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Chapter Three
Several days passed. Lady Josephine had almost given up on the mysterious Mr. Smith. London was an enormous city, and the chance of her meeting him again seemed slim indeed. Vauxhall Gardens had closed again until May, so she would not soon run across him again there.
She was surprised, then, one early evening, when she and Lady Hermione left the milliner’s. There, across the street and down by the corner, fiddling with a walking stick, was Mr. Smith.
He hailed them with a small bow as they approached him. “Miss Johnson, Miss Glump, good evening.”
“Why, Mr. Smith, what a coincidence,” said Lady Josephine lightly.
“No coincidence at all,” Mr. Smith said. “I had hoped to see you again. But I did not want to call at the shop—proprietresses being much like landladies. I suppose I could have invented a sister who deserved a nice bonnet for her upcoming birthday. But I confess it was easier just to wait for you here.”
“And do you have a sister, Mr. Smith?” asked Lady Josephine.
“Sadly, no. Just a younger brother, Ted, who means the world to me. But where were you ladies headed? Back to the red brick boarding house?”
“We usually stop somewhere for a bite of dinner on the way,” said Lady Hermione shyly. “But—”
“Then you must dine with me—I insist,” Mr. Smith said. Offering an arm to each of them, he walked them a few blocks to a little place below street level. “I know the owner,” Mr. Smith explained. “He’s from Rome.” And they had a delightful Italian meal there.
These meetings happened every evening over the next week or so. Lady Josephine found she could think of nothing else in between.
It wasn’t clear to Lady Josephine whether their escort liked either girl better. He was polite and attentive to both. And Hermie, of course, was the acknowledged beauty, although Josephine knew herself to be attractive in a very different way.
Still, there were moments when she and Ace—she thought of him now by that name—seemed to glance across the table and catch each other’s eye...when they would share a subtle joke that went over Hermie’s head. When he would inadvertently touch her, perhaps to help her with her cloak, and her skin would feel struck by lightning…. Perhaps this alchemy was all one-sided, though. She could not be sure.
Then came a morning when Lady Hermione fell ill to one of her vicious migraines, and she could not go to work. She could only lie in the darkened bedroom, moaning slightly, a sash tightly tied around her temples. Lady Josephine would have remained with her, but her friend urged her to go to the shop. “We don’t want Madame sacking us both!”
When Lady Josephine left the shop at twilight, Mr. Smith was, as usual, hovering near the corner. She told him of Miss Glump’s ailment.
“Should you be at home with her?” he asked. “Or can you spare time for a quick dinner with me?”
To Lady Josephine, the answer was obvious. Her friend Hermie would understand.
That evening, and the three that followed it, were the happiest of Lady Josephine’s life. She and Ace—for against social conventions, they soon began to use each other’s first names—talked endlessly.
The second night, he suggested they walk home through the pretty little park across from the restaurant. There, he took her hand in the dark as they walked, sending chills up her spine with his gentle touch.
He told her a little about himself. He was a prize fighter, and quite good at it, too, he said with an obvious effort at modesty. Pugilism was wildly popular right now, and the purses offered for a win unbelievably generous—particularly the more your reputation grew. Londoners from the highest to the lowest, from thetonto the gutters, came out to gamble. Even the Prince Regent had come to some of his matches at the John Bull Pugilism Society.
“Some of the young bloods of thetoneven throw off their silk shirts and join us in the ring,” he told her. “A number of the noblemen are quite good. They train at it, you know—they hire men like me at outlandish wages to help train them.”
“But it must be dangerous,” Lady Josephine said, picturing him on his back in the boxing ring, covered in blood. “I hope you take care….”
“Oh, I could use a broken nose or cheekbone,” Ace laughed. “It would be better for business. They’d stop calling me ‘Pretty Boy.’ And I’m making a small fortune monthly. It’s amazing, for a lad who grew up in the Rookeries.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, it speaks well of your upbringing, Josie, if you’ve never heard of the Rookeries. It’s housing for the lower classes. Ten or twenty people crammed in a single room to live...no windows, no candlelight...all manner of disease and depravity and crime. It’s the only life many Londoners have. It’s the life I had, as a boy.”
“Had you no parents?”
“I had a mother, but she died young. My father is alive out there somewhere, but he doesn’t know or care that I exist. I’m on my own, I suppose.”
“My mother died young, too,” Lady Josephine said sadly. “My father loves me, but he’s gone most of the time, busy with his cl—” She had been about to say “clubs,” but that would have marked her father as a gentleman. She quickly corrected herself, “—with his work.”
“And now you and your friend are forging your own paths, trying to make a living,” Ace said sympathetically. “It seems we have a lot in common, you and I.”
He stopped walking for a moment. Taking her small hand up to his lips, he kissed each of her fingers, then turned her hand over and slowly, lovingly kissed the palm.
