Lost Among the Living(18)
Dottie spoke again, something about Martin seeing the artworks she’d bought on the Continent. Robert countered that no young man would want to see such a dull thing, and instead they should go riding at the first opportunity. Martin agreed with both his parents without committing to anything. He seemed adept at navigating the treacherous territory between them, skipping past the many land mines with the agility of an adored son.
But I was only barely paying attention. I had figured out the subtle tension in the room with the sudden understanding of a thunderclap. My son is coming home to get married. Her dismissive wave of the hand when I had asked about his fiancée. I’ll take care of it.
Mr. Wilde’s assessment of me, the exchange of notes between them.
Our chance for children, someone to leave our legacy to.
You are lovely. I am so glad I came home.
Martin must have seen understanding on my face. I stood transfixed as he stepped closer, dropped my hand, and pulled me to him in an embrace. My packages bumped between us awkwardly, but still Martin patted my back, his thin hands touching me coldly through my coat at my shoulder blades.
“Cousin Jo,” Martin said, his breath in my ear, his voice dark with understanding. “We are going to have so much fun.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
I fell in love with my husband’s legs before I fell in love with the rest of him.
It was April 1914, England’s declaration of war still four months distant. With Mother living in the hospital, I had found a job in London as a typist for a lawyer named Casparov, who kept an office in the streets near Gray’s Inn. Casparov had a thick salt-and-pepper beard and a fondness for checked suits. He saw few clients in his shabby office, but he had a voluminous correspondence, all of which he wrote in nearly inscrutable shorthand. He kept two typists—both women—for the sole purpose of wading through his snowdrifts of notes, which he seemed to write day and night. We sorted them, typed them into understandable form, and posted them.
The salary was low, but it paid the rent at my boardinghouse and Mother’s hospital bills, and I was lucky to have the job. I was only a middling typist, but there was almost no other employment for women unless I wanted to be a nurse, a teacher, or a nun. So I put up with Casparov’s terrible shorthand and his occasional grasps of my bottom and earned my money as best I could. My fellow typist, a big-boned girl named Helen who was raising her “niece”—quite obviously her daughter, though Casparov never figured it out—did the same.
Helen and I were sitting in the office’s dark, unprepossessing antechamber, typing as the clock ticked on the wall, when the door banged open and a man walked in. Neither of us spoke a greeting to him; we were typists, Casparov had made clear, not receptionists. You do not speak to my clients, he’d said in his Russian accent. They are not your business. Your business is the typing only, and the looking respectable. We were functional decorations, like vases of flowers that managed correspondence. But I raised my eyes just above the level of the page in my typewriter and looked. And watched, transfixed, as the man crossed the room toward Casparov’s inner office.
The visitor was tall. He wore a leather jacket, cut to the waist and trimmed with a wool collar—the sort of coat a city fellow wears when he’s on a weekend out in the country. A cloth cap with a peaked brim was pulled down low on his head, and he did not bother to remove it. He wore leather gloves against the April chill, and as he approached my desk, I caught the scent of the damp, cold air he’d brought with him, the drip of the icy fog that coated the city. He strode through the antechamber without a word, his heavy-soled shoes thumping purposefully on the worn carpet.
I could see his legs perfectly in the span of my demurely lowered gaze. Clad in well-tailored wool trousers, they were the most spectacular male legs I had ever seen—long, muscled, swinging easily in a graceful, powerful gait. They were Lord of the Manor legs, made expressly for tight buckskin breeches and high, polished riding boots. I felt something inside me as I watched them, something that was lust mixed with stinging joy at seeing something so beautiful yet so utterly unattainable. You will never have that. Never. He will not even look at you.
The legs slowed as they neared me, and as they passed right in front of my typewriter page, so close I could see the weave of the wool trousers, they nearly stopped. I swallowed and looked up.
He was looking down at me. The face below the brim of the cap was handsome, well proportioned, with a fine jaw and a firm line of mouth, but there was nothing soft about it. It was obviously a well-bred face, along with the rest of him—class always tells—but the shadow of stubble on his jaw and the narrowness of his cheekbones spoke of a man who had not been raised in a country home. His eyes were dark blue, the lashes short and the irises ringed with black. They were alive with fierce, uncompromising intelligence, and they were focused on me.
I met his gaze and did not look away. I felt cold sweat form on my back, beneath my serviceable office dress with the collar I’d thought so pretty when I’d bought it. I felt my fingers go still and cold on the typewriter keys. I felt something happy and queasy and afraid turn over in my stomach. I did not blush; I did not stammer. But I looked at him, watching him watch me, taking him in as he took me in, as the moment spun on and on.
Behind him, Casparov’s door creaked open and his voice came across the room. “Alex.”