Page 43 of Dare to Love a Duke
The cabman flicked the reins, and the vehicle drove away, leaving Tom standing on the curb outside The Green Oak.
He glanced up and down the street. A handful of shops faced the narrow lane, but dilapidated tenements made up the majority of buildings, their rough brick facades on the verge of toppling apart. The street itself wasn’t paved, and mud spattered the shoes and bare feet of the people ambling down it. From a front step, a woman with a child on her hip stared at him cautiously. A handful of children in tattered scraps of fabric played with a wad of rags tied into a semblance of a football.
Heaviness pushed down on Tom’s chest. The air here seemed thicker, grayer, choking with hopelessness.
Mayfair was very far away.
Why had Lucia brought him to this place? The Orchid Club was miles to the west, far from here, so she’d have no business in this part of the city.
A door stood just beside the entrance to the gin house. He approached and pushed it open, revealing a rickety set of stairs climbing upward. The humid, earthy scent of human habitation filled the staircase. The smell had the heavy ripeness of too many people in too small a space. Yet Lucia had said he was to meet her in the rooms upstairs, so he climbed the steps. They protested loudly beneath his boots.
At the top of the stairs stood a corridor, with several doors ajar. He walked gingerly down the hallway, peering behind each door. In one cramped room, a woman sat on the floor, surrounded by a mountain of shirts. She didn’t look up from her needlework. Another narrow room held a man and a thin dog sitting close to a stove that emitted black smoke.
The dog didn’t lift its head, while the man glanced up and looked at Tom with red-rimmed eyes. “What you want, nob?”
“I’m looking for someone,” Tom answered neutrally.
“Ain’t nobody here worth looking for,” the man said wearily. “Unless you mean herself.”
“Herself?” Tom raised an eyebrow.
“The dark-eyed mort. Always carrying a basket o’ something when she visits, but it ain’t holding food, on account of me asking for a bite and she said what she brung couldn’t be eaten.” A smile appeared on his weathered face. “Next time, she brung me an eel pie.”
From what he was learning of her, that sounded precisely like Lucia. “Where can I find her?”
The man tilted his head to indicate the next room. “If you see her, tell her I wants a pork pie next. But I’ll take another eel if she ain’t got pork.”
“I’ll be certain to let her know.” Tom touched the brim of his hat and moved down the corridor to the last open door.
He paused when he heard Lucia’s voice.
“Try again, Letty. Don’t worry if you can’t get the loop just right.”
“But I want it to look like yours,” a young girl said, her East London accent prominent and her voice tight with frustration.
“It will, but be patient with yourself. It took me a month to get it right.”
“Awright.” The girl didn’t sound convinced.
Curious, Tom rapped his knuckles on the door. When Lucia bid him enter, he nudged the door open, unsure what he’d find.
Ash-colored light from grimy windows surrounded Lucia as she bent over a girl sitting at a tiny desk, a sheet of paper spread in front of the child. The girl held a piece of charcoal, and it was clear that she’d been practicing how to cross hert’s. More girls, aged somewhere between seven and twelve, wore frayed, ill-fitting clothes and sat at small desks crammed into the room. The gray walls were covered with plaster cracked into spiderwebs. One lamp burned, pushing back the gloom, and other girls within the chamber used it to illuminate the hornbooks they studied. The basket in the center of the room held a few slim volumes as well as more hornbooks.
“Who’s this?” a girl with thick black hair demanded, staring at Tom.
“A friend.” Lucia straightened, and while there was wariness in her posture, her gaze was warm. Answering warmth flared within him. “He’s come to pay us a visit.”
“Ladies.” Tom bowed with the gravity he’d shown members of the royal family.
A handful of the children stared, but two others giggled. Tom’s heart contracted at the sound.
“You here to learn your letters, too?” the black-haired girl asked. “It’s hard, but Miss Lucia says that worthwhile things are hard.”
Ah, hell. Surely Lucia meant to kill him by bringing him here. Like anyone who lived in London, he saw the faces of poverty everywhere, from crossing sweeps to girls selling flowers outside Covent Garden, to the children who’d hold your horse for a penny. It never failed to move him to pity, heaping coins into small outstretched hands. But to be in this small room with the city’s unwanted girls, seeing their youth beneath the grime on their faces and seeing them at their studies—that was a dagger in his chest. For now there was no pretending that “someone else” would see to their welfare, or ameliorate their deprivation. He was face-to-face with his country’s appalling treatment of the poor—of poorwomen—and helping these girls wasn’t somebody else’s task. It was his. It was everyone’s.
“I’m sure,” Lucia said, “that our friend would appreciate it if you read to him, Mary.”
When the girl looked uncertain, Tom said, “If you don’t want to—”
