Tory knew the cost of discovery, but she could bear it no longer. She missed Jack so much at night, and since she could not have him, she was driven to foolish risks to have the next best thing—his memory, his essence, in the words she had written about their life together. Her only comfort in these long, cold, English nights. Her logbook.
She had been so careful about keeping it hidden, prying open a split seam in the ticking and thrusting it into the straw stuffing of her thin mattress. She scarcely ever dared take it out, the way Jenny Kennett was always watching her with her odd eyes, one green, one brown, always probing, perhaps laughing at her. In some ways she had been so helpful; she'd shown Tory the most fashionable way to pin up her hair, gifted Tory with one of her spare everyday dresses, even taken out her own needle and thread to adjust it to Tory's height and shape. Tory might have even enjoyed the woman’s caustic wit, had she not felt it was so often directed at her. As if she knew Tory had no right to be here, knew, somehow, that Tory was a fraud.
But Mrs. Kennett often slipped out in the evenings, exciting Tory’s curiosity and envy. Tory had peeped out the window over her truckle-bed one night to see Mrs. Kennett gliding off into the shadows on the arm of Mr. Bell. Yet, as close as the two of them were, Tory could not credit them going off on any kind of romantic tryst, for surely Mr. Bell was not interested in women for that purpose; she had known many such men in the seafaring trade. The two of them had gone out together tonight, leaving Tory alone with Violet, an agreeable girl, if a bit young and silly. Tory was not much over twenty, herself, but she felt centuries older than Violet in experience.
As the girl's soft, high breathing rose and fell in the dark, Tory quietly lit a candle in a stick placed on the window sill above her bed and withdrew her treasure. It was covered in fine Spanish mahogany-colored leather darkened with much wear, its cream-colored pages three quarters full of her scribblings. She had begun it as a ship’s log, a recitation of dates and locations, little more than a record of business transactions. And yet, whenever she lifted the cover, she could smell the salt air, hear the creaking of the lines and the high pealing of distant gulls.
It had become more than merely a journal of her days and nights in the islands; as Tory huddled beneath her bedclothes, propped up on one elbow in this draughty hired room above the pastry-cook's, it was her only link to the life she had lost and the girl she had been, the brazen young runaway who had fought so hard to earn Jack’s love.
Violet sighed in her sleep and Tory turned the pages more slowly, caressing each one as if it were some part of Jack, his scarred back or his strong, callused hands. She held his life in her hands in fact, in this book. It was dangerous to keep and yet she could not bear to part with it. Especially now, on these lonely nights, when it was all she had of Jack. Love Denied, that was the name of their pantomime farce, but there was nothing funny about it in real life.
She could scarcely make out the words by the flickering candle flame, so engrossed in the operation that she never heard footfalls on the stair. Only a tread on the creaky threshold warned her to slam the book shut and thrust it deep under the bedclothes before the door swung open and Jenny crept in. Tory hadn’t time to pinch out the candle, and Jenny’s attention was drawn to the light. Tory dared not imagine what wraithlike visage she must present, taken by surprise. She quickly raised a forefinger to her lips and nodded at Violet, asleep in the shadows.
"Oh, Owen never wakes up once she’s drifted off," Jenny whispered, as she pushed the door shut behind her. "I wonder what sorcery you’re up to, here in the dark."
"I was reading," Tory said. "I didn’t want to disturb her."
"Romances by candlelight, eh?" Jenny grinned, crossing to the wardrobe to hang up her cloak. "Anything lurid I might enjoy?"
She actually took a step toward Tory’s bed, and Tory's knee tensed over the logbook.
"My . . . part. For tomorrow’s farce," she improvised.
"Oh dear, how boring," Jenny sighed, turning back to the wardrobe again. But Tory saw her keen eyes sweep across the bed, searching in vain for the playscript pages Tory had copied out this afternoon.
"You’re back early," Tory said, to prevent any further interrogation. "I hope Mr. Bell is well?"
"Kit is disgustingly radiant, since Fairweather took him aside at the Blue Fox to discuss putting him into bigger parts. Forgot all about me. I had to ask that charming brother of yours to escort me back."
"Jack?" Tory half sat up. "He’s here?"
Jenny peered at her through the shadows. "Well, I couldn’t very well ask him upstairs. That would be terribly indiscreet. Not that I wouldn’t like to," she added slyly. "You know him better than anyone, my dear. How is it that so dashing a fellow has remained unattached all this time? Or is there a mad wife chained in an attic, somewhere?"
Tory glanced briefly away; wife or not, she would be mad soon enough, at this rate. "He says ours is a gypsy profession," she murmured, "far too hazardous and uncertain a life to inflict upon a wife."
"Unless she’s a gypsy, herself," mused Jenny Kennett.
Jack was still half a block away from the Blue Fox, berating himself for not finding some pretext on which to go upstairs with Mrs. Kennett and visit Tory, when he saw Christopher Bell emerge from the tavern door after his interview with Miles Fairweather. The young actor nodded to Jack, touching the tip of his walking stick to the brim of his hat before turning the corner up ahead for his own lodgings in the next street. As he crossed the corner, Jack was alerted by a low buzz of agitation in the night air. By the street lamp lit on the far corner, he saw Bell’s silhouette sauntering down the street as three young fellows came round the next corner toward him. As they made to pass by, one of the strangers lunged a little sideways to slam his shoulder into Bell’s.
"Oh, I beg your pardon," minced the stranger, "Miss." He seemed to grin and glower in the same expression as his chuckling fellows drew up on either side of him.
"And so you should," Bell replied easily. "Well, run away, laddies, there’s no harm done."
"But I say there is harm done, Miss Margaret," jeered the other youth. "When your kind brings your filth into a decent town."
"My kind?" echoed Bell, turning round to lean upon his walking stick. "Do you mean to say you gentlemen do not fancy the drama?"
"You know what I mean," blustered the youth, his smile gone. "Molly-boy! Indorser! You . . . you . . . "
"He means our kind, dear." Jack had come down the shadowy side of the street to take up a position next to Bell. "Poor boy, he blushes to even say the words."
"Oh, our kind," Bell purred, darting a mischievous glance at Jack. "Well, perhaps if you’d stand us a drink like civilized fellows, you’d get what you’re after."
"I don’t want to drink with you!" gaped the outraged stranger, then he threw himself at Bell with such careless brute rage, he never even saw Jack’s knee in the darkness, never knew how he was pitched bodily across Jack’s back and slammed into the gutter. A second fellow was charging in with upraised fists, but Bell blocked a wild punch with his left arm and kneed him sharply in the belly. Jack somersaulted behind the fellow to trip him off his feet, then whirled about to see a third figure almost on top of him. But Bell’s walking stick feinted across his chest and in the next instant, Bell’s right fist exploded out of the darkness. The youth staggered backwards into one of his companions who was attempting to rise and both collapsed into the gutter next to the third.
Jack was up on his feet again, advancing toward the assailants, blood pumping, before he realized that, aside from some last, slurred invective, their fire for combat had evidently been doused by a surfeit of wine before the campaign.
"Once again, Romeo is saved by the gallant Tybalt," Bell saluted Jack; he'd caught up his hat and taken a few long, prudent strides farther down the street. "Which leads one to suspect there was more going on in Verona than Shakespeare wished to tell us."
"You appear to have little enough need for my help," Jack panted, following Bell. Behind them, the three young bravos had begun swearing and arguing with each other in lieu of any better target as they stumbled back into the shadows.
"One does not engage in my sort of life if one cannot defend it," Bell agreed, dusting off his jacket. "How do you think I have managed to preserve this face for so long?"
Jack noted the way the lad referred to his face as if it were a property, something separate from himself. He would need naught else to make his fortune on the stage, that was certain. Jack had further cause to admire him for refusing to pretend to be other than what he was, despite the cost. It made Jack feel twice the fraud. "That was one hell of a punch, all right," he agreed.
"I have known my share of bruisers," said Bell. "Pugilists proliferate like fleas in the sorts of neighborhoods where playhouses flourish. Not in the bruiser line yourself, are you?"
Jack shook his head, as if to deflect Bell's suddenly acute curiosity. He didn't fight, he danced, that's what his shipboard compañeros used to say; that was how he'd gotten his name. "I'm just a lowly tumbler."
"And yet, no stranger to a battle," mused Bell, expertly tapping his hat to the perfect rakish angle. "How fortunate for me that you happened to be lurking in the shadows."
"I was scarcely lurking, Mr. Bell," Jack replied. "Mrs. Kennett asked me to see her to her lodgings and I was on my way back to mine." He nodded toward the Blue Fox, from which Bell had so recently emerged. "I should have left you to your fun, but, not knowing any better, I thought three to one rather unfair odds."
"As indeed they might have been," Bell agreed. "Fortunately for me, no one expects a fellow of my kind to know how to fight, which is a great advantage." Bell gazed at him appraisingly for one more beat. "Not in the molly line either, I'll wager?"
Jack grinned and shook his head. "But, as you say, it gave us the advantage."
Bell smiled back. "Well, I am in your debt, Mr. Dance," he said, touching his stick again to his hat. "Not many would have bothered."
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