The Proposition (9 page)

His face was close. "Ah," he said. "Yes."
Ace,
his ridiculous
ace.
He nodded, as if he were agreeing with something. "I was fair enough sure I'd like kissin' you, and I do. You, Miss Winnie Bollash, are better than pretty—"

Oh, the insult of his game. The hurt of it. Tears rose up. She wanted to knock him down, to laugh, to cry. Outwardly, though, she moderated herself, only pushing him back more firmly. She was, after all, the sophisticated one here, the one who was supposed to teach him rules he didn't know to play by.

Her throat tightened around the words even as she said them. "I want you to know"—she paused, gathering herself—"that I am not angry with you." Just the bare bones, Edwina. Just make him stop. "Um, you caught me off guard, Mr. Tremore. You can't do, well—do what you just did. Don't ever do that again." There. Hold to the rules, she thought, and all will be fine. "It's not right. You can't do what you normally do." Something made her add, "I'm not a shop girl who can be flattered into believing nonsense, just because it suits your cheeky sense of fun."

He laughed. "Fun," he repeated, saying that particular word exactly right. "Miss Bollash, life be rich. Why don't you bite yourself off a piece?"

She had no answer. Speaking to him in the middle of the night in a dim hallway—about whether or not he could kiss her—was like walking into an unfamiliar, pitch-dark room. She wasn't sure which way to turn without running into something, without hurting herself. Every direction was potentially unsafe.

His head bent. He was looking at her nightclothes.

As if her simply standing there in them
was somehow provocative. Now
that
was an unusual feeling. It made her spine
shiver. It made her
heart beat
in
a
panicky
rhythm. The shadows of his shirt rose and fell, his chest making it move, a deep rising, falling. The sight sent such a shot of apprehension through her, her knees turned liquid.

She'd already told him once, and he wasn't stepping back. She burst out with, "I wouldn't be standing here in my nightclothes, Mr. Tremore, if you weren't prowling my house in the wee hours like a piece of Bow Bells riffraff, taking stock of what he can steal."

He cranked his head back. Light from the study cut across his shoulder, revealing a plane of his face: the look of insult. She regretted having said those precise words, yet couldn't think of different ones, better ones.

He tilted his head to look at her, then said quietly, "You can rest easy, lovey."
Loovey,
he said. "I ain't no thief. I work hard, and I be good at what I do."

She continued to be up in arms. "Not so good that you can keep yourself clean and in decent clothes."

His insulted expression softened into a kind of disappointment. He folded his arms over his chest, letting his weight fall against the edge of the door frame. "You be a snooty thing, ain't ya? Think you know everything there be to know about a bloke, because he don't talk like you, because he catches rats for a livin'—"

"I know a man too lazy to sew the buttons onto his coat. And who ends up being chased—"

He let out a single snort of laughter, loud enough to silence her. "First," he said, "who I be chasin' or who be chasin' me ain't none of your business." His face took on the shadows of his crooked smile before he added, "At least not yet. Second, the coats what I can afford don't right off have many buttons, and what buttons they do, I sell. See, I got ten younger brothers and sisters in Cornwall what depend on me to support them. I send most of me money home. And third—you will notice, I can count, by the way, all the way to
third,
and I can read, too, Public Education Act, you see. And third, loov, you ain't so funny to look at as you think. You be right nice to look at. True, you ain't pretty exactly, but you be—" He struggled for the right word, frowned, looked down, then said, "I can't explain it. I like lookin' at you." The dim light seemed to show him grinning again; it was hard to be sure. But there was wryness in his voice when he offered, "Different. A long pretty thing with the face of a moppet. You be loovly, Miss Bollash." He repeated softly with satisfaction, "Loovly."

Lovely, he meant, of course, but the softness and rhythm in the way he said it struck her.

"Loovly," she repeated, saying it his way. Then laughed. She meant her laughter to be ironic, a hollow humor full of disdain. Her usual kind of laugh when confronted with her own looks. But despite herself, she felt genuine amusement. "More on the long side though than the loovly side," she added.

"Well, long
and
loovly, yes." He laughed, too, possibly at her attempt at his word, at her saying it less naturally than he did.

He stood there, his chest reverberating with that low, base-drum sound again. While Edwina released herself into her own laughter, letting it out softly, letting it go till it ended of its own accord. The two of them slowly calmed till they were just looking at each other.

And there it was: For an instant, reality permutated. For an instant—villainous black mustache and all—a handsome gentleman smiled on her. It seemed suddenly plausible that a man could find her appealing. In a loovly sort of way. Mind-boggling, but plausible.

Then a moment later she truly
did
want to burst out laughing. For here in the half-lit corridor, of course, was only mousy, lanky Winnie Bollash—being flattered by a ratcatcher who didn't know any better.

She sighed, both her smile and the nice feeling dissipating into that sure piece of truth. She stepped back, pulling her dressing gown up tight, wrapping her arms
around herself. "Please don't go into the study. It was my father's."

"Your father's?"

"He's gone now. Dead."

"Sympathies, loov."

"Thank you." She nodded. "It was a while ago."

He hesitated a
moment, only a moment, then said, "You should have the room then. Your father don't need it now."

Edwina looked away, as if around them she
might
see something besides the dark landing. "The whole house was his," she said. "I've taken over all the rest, made it my own, but I've left his study as it was." She murmured, "I use it as the masculine place to take my ladies, to show them how to be comfortable in a man's world." She laughed without humor. "A good joke, don't you think? I'm not very comfortable in such a world myself. Except in that room. My carefully preserved upper-class male habitat." Like a museum, she thought.

She'd said too much already. "Good night." She walked past him, into the study, ostensibly to put out the light. Then she thought to ask, "You have everything, yes?"

He nodded. The question, she realized, was just an excuse to look at him in better light. He stood just beyond the doorway in the corridor, partly in light, partly in shadow. The study's electric bulb threw sharp definition up the front of him: Her father's trousers
were too short; they came to the top of his boots.
Chances were, under the long shirttail, the trousers weren't buttoned. The vest without doubt couldn't be. No cravat, no collar.

None of this stopped Mick Tremore from being handsome, however. His jaw was square, chiseled. He had a straight, high-bridged nose—a Roman nose that, with his deep brow, shadowed his eyes like a ledge. He was striking, there was no doubt about it. Elegant, she thought again. Not just good-looking. Handsome in a polished way that defied explanation. The luck of heritage, an accident of features. Whatever made him
so, it was a stroke of good fortune
for her—and for
Jeremy Lamont. It was much easier to pass a man off as a gentleman when he lined up with
preconceptions
of what a
splendid one looked like.

Which, she realized, in another sense was not a stroke of luck for her at all.

"Good night," she said
again.

She went into the study, but delayed
pulling the
chain on the
light. She made herself dawdle, reshelving a book, realigning a vase. She didn't let herself look back at him, not once. Even though she knew he watched her, waiting. It was at least a full minute before she heard his footfalls turn then walk the short distance to his room at this end of the hall.

Good. Once he was gone, she put the light out, then went back to bed.

* * *

Edwina gave herself a good talking-to as she lay back down into her sheets.

He was lying. Don't believe him. Long and loovly, indeed. He was romanticizing, at the very least.

She herself was no romantic. She knew her own narrow face, the thin blade of her nose with its bony bump on the bridge that was fine for holding up her spectacles but did nothing for her womanly charms. She'd long ago given up on the freckles that covered her skin, from her face down her neck, right down her body over the tops of her toes. She had no breasts to speak of, while she had too much bottom to be symmetrical. And her height, well, it went without saying it was as far from feminine as was Gargantua.

Homely. Hopeless. How could any man look at her and even think to— She grew warm lying there in her bed, staring into the dark. To what?

Kiss her. He'd kissed her. Goodness, it was a night for saying things to herself she had never voiced before.
Kiss.
She sighed.

Why had he done that? Had she misinterpreted? Maybe it wasn't a kiss. Had her mouth looked dirty? Had she looked as if she needed air? Was he trying to figure out how to say something by feeling the movement of her lips? Was there any reasonable explanation for Mr. Tremore to have touched her like that, put his mouth—his mustache—on her?

Lying there, she grew faintly frightened again—a state, it was safe to say, in which she lived almost perpetually. The only place Edwina felt utterly safe was downstairs in her laboratory, where she wasn't so much safe as lost to herself, unaware of anything else but her work. It didn't matter though. Tomorrow, like yesterday and the day before, she'd simply cover her fear by working hard, holding to the rules: immersing herself in the day and what ought to be done. All the while trying to quell worries like, What had she done to make him act like that? Would he ignore tonight tomorrow? Should she? Would he make fun of her now? Was he angry at her? She could have said things better…

And if Mr. Tremore, or anyone at all, did any one of these things—ignored her or became angry or made fun—she felt responsible. She might spend weeks trying to figure out what she had done to deserve it. As if the next time, she could avoid the roughness of life by doing something differently herself.

Often, as now, she chastised herself—how spinsterish to agonize over what couldn't be controlled anyway—yet she couldn't stop her thinking. It was too old a habit. A superstition pounded into her from her youth: the belief that if she were just a good enough, smart enough girl, if she could just think about it long enough, she'd figure out the "right" thing to do, and then life would be kind to her.

No, a woman who looked like she did—who thought as she did—could not afford to be romantic. That was why Edwina was practical. And responsible. And hardworking.

And up all night thinking about what Mr. Tremore
had said and done and how sincere he had seemed when he said it and did it. And what could it possibly mean? And would he do it again? And did she want him to?

Chapter 5

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M
ick stretched. He lay on a feather mattress. Sweet. Slowly, he lifted his eyelids, opening his eyes on shadows from bed curtains, a glow coming through their edges. It was a finer room than usual, but the light was the same as when he always woke up. Same time every day. Daybreak. No matter where he was, the sun found him and nudged him awake.

He swung his legs off the high bed, then had to step over Magic to walk to the window. He pushed open the shutters. The day's light poured in. It brought with it a lot of quiet. London at dawn was about as still as she ever got. Hardly a sound. A dog somewhere, not so lazy as Magic, barked far off. Nearby, a cart rolled on cobbles. Nothing else. Mick rested his palms on the wood sill, leaning straight-armed to look out.

Miss Bollash's back garden was damp with dew. Pretty. Her neighbors' houses were silent and still. No one. He loved this time of day—like he had the world to himself. Being alive felt good. Life was in order. It made sense.

Of course, he knew an hour from now he probably wouldn't feel the same. Most days usually fell apart, one way or another. But he knew, too, if he was alive at sunrise tomorrow the new morning'd feel like a gift. No noise in the day yet, no noise in his head.

Magic came over and bumped against Mick's leg. The dog got his first scratch, while Mick rubbed the
back of one knuckle down his mustache. It felt different on his face the way Milton trimmed
it. Different, but all right. Miss Bollash sure wanted it off. Wasn't happening. It wouldn't earn him a shilling more to shave it. It wouldn't make him talk better, give him a better profession, wouldn't give him or his a better life in any way. So it stayed, because he liked it—he wasn't even certain he'd know himself without it. He'd had a mustache of one kind or another for a dozen years.