She tucked his handkerchief into her bodice and handed him back his shilling.
He spent the next ten minutes repeatedly picking it up from the floor, then finally chucked it over his shoulder with an aggrieved sigh. “There. It disappeared.”
Chloe wiped away tears of silent laughter. “Don’t lose hope. All skills worth mastering require practice.”
He looked aggrieved. “How long did it take you?”
“Days to hide a coin reliably,” she admitted. “I started with buttons scavenged along the Thames. I had smaller hands then, but buttons come in all sorts of weights and sizes, just as coins do, so it was good practice. Later, Tommy would hide buttons in her bed or on her person and I would have to nick them without her noticing to win the game.”
“Tommy was with you back then?”
“Tommy has been with me for as long as I can remember.” Thank heavens for it. “Her cot was next to mine at the orphanage. There weren’t many places to hide things, since we had no true possessions, but Tommy was resourceful and made me work for every button.”
“Did you flip them the way you did with the coin?”
“No.” Chloe made the sovereign fly through her fingers, then vanish again. “That came later, once I had coins to practice with.”
His brow creased. “I didn’t know orphanages trusted their charges with actual money.”
“They don’t,” she said flatly. “I stole them from the pockets of rich passersby too busy being important to notice a hungry urchin by their side.”
She expected him to judge her harshly for her crimes. He would have been one of the wealthy nobs. If an entire rookery was an eyesore to the ton, a skinny eight-year-old girl would have been just another blemish on their great city. Refuse spoiling the view until the street sweepers came to brush it out of sight.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “There’s no force more powerful than desperation.”
A moment of silence stretched between them.
She let out a slow breath.
“It was farthings at first.” Chloe gave a lopsided smile she doubted reached her eyes. “I didn’t want to takemuch—not enough to be missed, but enough to make a difference to me. Limiting my bounty also made it more of a game. If I accidentally nicked a coin of greater value, I had to find some way to put it back. Soon I could tell the denomination with the barest brush of my finger. I no longer made mistakes. It wasn’t a game anymore.”
“What was it?”
“Survival.” Ironic, since thievery was punishable by execution.
Those farthings and halfpennies kept the pangs of hunger at bay not just for her and Tommy but for several other children in the orphanage with protruding ribs and empty bellies. How she’d dreamed of one day becoming a lady of quality with a reticule full of gold! The first thing she’d buy with her riches was a meat pie for every hungry mouth.
“It was so little,” she said. “But I did it anyway. It was the best I could do.”
“I imagine it was everything,” he replied. “You see yourself as powerless, but you were powerful. Then and now.”
“Invisible,” she corrected. “You have a storied family, and roots.”
“I may be a tree, but you’re the wind. Strong enough to shake the dead leaves from my branches, to carry pollen to the spring flowers. Air is invisible but essential.” He met her eyes. “Without air, I can’t breathe.”
Chloe swallowed hard. She could think of nothing to say in response to such a statement. Her heart was beating so fast, it felt like a single roll of thunder rather than separate beats. Perhaps it wasn’t thunder at all but the rumble of an earthquake before the volcano erupted, changing the world around it forever.
She’d felt like that once before. Twenty years ago next summer.
“Do you know how I met Bean? He drove past the orphanage in a flashy racing phaeton, looking smart and rich and fashionable.Everybodylooked at him. It was impossible not to.” She wiggled her brows. “Then he tied the carriage outside St. Giles’s church and disappeared inside like a proper fool.”
Lawrence groaned. “Please tell me you did not steal his phaeton.”
“OfcourseI did.” She straightened her spine with mock indignation. “Who abandons a racing carriage in a rookery?”
He covered his face with his hand. “How old were you? Could you drive?”
“Ten, and I’d never led horses in my life. Or even beeninsideof a carriage, as far as I knew. It took three tries to climb up into that phaeton. Its wheels were as tall as I was. The high perch felt like sitting on a throne on top of the world. I was dying to take it for a ride. The reins were still tied to a post, so I slipped back down to grab them. Before I could, Bean’s hand trapped my wrist like a vise.”
