Leave a Widow Wanting More, page 7
“What are you doing here?” Her heart rose to meet him as she sailed across the room. Confused heart. It should be furious. It was worried, pounding, glad, even, but not angry. “How are you here?”
The front legs of the chair fell to the ground with a thud as James rose to his feet. Sarah pulled him into a hug then held him out at arm’s length. She couldn’t help it. His dark hair was tousled. His limbs were still lanky with boyhood as she remembered. But, had he grown since the last time she’d seen him? Impossible!
She hugged him again, held him out at arm’s length again, and tempered her face into a frown. “How and why are you here, James?”
His smile doubled as his mother’s waned. “Set out last night. Walked.”
She checked his face further. Was he flushed? Too pale? “You walked in the rain?”
He cringed. “Wasn’t raining when I set out.”
She couldn’t deny the echo of her own conversation with Lord Eaden, and she tumbled into the memory of the part he’d played last night with relish. “How are you feeling, darling? Are you well? You look remarkably dry!”
“I bought an umbrella off a fellow when it started raining.”
And how much had he paid for that umbrella? Didn’t matter. It was money gone, as always. “Why didn’t you come to my lodgings?” She blushed. Perhaps it was best he hadn’t. What would he have thought to see her with Lord Eaden this morning? No, she knew the answer. The adventures of Lord Eaden had been all James could talk about for years. He’d be elated to meet his hero.
James shrugged her hands off his shoulders. “I just got here, Mother. I thought you’d be here already. You’re late.”
She was, but through no fault of her own, unless it was her fault she’d allowed a high-handed adventurer to escort her to work. Yes, perhaps that had been a bad idea. What with the second proposal and all.
Sarah resettled her mind on James. “But why, darling? Why are you here and not at Harrow?”
His face fell, his eyelids dropped. She hadn’t seen him this sheepish since, as a boy of ten, he’d accidentally set fire to her best gown while making shadow puppets on the wall. “I ruined my good suit.”
She groaned. “James, no. How?” That suit had cost every penny she’d had saved. But he’d needed it. He grew like a weed, ankles and wrists shooting past cuffs before she could finish reading half a book. But also, James hadn’t quite come to terms with the fact he lacked what his peers at school had. Namely money and the fruits of such privilege.
“Just ordinary stuff, Mother. Some foreigners and I, we were chasing a rabbit. Eagerton made a bang-up bow, and Cuttles and I made some arrows, and we were going to cook it. The rabbit, I mean.” He fairly radiated excitement. “We were chasing it through the woods but didn’t see the stream and fell in. Dirty business. Caked all over with mud. I tried to salvage what I could when we got back, but … They have plenty more good suits, Mother. I just have the one.” He shrugged and looked away.
Sarah sat in the chair James had vacated. It would take forever to earn enough to outfit James like the young lords he went to school with. She cut her eyes toward his tall, trim figure. He was wearing his old suit. The pants and jacket sleeves were too short, the shirt threadbare, the cravat not quite white. He still wore his good shoes. Hardly good any longer. They were caked in mud. Ruined. But he had no other options. His other shoes no longer fit him.
She sighed. She had no options, either. She must fix the situation. For James. She rose and pulled her son into an embrace one final time.
He squirmed under her ministrations. “Mother!
“Sorry.” She set him free. “I just didn’t expect to see you. Why didn’t you send word first?”
His face turned crimson. “I didn’t know … I didn’t know if you’d have the blunt to pay for a letter.”
“There’s always enough for a letter, James.”
“Yes, but I’ll need a new suit.”
He was right. She’d need every penny for a new suit. There would no longer be enough for letters. “We’ll just have to figure something out, but you’ll have to go back to school, James. Tomorrow. Rest first. Do you remember the way to my lodgings?”
“Yes!”
“There’s some tea there, but nothing to eat, I’m afraid. Here.” She reached into her reticule and gave him what was there. Not much. Blast and damnation. Barely anything at all.
He accepted the coins with a grin and an open palm. “Thanks, Mama!”
Her heart melted. He never called her that anymore. “I have to work. Go rest.”
He waved as he slipped out the door and into the waking street.
“Great Gutenberg!” Sarah groaned, sinking back into the chair.
“That does not sound like the exclamation of a woman who’s brought me Gulliver’s.”
Sara jumped from the seat and swung around.
Mr. Hopkins stood behind the counter, his head tilted at a curious angle. “Who was that boy, and why did he leave without buying a book?”
“That’s my son, James. Down from Harrow.”
Mr. Hopkins frowned, discarding the information. “And my book? You don’t have it, do you.”
Sarah chose her words carefully. “I was not able to procure it for you, no.”
“Pity.” He sighed, his face falling. “I didn’t have high hopes. No one can outwit Lord Eaden. He’s the kind of man who always gets what he wants.”
Not everything he wanted. Not Gulliver’s. Not her.
But what about James’s muddy boots? His ruined suit? His too-small clothes? The young lordlings he emulated?
If she gave Lord Eaden one of the things currently denied him, namely herself, she wouldn’t have to deny James.
Was she being selfish, refusing to marry Lord Eaden?
“I’m sorry, Mr. Hopkins. I’ve failed once more, it seems.”
He patted her on the hand. “Tsk-tsk, Mrs. Pennington. Don’t wallow. It was a doomed task to begin with.”
They swung toward the front of the shop, where the creaky hinges of the opening door alerted them to a customer.
Mr. Hopkins backed toward his office. “Ah. I must be going. I’m interviewing gentlemen today. You’ll have to mind the shop.”
Not a customer, then. A potential employee. “To fill my position?”
He grimaced. “You can’t be overprepared, Mrs. Pennington.”
“I suppose not.”
Mr. Hopkins disappeared, and Sarah swept in to greet the young man, tall and stooped with a serious face, who’d entered the shop.
“I’m here to interview for the position of shopkeep,” he said, his face barely moving as he spoke.
Oh, he’d be excellent at selling books. Customers loved automatons. She pointed to Hopkins’s office door and rolled her eyes as the young man walked away.
She had a month to find a new position, but Hopkins had set about replacing her as quickly as possible. A heavy dread filled her gut, and she found herself walking toward the travel books at the back of the shop. Though Lord Eaden’s works were scholarly and concerned with the social customs of the people in the places he visited, Mr. Hopkins organized them as travel narratives, and most people read them that way. She, too, often skipped over the scholarly bits.
But sliding one of the books—Burial Customs Along the Nile—off the shelf, she tried to understand the argument he made. Something about similarities to British burial customs and a refusal to, as he called it, “pillage and desecrate a people’s most sacred spots.” She remembered this book. Her son had loved it for the gruesome depictions of mummified bodies. She’d never paid it much mind beyond the fact he loved it. She’d questioned, briefly, his morbid fascination with it, but in hindsight, it hadn’t seemed to do him any harm. Now, though, Lord Eaden leaped off the page. She envisioned him moving with feline grace across deserts, startling at the smallest sniffle from any nearby female, agonizing over the perfect item to gift each daughter, and carting the tiny gifts across countries and oceans in pockets deepened for the purpose.
In laying out each supporting point of his argument, she saw the way his mind worked, so logically that if others didn’t follow along at the same rapid mental pace, it felt illogical.
“Point one,” Sarah read from page thirty-two, “consider the crocodiles.” Intriguing. She scanned a few paragraphs, but the language dried out after the first sentence, and her eyes glazed over. She snapped the book closed. What was there to consider about crocodiles, and how did such considerations connect to burial customs or to respecting those customs? She didn’t really care. But she loved that line. Consider the crocodiles. Indeed. Lord Eaden was a crocodile in need of consideration.
Especially because of James and his muddy boots, his ruined suit.
Especially because of the tall automaton interviewing to replace her.
Sarah meandered through the books. Lost in her considerations, she didn’t see the stack of books until she’d knocked it over. She bent down to collect the items, inspecting the spine of the first book she picked up. Lady Hemsworth’s Lady’s Guide to Moral Rectitude. Sarah stood and opened it. It cracked as if shocked at actually being opened. The table of contents declared advice on courtship could be found on page fifty-six. She flipped through the stiff pages, but page fifty-six was uncut, so she settled for page fifty-eight.
She read out loud. “The first thing a lady should ask herself when considering a marriage proposal is what potential dangers lie beneath the handsome, placid face of her suitor.” Not bad advice, all in all. Perhaps the book’s dry title did Lady Hemsworth a disservice. Sarah read on. “It is the worst kind of hell on earth to sew oneself for life to a reprobate, a profligate, in short, a moral crocodile who will eat your heart in a single gulp. Ha!” Sarah’s bark of laughter rang throughout the shop.
Consider the crocodile.
Popular advice, it seemed.
But ultimately worthless. It didn’t help her with James’s ruined suit. It didn’t help her with losing her position at Hopkins Bookshop or with finding a new one.
She could accept Lord Eaden’s proposal and be done with all those worries, but if she did, he might very well eat up her heart.
Chapter 10
Henry watched Sarah walk away for the second time and called himself a fool. A fool for still feeling her in his bones and a fool for watching her walk away. The sway of her posterior in the loose gown was more arousing than it should be. So much so, that when she entered the shop, he continued watching her through the window.
In some of the places he’d visited, he’d have been shot for staring so long, so lustily, at a woman not his own. And rightly so!
But she could very well be his, and soon. He’d propose again, one more time, and if—
Sarah rushed across the room, embracing a young lad. He had Sarah’s black hair and lean frame but towered above her. He wore an expression of maternal devotion mixed with determined independence.
Sarah’s steel-lined back melted, softening as she wrapped the young man in her arms, then fluttered with avian movements as she plucked his ear, tugged on his sleeves, smoothed his brow. Her son. No doubt about that. But what was he doing in London? Wasn’t he supposed to be at Harrow?
Sarah opened her reticule, snuck her tiny hand in, and though Henry couldn’t see, he knew what she held in her palm, outstretched to the dark-haired boy. Probably the last bloody coins she owned.
The boy’s face crimsoned in a grateful, sheepish sort of look. He hugged Sarah, then sped to the door, turning only briefly to wave a farewell before darting out into the streets.
Definitely her son. Henry watched the boy slip down the street in the opposite direction of his mother’s accommodations. Where did he go with possibly all or most of his mother’s money? And why was he not in school? And, more curious still, why was the boy so filthy?
Questions abounded. The easiest way to achieve answers was to ask Sarah. However, Henry had found through years of investigation into other peoples and cultures that directly asking for answers did not always result in truth. People lied, modifying the truth to best suit themselves. Not that Sarah would. She was a good egg. But still, sometimes passive observation got one closer to the truth than a direct assault.
Henry slipped down the street after the dark-haired boy. He seemed headed in the direction of Cork Street, but then he stopped and hailed a hackney.
“What in Zeus’s name?” Henry muttered under his breath. Surely Sarah didn’t have enough extra money for the boy to spend it this way. She hadn’t even paid for a hackney yesterday, instead of walking through the rain to Hellwater’s.
The boy handed the hackney driver some coins. “Cork Street,” he announced, slipping into the conveyance.
“So close!” Henry hissed. What was wrong with the boy? He stopped the hackney driver before he could depart. “Take on another passenger, and I’ll pay triple your usual fare for that distance.”
The driver’s eyes grew large and greedy. “As you wish, sir.”
Henry lumbered up into the cab before the driver finished responding.
The boy scooted to the other edge of the cab, avoiding Henry’s gaze.
Henry leaned back on the bench. So much for his plan of observation. He’d jumped headfirst into a direct attack when he’d leapt into the hackney. But all was not lost. The boy didn’t know Henry’s identity, nor that he wished to marry his mother. Henry cleared his throat. “Cork Street, eh?”
The boy nodded, darting a glance at him.
“I suppose you require a tailor.”
Another nod, another glance. This time the boy looked longer, his eyes narrowing. “I know you.”
Zeus. He’d forgotten. If this was Sarah’s son, he’d probably seen Henry’s picture. But surely the famous explorer was just shaggy and dirty enough after a night sleeping in a hackney that no one would recognize him from the formal sketch portrait that appeared in his books and articles.
“You’re Lord Eaden. The adventurer.” The boy’s eyes shone with excitement.
Damnit. Henry nodded his assent. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. …”
“Pennington. James Pennington.”
No surprise there.
“I loved your last book.” He scowled. “But it’s been years and years since you’ve published a new one. Why?”
“Tell me, Mr. Pennington, would you appreciate it if your religious iconography became a design for someone’s wallpaper?”
“I … no, I don’t suppose I would.”
“And would you like to be considered primitive because your customs differed from someone else’s?”
“No, but—”
“Well, neither do my Egyptian friends.” Henry ran a hand through his hair. “I did not realize the harm I was doing until too late. They are people, not science experiments.”
“Why do you still travel, then?”
“They are my friends. And I am still a curious man above all. I want to learn from them. I have learned from them. I just refuse to make their lives public spectacle.”
The boy looked flummoxed. He wasn’t the only one. Henry’s publisher ranted every chance he got about missed remunerative opportunities. Zeus, but he had no desire to think of those lectures now. He eyed Mrs. Pennington’s son. “I’ve illuminated something for you, Mr. Pennington, now it is your turn to tell me something.”
“Anything!”
“What mudhole did you tumble into before we crossed paths? And another question. I’m naturally curious, you see, so I must know. Why has such a young, strapping man hired a hackney for such a short distance?”
Nose wrinkling, James picked at his clothes. “I fell into a stream at Harrow. I walked back to London last night.”
So the boy was stupid, too? “Rather dangerous. Have you no parents to teach you better?”
“My mother wasn’t best pleased with me. For walking last night or for my clothes.”
“No father?”
James shook his head.
“Your mother, she’s a woman of means, then?”
James’s face grew red as the Egyptian sun. “I, well, not particularly.”
Silence reigned as Henry watched James squirm on the seat. Sometimes silence, not talk, was the best way to get answers. Henry counted slowly to himself, waiting.
He didn’t have to wait long. He’d gotten to precisely thirty-two when James spoke.
“I’m going to a hell I heard Lord St. Vincent talk about at school. It’s on a side street near Schweitzer and Davidson’s. I’m going to take a few shillings and turn them into pounds!”
“Ah, you’re a fairy, then? Or a fool. Which is it?”
“What? No. No. See, I want to help her. And I can do it. I win when I bet with the lads at school.”
The boy trod the road to ruination. He had his mother’s heart and courage, but not her sense or practicality. And Sarah likely had no idea she’d given her final few coins away to be lost on a gamble. Henry groaned, seeing his path clearly before him. Sarah would think him high-handed, interfering. But so be it. “You know, I lived with a group of people in the last year who believe all coins have a lucky or unlucky aura?” It was a Canterbury Tale if there ever was one, but James didn’t seem to realize it. He leaned nearer, listening greedily for more. “They can tell just by looking at a coin if it will grow in their coffers or disappear.”
“Fascinating. Where do they live?”
Zeus. They didn’t live anywhere, being entirely fictitious. “The Continent.” There. That was vague enough to work.
James nodded sagely.
“Let me see your coins. Perhaps I can—”
James pulled Sarah’s money from his pocket before Henry could finish his sentence, and just as quickly, Henry scooped the precious coins into his own hand.
“Hey!” James lunged at Henry, grasping for the money, but Henry held him back. “Hey! Let me go! Give it back!”
“No. I’m not going to let you lose your mother’s hard-earned shillings.”
“What’s it to you!”
“Driver!” Henry pounded on the roof of the hackney.
