last. It was a rule of thumb that the higher the floor, the lower the price of the room, and in her present financial state Miss Dawkins would not have scorned lodgings on the roof itself, directly under the chimney pots, if the rent had been small enough.

  Luckily, Mrs. Rogers, the landlady, had offered this one vacant room at an absurdly low price. And although Miss Dawkins realized it was closer to the heavens than most pigeons ever got, and though it was so small that she made sure the door was always bolted, since if she fell out of bed in the night she’d have been in the hall if it weren’t, and though the neighborhood was such that it was dangerous to step into the street on a cloudy day, still, the young woman counted herself fortunate to have found it.

  Because, unlike so many of her neighbors in this section of the city, Mrs. Rogers at least still clung to some rudiments of propriety. She allowed no females to conduct business in their rooms unless it was to do with sewing or knitting or handiwork that had nothing to do with bringing clients back to rooms for services rendered. She allowed no one to sleep in her halls, drunken or sober, and permitted no more than six persons to each room. And she always locked the main door at midnight each night. Although in this neighborhood this was only a symbolic gesture, Miss Dawkins appreciated it.

  It was true that the upper floors had not felt a broom upon their scarred surfaces for decades, and some of the windows looked like thin walls, it had been so long since a cloth had been taken to them, but then, Mrs. Rogers could scarcely be blamed for that, having over the years grown to a size which precluded her fitting onto her own stairways, and then too, some of her lodgers were not inclined to be fastidious. Still, Miss Dawkins had got herself a room with a roof, and a bed, and a door that she could close against intrusion, and it was extremely cheap. And it came with a bowl of gruel, available between seven and half-past each morning in the kitchen downstairs, if one could swallow it, all included in the price.

  It was not what Miss Dawkins was used to, in fact she shuddered to think of a person who might be used to such. But she prayed it was temporary, and as she sank back upon her lumpy bed she shivered just a little, for just a moment, because she’d allowed herself to wonder in that moment if there would not be a time, and soon, when she would look back at this meager refuge and wish she were lucky enough to have it back again. For it seemed to her that just as the stairs which brought her here today grew more constricted as they spiraled upward, so her life of late grew more convoluted as it relentlessly bore her downward. She was no stranger to London, since she’d been born and raised here for all her twenty years, although this section she found herself in now had been the stuff of myths to her for all her young life, and the persons she found herself among had been the sort she’d always been warned not to speak to in the streets. She’d not been raised to nobility, nor to excessive riches. But she’d lived in a neat, comfortable, safe section of town, with many luxuries, for her father had been an apothecary, and her mother from a family fortunate in their dealings in dry goods. There had been, some century past, a grandfather who was a younger son to a minor baron somewhere in the south. And there were tales of an ancestral female favored by the royal lecheries of King Charles, but as that could be said of almost any other comely lass of her time, the family had no pretensions, and little to show for it save for some warm apocryphal stories and a little antique brooch with half its seed pearls gone.

  The Dawkins family—Papa, Mama, Grandmother, son and heir Richard, and lovely little Victoria—had been content to live in unrenown and modest comfort. They may have existed in tastefully furnished, spacious rooms above their apothocary shop just city blocks from where noblemen squandered thousands on excesses like diamond buckles for their shoes, and the same number of streets away from impoverished wretches who could not
even sell themselves for coppers, but the doings of either world, from either pole, were completely alien to them. In fact, those in the ton might have had more in common with those in the gutters than they did with Victoria Eliza’s family, for each of those other sets, it was understood by the scandalized Dawkins clan, countenanced, as they would have never done, illegitimacy, promiscuity, insobriety, and gambling from those within their ranks.

  In time, if times had been allowed to run their course smoothly, the family expected that one day Victoria Eliza might have caught the eye of some other worthy apothecary, or perhaps a young man at law, or even some youthful physician, and settled down with him (only if her eye had been similarly dazzled, for she had a fond papa) in pleasant, unremarkable bourgeois bliss. There might have been some difficulty with these expectations in time, for Victoria grew to be as clever as she was lovely, and with the education her doting papa brought her, she had been developing some rash and liberal fancies about a woman’s lot, but that conflict, happily, and unhappily, never came to pass. For when she was in her seventeenth year, Victoria’s papa succumbed to an infection of the lungs that none of his great jars and many vials of roots and powders and salves could cure.

  She had been at a respectable boarding school for young females of moderate means and aspirations all through the unhappy events, and when she came home for the funeral it was made clear to her by her grieving mama that she was to finish up her last year at the school. If she didn’t, she couldn’t complete all the schooling her father had contracted for and it would be a waste, and the Dawkinses disliked waste above all things. And also, in that way she could always earn her own livelihood as a teacher herself, if, heaven forfend, she should ever have to do so.

  When Victoria returned to London at eighteen years of age, with certificates of competency in three languages, passing aptitude in music, history, and art, and one for pretty behavior as well, in her hand, she was just in time to see to the sale of her home and her father’s shop. There might have been some truth to that story about the ancestor who’d been King Charles’s lady after all, since it appeared some reckless blood had been secretly percolating in the veins of the family down through all the years. For it transpired that all unbeknownst to his horrified family, Papa Dawkins had been making clandestine investments in all manner of schemes by which he’d hoped to make a great fortune and amaze and astound the world.