Jane Steele(100)

At this juncture, I considered that a sound from Clarke—any sound—would be taken as a boon. Instead, she stared at me with wide green eyes, her hands vibrating hummingbird-fast.

“I’m upsetting you.” The admission stung. “I can’t tell you what it meant to see you again. I’ll just—”

“No.” Clarke trapped my wrist with the strength of a steel manacle. “Sit down.” She blinked, hard. “I mean, won’t you sit down?”

Slowly, she released me.

I sat down.

Clarke folded the newspaper with care; then she took a long breath and sat back, nodding at the silver coffeepot. “Would you like a cup?”

“Please.”

A waiter came with an additional service and poured, a civilised piece of pageantry which enabled us both to pretend we were friends meeting for coffee to discuss our summering plans, rather than friends meeting for coffee to discuss whatever we were going to discuss. My teapot and sandwiches appeared, and I gestured for her to help herself; Clarke shook her head, eyes wide under pale lashes, and I looked away.

“You look well too,” said she.

“Hmm?” I had been studying my coffee with more interest than that beverage had ever previously inspired.

Clarke smiled—the indulgent one which meant I had journeyed too far into the wilderness of my head. “You look very smart. I’m happy over that, your clearly having plentiful coin. So often I wondered whether—”

“Me too, every single day,” I blurted.

When she blushed, she looked more herself again, for her previous pallor had been alarming. Clarke had never blushed often, however, and never lacking a sound purpose, so I wondered at the expression.

“Well.” She pretended to polish her pince-nez as I pretended to add sugar to my coffee. “I probably did not wonder quite as much as you did, for I used to hear news of you.”

“You have the better of me, then,” I marvelled. “How?”

Clarke’s head found the much-loved angle it adopted when thinking harder than usual; as if remembering something, she spoke. “‘I always knew my grip upon the thread of time was tenuous, and the harder I clutched, the sooner it would break. Therefore, do not weep for me, my tender sweet love—we must all resign ourselves to the final snapping of that bond between soul and breath, and though it is a present unworthy of your grace and beauty, you must know that I gift my soul to you.’”

Jaw dropping, I laughed. Clarke gave me a faint smile.

“I wrote that!” I exclaimed. “John Jacob Holdworth, hanged at Newgate in eighteen forty-seven.”

“Precisely so. When your gallows confessions started selling at newsagents’ and tea shops, occasionally I would purchase them, though I never caught a glimpse of you delivering the papers or picking up your earnings.”

“But of course my name wasn’t on them, only the names of those executed—however did you know it was me?”

“That wasn’t very difficult,” she said quietly. Brightening, she attempted to adopt a brisk air. “And now what are you doing with yourself? Good Lord, that frock and those jewels—I didn’t suppose last confessions brought in ready enough chink for those togs.”

I glanced down at my new dress, and my pulse sped, for she was right.

“I had better not say,” I confessed softly. “It’s complicated.”

The set of her shoulders grew brittle after she shrugged. “You always did keep secrets, and everything is complicated these days.”

Extraordinary contradiction, I thought, that she could always condone even the most operatic of my falsehoods, so long as none were directed at her.

“I’d tell you if it didn’t mean betraying another party.”

My friend took rapt interest in the traffic outside the window. “It’s all one to me.”

“Where did you learn slang?” I teased, wanting the light to return to her eyes. “You always spoke so properly, even in Rotherhithe.”

“We were speaking with each other mainly, so it was easy to keep pure back then.” Surely I imagined the dryness in her tone, having spent too long in Mr. Thornfield’s company.

“Oh, won’t you say what you’ve been doing?” I begged. “The matter which brought me to London doesn’t involve just myself, you see. Pax, please. I’m desperate to know—you never bought that rigging with street-chaunting coin either, and my vocabulary is every bit as disgraceful, and you really must take pity on me. We were so lucky, when we arrived here, to find shelter so quickly, and afterwards when I pictured you . . .” Faltering, I cleared my throat. “If anything had happened to you, it should have been my fault.”

Clarke’s gaze grew a shade less hard.

“No.” She sighed. “I was the one who left, after all.”

“But what came next?”

“I continued singing, but finding lodgings was harder than I imagined, since for all those years you’d taken care of me—I was sharp enough at school, but a complete ninny when loosed to the streets. At times, I slept in doss-houses with the dollymops, and it was . . . Don’t frown like that, Jane. Most of them were kind, for all that they were filthy and coarse. I could have gone straight back to my parents. I did, for a fortnight,” she admitted, wincing. “When they seemed only half relieved to see me, I asked them for a few pounds and struck out again. They claimed what I was doing was ‘admirably Bohemian.’”