Page 11 of I Will Steal You the Stars
A daughter would be an extravagance.
Would life give her the chance to have both?
Enzo reemerged from the crowd. He held out a round potato nestled in a small square of newspaper. Creamy golden rivulets of butter curled down its side and pooled in the creases. Mina stripped her gloves and cradled it in her palm. She took a bite. The outside skin had thickened, all nutty and chewy, and the inside flesh had baked so fluffy it dissolved on her tongue.
Enzo leaned against the newly lit lamppost, and the small circle of golden light encased him, like a halo he didn’t deserve.
‘On Sunday nights at the house on Grosvenor Square, we’d have potato. The table maids would carry pats of bright yellow butter upstairs, but we’d have ours with drippings from the roast. Sometimes, there’d be a bit of meat in the lard. It made it sweeter.’
Enzo shrugged off his coat and draped it over her shoulders. It fell heavy, like an embrace, and the inside lining smelt of coffee and days spent out of doors.
‘You like to make sport of me, but I didn’t dream of being a maid of all work. No one does. I wanted to be a governess. To spend my days with children. But my reading wasn’t good enough, and Matron couldn’t get me a placement. I miss that. All the children. The way they chatter and play even through cold days with thin mittens. There were no little voices at Morton House, only quiet, because that’s what His Grace liked.’
Enzo took up a seat on the bench beside her. She passed him the last of the potato, and in a few short bites, he wolfed it down. Duke Street kids didn’t waste a bite.
‘All my life I’ve lived in basements,’ she continued. ‘At the diplomat’s, with my mother. Working in the kitchen and laundry at Duke Street. And sure as sin, once I had my first position, I was underground, but not only for work.Allthe time. I’d get to the end of the day and not even know if the weather had been sunny or rainy or foggy. All I knew was the pale yellow of thelamps in the scullery. If I had been clever enough to become a governess, I’d have had a room on the top floor. A long way to walk, but if the night was clear enough, I might sometimes see the stars.’
‘You like stars?’ Enzo fixed his cap. He took her hand and tugged her to her feet. ‘Come with me.’
They cut a trail almost the same as the one she had trekked a few days before, when she had been reeling from her dismissal and heading to the rookery in the hope that the boy who had helped her at the orphanage gates would help her still. Past the shops and businesses, and the paths teeming with the well-dressed who peered into glowing windows with choice in their expression. Then beyond the swept streets and horses with bridles, to the lower reaches where ponies were brought inside for warmth and dogs fought over scraps. To Enzo’s domain, to the Wild Court Rookery.
Night crept darker here. It wound around the feet of the children and dimmed the edges of mucky puddles and bent over front steps and curled against lintels. The odd call of ‘evening Duke,’ followed them. Sometimes in light greeting, sometimes with a chuckle, and sometimes with a sadness, like they didn’t register him at all, only the rhythm of the day, and his arrival was part of its closing. Enzo knocked on the front door of a tall tenement building, and a crouched man with one arm let them in. Up they went, into the stairwell, where each corner led to a crowded hallway and yet another flight of stairs.
Four levels up, Mina paused to catch her breath. Enzo chuckled. ‘Not much further. I share the attic with a coster who works nights. He leaves at sundown and comes back sometime around dawn. Says people don’t notice his skin so much in the dark.’
One last trek, and the building ran out of stairs. Enzo pushed the door open.
‘No lock?’ she asked as she followed him over the threshold.
‘We ain’t got nothing worth the climb,’ he replied with a confiding smirk.
An angled ceiling hung over the small confines. Two beds, one stoic iron, the other a wooden pallet on the floor, butted opposite walls. Each was covered with a thin mattress and a heavy grey blanket. Enzo hung his coat on a rail spike that had been driven into a beam, then ran his fingers through his hair. In the low light, she couldn’t decide if it was the same colour as soot or merely dusted with it.
The duke of Wild Court Rookery lived in a tower as sparse as the room she had inhabited in the basement at Grosvenor Square. The austere similarities were uncanny. Wooden floorboards. Bare walls. A thin pillow. Even the air had the same gritty texture.
Poor was poor, no matter what the walls were made of.
Mina’s vision settled into the gloom, and slowly, she picked out small edges that sang of a different kind of familiarity. The pulled tight blanket. Socks draped over the foot of the bed. A small shelf for a comb, and orange water. He’d likely deny it if asked, but Enzo positioned his few belongings in the same way all of them had been taught. He may have walked out of Duke Street to never return, but he’d carried a little of it with him.
‘I know it’s barely nothing.’ Enzo slipped off his boots and lined them up at the foot of the bed—another Duke Street rule—then climbed onto the mattress and balanced on the thin window ledge. He held out a guiding hand. Mina took a little longer to unlace her boots, but soon clambered up to join him. He drew her close, positioning her between his thighs, with her back against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and rested his chin on her shoulder. His voice stayed even and confident, like all of this was the most ordinary day in the world. ‘On nights when the wind blows, and the smog thins, and themoon is small, sometimes, you can see stars. Not lots. Not like I’ve seen in books. Just a few. But still, a few is better than none. It reminds all of us down here, in the slums and the dark, that perhaps we aren’t forsaken.’
‘Did you know some stars have names?’ she asked.
‘Names? Like what?’
‘I don’t know them,’ she said with a slight embarrassment as he nudged the edge of her knowledge. ‘I heard once that they do. Some are Greek. Or Latin. Almost none are words people like us might need.’
Enzo nuzzled her neck, and his inhalation sent a steady tingle through her. His cheek pressed against hers, and without seeing, she knew he traced the silhouettes of rooftops and chimney pots, navigated the grey clouds and searched the pockets of black for tiny darts of light.
‘You see that star there?’ He pointed, and she followed the motion. Against the night, a tiny white dot strained to be seen. ‘I will call it Mina’s lips. I will pluck it from the sky.’ He flicked his hand, as fast as he had in the square, as if he could detach the star from the blanket of night. The star winked, as if an accomplice to his trick. He turned her a little, so that she faced him. ‘And I will put it here, where it belongs, and fix it into place.’ He pressed the imaginary star to the edge of her mouth, then followed with the promised kiss. ‘And those two stars are Mina’s eyes, and they belong here.’ She closed her eyes in anticipation, and as certain as smoke, he kissed her on each lid. ‘And because tonight London only gives us four stars, I will place the last one here.’ He sunk onto his haunches and eased her onto the mattress with him, so that they faced one another, knee to knee, chest to chest. He bent and kissed the skin at the edge of her shirt, to where her wishes beat into existence each morning.
How did he know that was where her hope rested?
‘Right here,’ he said, all tough bravado and chivalry. ‘I give you a star for your heart. And if that is not enough, I will cobble together all the ladders of London. I will lean them against St Pauls, and I will climb each rickety rail until I find heaven, where I will gather all the stars into my arms, and I will bring them all back for you. I will place them in your hair.’ He tickled his fingers over her braid, so light and fast she giggled, grateful for the chance to break the intensity of his gaze, and the ferocious sincerity of his words. ‘And I will knit them into lace to adorn your dresses, and I will spread those that remain on a path before you, so that you never have to walk on the grubby pavement again. I will steal all the stars of heaven, and I will give them all to you.’
Too much, he was entirely too much. Too much complex simplicity, too much reality, too much obscurity, and he had no right to be so ambitious, but all she could do was allow her knees to weaken and sink into him.
‘I’m having another man’s baby,’ she said.
