Again, the man assesses, looking between me and Gray. I’m not dressed as finely as Gray, but I am dressed well, Isla having insisted on a new wardrobe with my change in position. I wear a simple and modest day dress with a bonnet, and I’m no longer obviously a working-class girl on her day off, which means I’m no longer mistaken for Gray’s side piece. So what am I? That’s what this man is trying to figure out. Catriona is a twenty-year-old buxom blonde, much more conventionally pretty than I’d been in my own body. Put that figure and that face in a second-hand dress, and no matter how modest it is, I look like I probably make some extra cash lifting my skirt. Which Catriona never did.
“John?” Davina says.
The man steps back and waves us in. Then his gaze shoots down, and he moves forward again. “Not the dog.”
Gray deftly passes him a half sovereign. “For your forbearance.”
The man looks from the coin to the dog and then steps away again, mumbling, “It better not make a mess.”
Davina expected Gray to be the diva, lifting his nose when he saw—or smelled—this place. Instead, that’s me. Blame my twenty-first-century sanitation expectations. I’ve been to dive bars. I actually prefer them—I’ve never been the cocktail-umbrella and cocktail-dress sort. But even the grimiest of those places had been pristine compared to the average Old Town pub.
I want to get past it. I hate feeling like a snob. But I’m accustomed to drinkware that has, you know, met dish soap in the past week.
Gray is equally at home in an Old Town pub or a New Town gentleman’s club. Of course, he notices the difference, but he realizes fastidiousness smacks of snobbery.
Still, he knows I’m picky—and it amuses the hell out of him, because otherwise, I am no one’s idea of a proper Victorian lady. In deference to me, he waves for me to choose a table. That’s easy enough. The tables aren’t so bad—it’s the neighboring clientele who might assault my delicate nose.
Again, I feel like a snob. In the modern world, we mock our ancestors for being so uncivilized they bathed with the full moon and never realized how they smelled. Neither is true. Victorians bathe as much as they are able, which depends on the availability of hot clean water and soap. I’d love to see how often contemporary folks would bathe if they had to heat and lug water to a tub and use harsh soap that costs more than we pay for luxury bars.
I wash daily, which means a basin, a cloth, and soap, all provided by my employer. For the lower and working classes, that isn’t an option. But they certainly know they smell, and so they cover it up with colognes, and that’s what assaults my nose—the cloying perfumes rather than the unwashed bodies beneath.
I find a table in the corner. Gray pulls out our chairs and then sits across from us. When the barmaid stops by, he orders a pint while Davina and I get meat pies and tea.
How safe do I feel eating meat pies here? About as safe as I feel eating them from anywhere except Mrs. Wallace’s kitchen. Whatever issues our housekeeper and I have, her cooking is excellent, as is her food safety.
I don’t think I ever spent ten minutes in my life thinking about the Canadian Food Inspection Agency—our version of the American FDA. I now consider those regulations a watershed moment in medical history, because I live in a time before them. Do I know that the mutton in my mutton pie comes from a sheep? I do not. Do I know that the milk in the broth hasn’t been laced with boric acid to keep it fresh? Or that the flour hasn’t been diluted with bone ash? Nope, nope, and nope. But I’ll eat it, and I’ll stop if it tastes off. If I suffer digestive woes later, I’ll thank my lucky stars that I have both a doctor and a chemist in the house and neither believes every unsettled stomach should be treated with the harshest emetic possible.
“Before we begin,” Gray says, after our drinks arrive. “Catriona no longer goes by that name.”
“I know,” Davina says.
My brows rise.
She gives me a withering look and waves the chapbook from her pocket. “I can read. Unlike you. Although I hear that has changed as well.” She sips her tea. “Or perhaps it has not changed, but it is only something else you lied about to make yourself appear a regular common lass.”
“Regular common lasses know how to read,” I say. Which is true. Victorian Scotland has a high basic literacy rate.
“But you might not have known that. So much you didn’t know, coming here with your pretty airs.”
“I could not read and write,” I say. “Apparently, I said the letters swam before me. They no longer do. As Dr. Gray was saying, I go by Mallory, but you already knew that, so let us move on.” I take out my notebook and pencil. “When did you first realize Bobby was gone?”
She eyes the paper and pencil, looking from me to it and then shaking her head. I brace for a snarky comment, but she only says, “Two days ago.”
“What time?”
“The one o’clock gun had just sounded. That’s when I start work. Bobby is not always there—he does wander now and again—so I wandered myself and came back in an hour. I continued to check all afternoon. When there was no sign of him, I asked the watchman. I was polite as could be, and yet he would not even answer my questions. He knows better than to run me off, but he never speaks to me. Pretends he does not even see me.”
“That is the day watch?” I ask.
She nods abruptly. “The night watch is even worse. He will run me off, so I did not bother asking him. When there was no Bobby the next day, I found that one.” She points at the terrier mix. “For the children.”
“The children?”
She fingers her crucifix. “The wee ones love Bobby, and I could not bear to disappoint them, so I found a replacement until the real one returned. But it has been two days, and so, I decided to hire you.”
“For the children,” I murmur.
She glowers at me. “Mock if you will, kitty-cat, but the Lord will recognize my good deed.”
