Sons of Fortune (21 page)

“So it would be dangerous—apart from being treachery—to talk in that disloyal way about him.”

This reminder halted her. She puzzled something to herself and then turned helplessly to him. “I got to tell you. And I can’t tell you without speaking of him that way.”

He shrugged and resigned, smiling to show her she could go on.

“I were in the women’s work room. Know where I mean?”

He shook his head.

“Anyway, ’tis like a long room between the study room and the wash, and you can’t help but hear through the walls. Like paper they are. Then she come in. And him behind her. And he were going on—about you. That’s why I listened, see. And he said some old geezer had come to see him, about you. Some bloke asking a lot of old questions. From the government, he said.”

“Who said? The ‘geezer’ or Mr. Thornton?” John was on the edge of his seat now.

“Dunno. This bloke, I suppose. Anyway, it were all under your hat and don’t breathe. He said he asked all questions about you. Then Mrs. Cornelius and he, they both fell to talking about you, and mister he said he thought as how it was about making you a lord. And missus she said as how you deserved it. And mister said about how they were looking back into your past life, like, looking for skellingtons or something, I dunno. Anyway…looking to see if they could make you a lord.” Suddenly the idea caught hold of her imagination anew and she flashed the sweetest, most radiant, smile. “Eh?” she said. “What about that, then, eh?”

He could not hold her gaze. He hated the effect she was having on him. It was so—shallow, so obvious. A man of any intelligence, a man with the slightest bit of moral fibre, should be able to resist these primitive urges.

She was disappointed at his lack of response. “Anyway,” she went on, “then he mentioned me. He said as how he always did think there was more between me and—and you, sir, begging pardon, sir—this is what Mr. Thornton said. He said there was more to it than ever come out. And she said rubbish. And mister he said just wait, and you’d been very strange that night we met and you brung me home to Mrs. Thornton. And missus she went on saying it were rubbish. And then they went on talking about this and that and I wasn’t really listening, like, ’cos I was trying to remember that night and how you come to rescue me. And I thought, begging pardon, sir, you
was
a bit…strange, like. I mean you did think but what you knew me.”

“I did,” John said with lowered eyes, wanting to stop this particular reminiscence. “I did, but it was all a mistake.”

“No, but the way you were going on, like, made me think that you…like, you know, in books and that where people find long-lost children?”

John pretended to laugh, pretended it was ridiculous.

“No, but anyway, that’s what made me think, and that’s why I never heard all what they two said. Anyway, soon I thought, hello, they’re talking a bit funny, ’cos I come back to them from what I had been thinking on about. So I had a peek, what with the door being open and all, and I seen they had some of their clothes off and he was taking more off and promising her better than what they’d ever had before! So I thought
oh yes! My my!
And she was just standing, shaking her head and saying no with everything—except not with words. Shivering, she was, and crying.”

Charity laughed at the memory but the sound in that small carriage was so loud that she instantly thought how unfeeling it made her seem. So she stopped laughing suddenly and then didn’t know what to say next. Nor did John.

Charity had understood why Mrs. Cornelius was behaving in that way, for it was exactly the way in which she would have been responding to what Mr. Thornton was doing. But that was as far as her understanding went; she was not given to self-analysis. If she were, she would not now have found herself sitting in a cab in Regent’s Park beside John Stevenson. The steps that had brought her there would not (had she paused on each for thought) have carried the weight.

The moment she had seen Mr. Thornton and Mrs. Cornelius doing that thing, she had known, in the way that does not call for words, exactly what her life had been missing since she had become one of Mrs. Thornton’s converts. And that was strange, because she hadn’t enjoyed it much during those few weeks when it had been her trade—only the power it gave her over men who were much stronger than she. Aside from that, she had taken their money and done what they wanted, but she had spent most of the time thinking about clothes and dancing and walks in the country.

But five years of continence—or perhaps just of growing older—had changed all that. Unknown to her the pressures had been building until this morning when she had seen them at it and had caught that fierce, predatory look of delight in Mr. Thornton’s eyes. That had hit her.

She disliked the man for exactly the reason she had given to John—Thornton wasn’t fit to touch Mrs. Thornton. But those glittering eyes! They were something outside all ideas of liking or disliking. They stripped you where you stood; she had often felt that. They gloated. And that loose-lipped smile that lurked in his beard—it could make you shiver at times. And then having to stay there and watch them go at each other! She almost ran into the room to join them—or, better still, to make Mrs. C. run out in shame and then take her place with him. But all she could do was stand there, spellbound, living it all through Mrs. Cornelius and thinking that the woman’s earlier crying and parade of unwillingness had been very hypocritical when you considered this exhibition of abandonment.

But even if she had stayed as cold as ice herself, she knew at once that it would be impossible for her to remain under the same roof as Mr. Thornton and to go on being lady’s maid to Mrs. Cornelius. She could never have looked at either of them straight again; and they would surely have put things together for themselves then.

That was why she had to escape, of course. She kept repeating the reason to herself. But where? What could she do? Without a character, what could she do? No one would look twice at her, except for
that.
There had even been girls with good references down on the quays. So if she didn’t want to find herself back there, she’d have to get a protector. She had only the one sellable commodity, so it didn’t take much puzzling to get that far.

There was only one man in all the world who occurred to her: John Stevenson. Funny, whenever she had thought of a husband in these past years, it had always been John. By other names, of course, and in other walks of life, usually closer to her own likely sphere. An imaginary police constable called Henry Turvey—he had looked the image of John Stevenson and had rescued her from a fire that had killed everyone at the Thorntons’ and the Refuge. Beautiful tears. A ship’s mate called Zachary Hitchens had been smitten with her down in the market and had taken her off to a tropic isle where they had lived a long and happy life all alone, spending the gold that a pirate had left there long ago; Zacky, too, had been the spitting likeness of John Stevenson. And there were dozens of others.

But that was not really why she had now flown to him. She knew from the way he had looked at her that night he rescued her she had that power on him. And since! Every time they met, or, rather, every time their paths crossed, she could see that surprise in him, and the longing. She knew he wanted her, though she never thought anything would come of it.

But that wasn’t it either. She knew he wanted her and she only had to make it acceptable, even noble, for him to—no, but it wasn’t really that. Now that all the bridges were burned behind her she could at last admit to herself that she loved him. She always had admitted it, but only in a very chaste, secret, admiring sort of way. There was no other man, anywhere, not now, not at any time in her past, she loved like that.

And also there was this threat that Thornton had talked to Mrs. Cornelius about; something to do with her. Mr. Stevenson’s past was somehow bound up with hers. She couldn’t think how. It couldn’t be that she was a long-lost daughter—besides, she didn’t want to be his daughter! So it couldn’t be that. But what if the government people came and started asking her questions? She wouldn’t know what answers would help him best. So if she did nothing else, she had to get to see him and warn him and find out the answers.

That was the missing note of pure altruism which finally spurred her into making the break with Bristol and going to find Mr. Stevenson.

These were not the thoughts that had gone through her mind as she stood eavesdropping on Walter and Sarah. But feelings akin to them had bubbled in her blood, and she had reached that final resolution before the other two had finished.

“Did they see you at all?” John asked, more to break the embarrassing silence than to be informed.

“No,” she said. “Of course, they weren’t looking for anyone. They thought they was safe there. And so they were, except for me, which they didn’t know of. The Rescue girls were gone for the morning along of Mrs. Thornton. And the good girls, they don’t go up in those parts. They don’t mingle. Not they…good…”

At that moment he saw a most violent change come over the girl. Up until that point she had been telling the story as comedy. Her attitude had been slightly brittle, a bit bright-eyed, a bit garrulous. But suddenly, over those last three words she burst into tears.

And it was not a quiet little cry, either. Bitter sobs shook her whole body, squeezing the last ounce of breath out of every shivering exhalation. She breathed in as though drowning and she begged something from him with great, frightened eyes. It was obviously as unexpected to her as it was to him.

“Come!” he said, stirring uncomfortably but making no move toward her. The thought of being close to her really frightened him. He did not trust himself at all.

She mistook his meaning and half-rose to fall into the comfort she imagined he was offering. But when she saw him sitting on his hands, bolt upright, and looking more scared than she would have thought possible, she realized she had turned to the wrong person, that all her hopes of him were groundless, and that she was as alone, as friendless, as penniless as she had ever been in her awful former life. She flung herself down on the seat and wept even more hugely.

He leaned forward and tentatively grasped a fold of her sleeve. “What is it?” he asked. It was all he dared risk touching.

She shrank from him and redoubled her sobbing.

“Please? Tell me,” he said. Now he caught her arm gently. The cloth was harsh but his imagination supplied the softness and youth beneath it. He closed his eyes so that he should not see what he was doing.

“I worshipped her!” Charity said in a rough, salty sob. “That Mrs. Cornelius, she were like an angel to me.”

“Well, that was foolish of you,” John said. He opened his eyes but did not release her arm. The cloth was no longer harsh, somehow. “She is flesh and blood, like all of us. She is vulnerable. She needs your understanding—not your contempt. Just as you once needed hers. And, I may say, got it.”

Charity buried her head in the seat once again; the sobbing resumed with all its previous strength.

Knowing the folly of it but unable to help himself, John moved forward and knelt on the floor between the seats. He pulled at her arm to disengage her hand. Surely he could hold one of her hands between his?

She clutched at him with eager fingers. She was quite a strong little creature, really. A moment later he was to find out just how strong, for she darted that hand forward, thrusting his aside, and clutched behind his neck. Before he could recover from his surprise she had pulled him down toward her and was kissing him with big, bold, passionate abandon.

There was a moment—it lasted perhaps less than a second—when he could have pulled away from her and halted everything between them. She could not have recovered from such rejection, and he would then have gained in moral strength each second that passed. He very nearly seized that moment. It was so real it became almost physically there, as if he could have literally grabbed it as it passed.

But it did pass. He merely stared at it as it went by. He stared as a condemned man in a tumbrel might stare at some landmark for the last time, knowing it to be the last time. The rest of him was too busy discovering that this was not Alice—a safe, dead memory whose image he could cherish in the safety of that supposed death—this was Charity. Soft. Young. Warm. Cinnamon-smelling. It was the unexpected smell of her that finally overpowered him. Not quite cinnamon, but he could think of nothing closer. It was very compelling, very heady.

Then she was sitting up and he was still kneeling. And their lips were still together, but the touch was gentler, less urgent, less fearful it might not last.

Blood and sensation returned to his lips. Hers opened, opening his. Her tongue wriggled through and the whole of him revolved around that soft, wet warmth.

I must not do this,
he thought.
I am over forty.
But no part of him felt half so old. No part of him did not rejoice at this delight—which every part of him had forgotten until now.

What is it like to start being in love? If one of his boys had asked him, he could not have told them. But now he knew! He remembered. This was exactly it. This warmth of lovely flesh you crave; the question: “What’s it like to be
you
?”
and wanting to do nothing all your life except find the answer; this sharpening of every sense, tuning it to the one melody alone, making it flat to every other theme…all this was happening, like a long-silent machine fired in steam once more.

She took his hands from her neck and put them on her breasts, moving his fingers with hers, making them caress her. Strange thrilling softness, different from Nora’s. Until now he had not known how far Nora had let herself drift from him.

Her knees moved apart, bringing him even nearer her. “Mmmm?” she made a little, questioning moan.

“No,” he said, pulling away from her at last. “We’ll go somewhere else.”

She nodded, smiling contentedly. A little gesture like that, and it put him all in a turmoil! It was marvellous.