Wilful Impropriety (46 page)

I nodded and managed to sit upright, after much travail. She hurried to help me. “Stupid, adorable thing,” she whispered over my head as I leaned against her, gasping with pain.

“You didn’t take the draught,” she said.

I shook my head. “That was how they got me the first time.”

“Got you? What—you think I was trying to drug you so I could ship you off somewhere?”

“Not you,” I panted. “Your . . . father.”

“What do you mean?” She was practically glaring at me now. I owed her an explanation.

“I was delivering corpses to your father. But not just any corpses. Victims of murder.”

The shock on her face was painful. I didn’t like the way it drained her to the pall of the very corpses I’d just mentioned, the dull glaze of understanding in her eyes.

“I was very nearly one of those. They tried to dose me with enough laudanum to poison me. They hung me down a dry well until they were sure I was dead. But it didn’t work. I escaped, barely, and came here.”

“To the enemy,” she said flatly.

“To you,” I said.

It was then we heard her father calling, his voice getting louder and more strident as he approached. She fluttered around the room as if she could make a magic door that she could whisk me into, but I knew there was nothing we could do. We were caught. He would have me transported for crimes I didn’t commit. Or worse, give me back to Jack Stirabout and his boys. I knew they’d never let me get away a second time.

He burst into the room, all bristling mustache and slick, dark gentleman’s clothes. “Willie, what the devil . . .”

And then he saw me.

“You!” he said. “What in blazes are you doing here?”

I opened my mouth, but he kept going. “You’d both better have a damn good explanation, because . . .”

Willie went over and shut the door, leaning against it with that look of absolute confidence I’d come to love and somewhat dread. I would have laughed, if it hadn’t hurt so much.

“No, Father,” she said. “
You
have some explaining to do.”

Her father frowned. “Whatever do you mean? You were the one late to breakfast. You were—”

She held up her hand and, much to my everlasting awe, he fell silent.

“Perhaps you’d like to explain how it is that this boy was nearly murdered last night by thugs who work for you? Or perhaps you’d care to tell us how it is that you justify hiring said thugs to murder innocents for your surgery? We’re both listening, Father. We’d love to know.”

And now it was his turn to go absolutely pale and still.

“What?” His voice was as flat and sharp as a knife. I wanted to warn Willie to tread carefully now, lest she do herself harm.

“You heard me.”

“I know of no such thing.” He gestured toward me. “This boy is a liar—you’d believe him over me, my dear?”

Willie lifted her chin and looked at him sidelong. “Any day of the week.” She bit the consonants off hard.

It was utterly amazing to me to watch the transformation in both of them. She was tall and regal as a queen. He looked back and forth between us like a whipped dog. “Well, I didn’t, I mean . . . that is to say—”

He couldn’t go toward the door, so he backed into the other corner of the room. “It’s very difficult to advance medicine when one is constantly forced to use rotting specimens!” he blurted out.

We both stared at him. The silence was so sharp I feared it would cut us.

“Here’s what you’re going to do,” Willie said. Her voice was as deadly calm as her father’s had been the day he’d threatened me. Strange, how all his composure was gone in the face of his daughter’s rebellion.

“You are going to stop dealing with those men. You are going to take Jonathan in and train him as your apprentice, so that eventually he can take over your practice and, if he so chooses, marry me. You will do things honorably and above board. And we will swear that neither of us will ever tell what we know of your sordid, absolutely unforgivable crimes.”

She looked at me then, and, though we were both blushing at the thought of our love so boldly (and yet still so secretly) declared, I nodded.

Her father’s face went through several shades of red and purple before at last he hung his head, muttering through his mustaches about agreeing. We all shook hands on it before Willie let him out the door, telling him that she’d follow him presently.

She shut the door and took a deep breath before looking over at me.

Then she smiled and said, “I always did get my way.”

And that is how I became Dr. Jonathan Wells, Esq., surgeon to a great many of the wealthy families of Kensington. And how Miss Wilhemina Constance Grace became my wife.

Looking down the narrow street, more usually identical to several twisting others like it in Manchester, Sam felt amazed at how completely they had, in less than a fortnight, transformed it from its habitual dreary sulk of a state into this marvel of vibrancy, thrillingly full of colors with its joyfully defiant banners and flags. The soot-caked bricks and half-crumbling walls of its tightly packed buildings were still there. The cobblestones in the street itself were still cracked, and missing entirely in a few treacherous places, tripping around which had left more than one careless drunken wanderer battered and bruised. Yet the grime and decay itself now seemed somehow enlivened, as if it were a wildly blooming industrial garden instead of a place for poor people to sleep badly between hard shifts of work.

Or at least, Sam had to assume most of the cobblestones were still there, because every inch of them was now covered by some boisterous activity, until they were blocked from view by the sheer size of the crowd. Being of a less idealistic set of mind than certain of her comrades, she paused to wonder whether the count of cobblestones might indeed have changed from the night before, with a few of the looser ones pried up and piled neatly somewhere not too far from reach.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the passing of one of the very ones to whom she might ascribe the possibility of such . . .
forward-thinking
activity—Tristan, jubilant that his treasured but previously hidden contraptions would soon make their debut, who half yelled above the growing din of the throng, “Can’t imagine the Institution’s ever had a queue quite like this, eh?”

“Nor would they care to,” Sam said absently, still watching the narrow street and thinking about the different ways in which a cobblestone could do damage to the human form. “They’d sooner face the shame of having to whistle for Peeler’s lads than have their Royal associated with this lot.”

Merchants of the right mannerisms and acquisitions were welcome, yes, Sam thought—a suitable fortune could now sway the otherwise disdainful heads of the aristocracy, who lately had begun to find themselves rather longer on titles than they were deep in purse—but the men and women working to make those merchants rich were not as welcome in the city’s small answer to London’s assumption that the North was without culture, or indeed perhaps even without civilization itself.

These mere laborers as now surrounded her, though there were so many more of them—and more every day as Manchester boomed both around them and by the work of their rugged, sooty hands—were not yet expected or understood by the ruling class to have even any interest in, or ability to understand, the world of art, let alone to harbor suspiciously political thoughts about making some of their own. Most especially not in ways which defied the entrenched hierarchies of London’s Royal Academy, or its highly specific views on what constituted art worthy of critique, let alone display.

“Oh, but it’s open to the public, don’t you know that, Sam?” Tristan called over his shoulder, with a laugh they shared, knowing that to the patrons of the Institution, the public was a very different entity than the people.

“No, but also not like this!” Sam yelled at Tristan’s retreating back. “We’ve hours yet to open, and already I’m not trusting the place won’t burst at the seams!”

The fact that the merchants and workers had already begun to collect, in woodcuts and engravings, whatever pieces of art they could manage to afford, almost to the very moment these were available, was hardly considered worth noting to the members of the Royal Manchester Institution—after all, the minions of merchants were already known to always have their unpleasant little ways of passing their time, not to mention their money, along.

The tiny street already contained more people than Sam—or any of them, except perhaps Antoine—had imagined would rise to the occasion. Yet the Frenchman
had
not only imagined it, but believed in it with such fervor that his passion opened up a way even for those who could not envision it at all to
hope
for it.

Hope for it enough to work for it, separately and together, in each of their unique ways shaping both the fact and the way it had been brought about. As Sam surveyed what had once been a familiar landscape, and was now somehow both more and less itself than it had ever been before, she realized that nothing fundamental about it had been altered, and yet it was a new place nevertheless.

Sam looked down at the carefully hand-sewn frock she had worn that morning, and touched her stolen wig, and understood—though still without knowing exactly what it was she was understanding—that she had some deep and essential connection to the almost occult process which they had all worked so hard to bring about here.

Even as Antoine ascended his old crate and attempted to catch the attention of a crowd who he had not yet realized had no further need of him, Sam felt this had become a place not just refreshed and reformed, but somehow transmuted into a fragment of a different world entirely.

She found herself tracing all the paths that led from the old world to this new one. All the while, she wondered at whether each step taken had been essential to the destination, or whether instead they would have been propelled to this strange and wonderful place regardless of the choices they had made, pulled there by forces beyond their understanding or control.

She felt as though she had been fated to come to this moment, standing and watching as the crowd somehow swelled with even more bodies attracted to all the commotion and spectacle—not to mention the rumors that had been running wild as they’d quickly taken all the complicated steps necessary to prepare for this display, especially when the details of what people (or which creatures, to some minds) were behind its production became known.

Later—with the long chestnut-colored hair (donated by a kind friend who’d decided she preferred her own short-cropped to go with her suspenders) unpinned and returned to its tattered hatbox, and the plain but precious dress hanging once again neatly beside the ragged trousers and workman’s rough shirt, which were together all to be found hanging in the room’s excuse for a wardrobe—Sam thought it must have been Uncle Andrew and his Shop of Wonders, rather than fate, who set it all in motion, for purposes which would remain forever unknown.

•   •   •

When he saw it for the first time, all Sam could think was that it would have to do. The carefully hand-lettered sign in its window declared that within were “wonders to behold”—though apparently not, he thought wryly, to be dusted now and again. Wonder might be less dear than its reputation suggested, his cynical mind continued, as he stood there in the trousers,
beholding
it as instructed by the sign, as it was assembled there, in a jumble of creaking shelves and upturned crates, with only the occasional panel of glass to betray the late shopkeeper’s thoughts about worth in terms of finance rather than fascination.

Yet it would do—there was nothing for it but to be done. This dusty shed of junked-down marvels consisted of all the valuable worldly goods Sam had ever owned, as of the previous morning, which had been far more surprising than most of those which had come before.

First, news of an uncle—thus also once a brother—previously unmentioned by a sister, also a mother—though admittedly not much of one, Sam thought with more forgiveness than the woman, who’d briskly brought and then left him without a word at the age of seven on the steps of the City Hall, as if to declare he was now Manchester’s problem to resolve, was due.

Most everyone’s ship is anchored eventually, and few of them find the best ports. Just the closest
, he’d thought upon occasion, whenever he happened to think of her.
Just the ones in reach before we crash.

Now he was in possession of a small new shard of knowledge about her—the youngest brother of Sam’s absent mother had been called Andrew, and Uncle Andrew would never exist in the present tense for Sam.

•   •   •

The first surprising morning of the week was delivered by a man unexpected in himself—in his carefully tailored suit, with his impeccable hat, the smell of London overpowering even the lasting tang that hung around him from the natural effect of sitting backwind of horses on the move. The appearance of his carriage had been the disappearance of several clutches of vagabonds and rag-children, scattered like mice when a cat stalks down the cellar stairs.

He was a barrister, this vision of a hundred hungry nights woven tightly into just one vest, appearing in Sam’s row like the demon of money itself.