Page 23 of Eliza and the Duke
She nodded thoughtfully. “Even still, it seems I misunderstood the aura of your mystique.”
He laughed. “The aura of my mystique?” He couldn’t help but laugh when she was near even as they dodged the piss and shit that clogged the streets. “Where to next?”
She looked around and her gaze caught on the pub across Whitechapel High Street. The White Hart was well-known far and wide. Loud and crowded, it tended to attract those from outside the rabbit warrens of Whitechapel who came to gawk at the people who lived here. He didn’t want to go there. Not with her.
“Do you see the church?” he asked to distract her.
She turned her head to look at the church spire that rose about two hundred feet high into the sky just past the boundary of the high street area. “Yes.”
He’d always found the outside of the building rough and forbidding. It was meant to be a respite among the dirty streets that surrounded it, but the forbidding brick and stone had never felt welcoming. It loomed dark and austere in the night. The inside wasn’t any better. He hadn’t seen it in over ten years, but it had been filled with sculptures, gilding, and stained glass windows. An embarrassment of riches given the lack of basic necessities available to those it cared for.
“St. Mary Matfelon. Legend has it that it was once limewashed, ages ago. Or perhaps one of the earlier buildings that sat there was. It’s how the area became known. It was the White Chapel.”
She looked at it with renewed interest. “I’d never heard that.”
“Why would you have? Most people don’t care about this corner of the city.” He hadn’t meant his voice to sound bitter, but it did.
Her head whipped around and she looked up at him, perhaps seeing too much. “I didn’t mean…”
“They say we were found there…Mary and I.” He didn’t know why he’d said it. There was no reason to tell her about himself. He damned well didn’t remember those early years. If the change in subject was meant to shift course from the awkwardness of his previous statement, it didn’t work.
“You were left there?” What else was she supposed to say? She turned to him, and her voice had taken on a soft and curious inflection.
Her tender concern would break him. He could feel a tightening sensation rising in his chest. His hand slid to her hip, and he made sure to keep his eyes straight ahead and not on her as he led her away from the high street. This road was still a main thoroughfare, less busy, but not so quiet as to be dangerous. Or any more dangerous.
He should change the subject, but he inexplicably kept talking. “There’s an alcove around the side of the church that is hidden from the street. We were found there with a threadbare blanket. It was near winter. November or December, I reckon. I was an infant; Mary couldn’t have been more than a year or two. They said that she held on to me and wouldn’t let me go.” She’d always been protective of him, even when the foundling house had split them into different rooms once they’d moved out of the nursery. Her with the girls and him with the boys.
“Do they know who your parents were? Your mother?”
He shook his head. “If they did, they never said.”
“Perhaps she left you there because she knew she couldn’t care for you properly during the cold winter.”
“It’s kind of you to think so.” Sometimes he thought that, too. Sometimes he wondered if she’d died from disease and someone had dropped them there. Sometimes he wondered ifshe’d ever cared for them at all. If she’d been happy to rid herself of them. He’d never know the truth.
“Where did you grow up? Did you live at the church?”
“The church sent us to a foundling house they funded. We stayed there for a while…until we left.”
“Why did you leave?” she asked.
“Doesn’t matter. That’s enough about that.”
He was cursing himself for ever mentioning it. He let her go. They could walk side by side. No one would bother her. It was obvious they were together. He didn’t need to touch her. But she didn’t give him that choice. She took hold of his arm and laced hers through it. He shouldn’t like the fact that she did it as much as he was enjoying it. Having her on his arm made him feel about two stone bigger and taller.
She was silent for a moment, her attention caught by a trio of acrobats performing on the pavement ahead. The high street was known for its street performers. They all wore black tights and flat boots as they contorted themselves into unnatural shapes. Then, as a fourth beat cymbals together, one of them was tossed into the air to land on another’s shoulders to much applause from the spectators they had attracted. He tossed a halfpenny into the ratty felt hat laid out on the ground as they passed.
“You and I aren’t that different, you know.”
He should’ve known she wouldn’t give up the conversation so easily.
“You’ve said something similar before, but from where I’m standing you’re wrong.” He grinned to soften his words. “You’re either lying or prone to delusions, and I can’t figure out which.”
She smiled up at him, latching on to his arm with both hands. “There is a third option. That I’m telling the truth.” He shook his head, but she kept talking. “My mother tells everyonethat she was born to some genteel but impoverished family from South Carolina. That they died from a fever. Sometimes it’s influenza, or scarlet fever, or yellow fever. She was the only one who survived and was sent to Chicago to be with distant relatives. But the truth is that she was born in Chicago. Much like you, she was left on the steps of an orphanage as a newborn. When she was older, they told her it was likely that her mother had been a prostitute. They frequently left their liabilities at the door. The orphanage had a basket set out for that reason.”
He shook his head. He didn’t think she was lying to him, but it seemed too unlikely. She wasn’t like him.
“How did your mother go from a prostitute’s castoff in an orphanage to the ballrooms of London?”
