It was the scent that woke Tory, first, waves of light, sweet, spicy aromas washing over her. And then the tickling, soft and tentative as a butterfly wing on her exposed arm, her cheek. She opened sticky eyes and blinked at what looked like an entire hillside of wildflowers strewn over her in the musty little bed above the dry goods shop, daisies and lilacs and tiny blue-bells, lillies of the valley and delicate forget-me-nots, a sea of pale colors and velvety petals and sweet scent.
"It’s Maytime, Rusty!" Jack perched on the edge of the bed, already dressed, lettingthe last of the flowers sift through his fingers over her, grinning like a boy. As beautiful as any flower.
"Now I know how a rabbit feels, popping out of his hole!" Tory grinned. She scrambled to sit up and a waterfall of tiny white hawthorn blossoms rained out of her hair.
"Only mind the May dew," Jack cautioned. "It’s said to cure freckles — and that would be a shame." He leaned forward and gently kissed the faded V of rusty freckles just below her throat, the relic of her year at sea in open-collared shirts. Then he kissed her cheek.
Are we celebrating something?" Tory asked, tucking the stem of a white marguerite into his dark, disordered hair as he sat up again.
"Only the season." He smiled. "And our impending journey."
Alphonse and Kit had arranged to assume the lease taken on the Heathpoole Playhouse by the unfortunate would-be lessee. Two nights ago had been their final farewell performance at Charton-on-Crewe and yesterday, Jack had paid off all the players with a promise of a summer engagement at Heathpoole to begin on the first of July to anyone who wished to accept. Richard Gabriel had been offered a summer engagement with a major provincial company north of London that Jack had encouraged him to accept. George Plumleigh had accepted a similar situation, and Mr. Ingram, the stage manager, had been snapped up by one of the London summer theatres. But Tory supposed the rest would return to Heathpoole in six weeks’ time — the time Kit judged it would take to make the place presentable, as it had been some sort of fish market before. Today, they were starting out for Heathpoole with Alphonse and Thomas Ashbrook and Mr. Amos to manage the property coach. Jack had offered Kit the position and salary of stage manager if he would come with them to Heathpoole, and he was also bringing Jenny to serve as interim wardrobe-keeper.
"The others are going to Heathpoole," said Jack. "I’m taking you to London."
"London?" Tory echoed, astonished. "Why?"
"Because it’s Maytime," Jack grinned, catching up her hands in his. "Because I haven’t been up to London in ten years. Because we’ve a long summer of hard work ahead of us which may very well ruin us." He drew her hands to his mouth and kissed them. "Because I adore you so."
Tory beamed back at him. Just when she thought she had lost him to the cares of his new position, her Jack came back to her.
After five years in Boston, Tory thought she knew what a city was. But the proud, stern, stately buildings of Boston, glaring down in condemnation at the unworthy folk who dared to bustle along at their feet, were nothing like the riot of London. Tall, gaunt buildings were jammed so close together and at such perilous angles, they seemed to loom out over the narrow streets, so festooned with precarious timbered overhangs and shop signs and railings and balustrades, one could scarcely see up to the sky. In the broader boulevards through which the coach had brought them into the heart of the city, the elegant townhouses and grand, colonnaded public buildings on either side were overwhelmed by the spectacle in the streets, the thronging up and down of every sort of coach and carriage and wagon and donkey-cart, jostling with dustmen and water carts and road-sweepers. Street vendors crying their wares maneuvered their way around fashionable shoppers and agitated clerks and gentlemen of business and armies of scruffy laborers off about the endless construction that seemed to be going on in every other street, and gangs of ragged urchins skittering about like moths.
Jack secured them inexpensive lodgings in a small, unfashionable hotel in a tiny street hard by the fruit and vegetable market of Covent Garden. It was only a cartwheel or two away from both of London’s famous winter patent playhouses, the Theatres Royal Covent Garden and Drury Lane.
They had scarcely set down their things before Jack hustled her out again to have a look at them. At Old Drury, where Jack had made his ill-fated London debut as Romeo so many years ago, they gazed up for a silent moment at the elegant formal facade of the place that consumed the width of the entire block. The theatre was another block in length, easily four to six times the size of anywhere Tory had ever performed, and she stole an awed glance at Jack, that he had ever dared to set foot upon the stage in such a place. What must it have felt like to fail, here? But Jack said nothing and they circled back to the Covent Garden playhouse, perched on the edge of the market square, to drink in its four enormous Greek columns and soaring portico. Only then did Jack break his silent reverie.
"These are theatres, Rusty."
But Tory was distracted by the boisterous theatre of life that was sprawling through the busy streets. At mid-morning, the hotels and restaurants had already plundered the marketplace for the day’s best produce bargains and swarms of costermongers were filling up their own barrows with the leavings. But all the streets in the neighborhood were like one, huge, continuous market. There were broad-shouldered milk-maids yoked to their pails, chair-menders with bundles of rushes over their shoulders, organ-grinders and musicians, boys carrying baskets of radishes for a ha’penny a bunch, girls selling brilliantly colored spring tulips, sturdy women selling fresh May gooseberries by the gallon and breadmen wheeling their basket-carts. The smell of hot meat pies and spicy gingerbread mingled with the stink of donkeys and rotting vegetation and human musk. The noise was thunderous.
It was like the slaves’ market Sunday in the islands grown to stupendous proportions. Some of the vendors were Africans and Tory also noticed an Asian-looking fellow selling carpet slippers and a Turk in a turban wielding a pot of steaming coffee. As they made their way down narrow alleys and wider thoroughfares, Tory clung to Jack’s elbow to guide her while her head revolved like a child’s top, her eyes goggling at everything. When she remembered to glance up again at Jack, she saw his expression was alert, thoughtful, unfathomable.
"Is it the way you remembered?" she asked him.
He nodded slowly. "Only more so. There’s so much more of everything. Hellfire, I’d forgotten how big a place it is. How busy, how dirty, how desperate. How full of life."
Tory wondered what he must be thinking behind those opaque brown eyes. How could he not regret the years lost, the runaway tumblers’ boy turned provincial player sold into a brutal seafaring life that took him so far away from everything he loved, everything he was? There was so much he had missed. Then his eyes reconnected with hers, boring into the heart of her thoughts.
"I would not change a single minute of my life, Rusty. As long as I could be sure of finding you."
He slipped his arm around her for a moment, holding her close, a tiny island of security in a great roiling, riotous sea of human activity. Then he smiled, gazing all round again.
"I was a boy the last time I was here," he said. "I didn’t know anything."
"And now?" Tory prompted, as they started off again.
"Well . . . at least I’m no longer a boy."
Ambling into the neighborhood of St. Martin’s Lane, they were drawn by a youth beating on a drum strapped to his chest and an older fellow playing on the pan-pipes to what looked like a tall Punch and Judy booth with Fantasina written in script at the top. But the puppets who capered out were Harlequin and Columbina on strings, as buoyantly insouciant as if they owned the whole of London. Farther down the road was a fellow selling clockwork toys and a diorama box purporting to show the coronation of George IV.
"Win the lady a fairing, sir!" cried another youth in the road. He pushed a cart clattering with different sized glass bottles, open and standing upright. A row of small wooden rings were secured to one of the handles. "Toss a ring round a bottle and win what’s inside," he chanted. "Three pitches for a penny. Show off your skill and win a valuable prize for your lady."
"Perhaps the lady would like to try her own luck." Jack grinned.
Tory paid for her three rings and took aim from the end of the cart handles. Two of her rings skittered off bottle necks that were too wide to accommodate them, but the third managed to snag the lip of a green bottle in the last row.
"The lady wins a prize!" chirped the lad, snatching up the green bottle and pouring its contents into his hand. It was a plain, thin band, pink enough to suggest copper rather than gold.
"A valuable prize, well worth the penny it cost," Jack teased as the fellow trundled off with his cart. "It likely was a penny, once."
"I don’t care," Tory declared. "It may be only a fairing to you, but I think it’s good luck. I’ve never won anything before."
But when it proved a bit too large for any of her fingers, she looked so disappointed that Jack bought a dark green ribbon from a passing vendor so she could hang her prize round her neck. She didn’t want to lose her luck.
They bought hot pies and beer and crossed the wide avenue called the Strand and wandered down to eat by the docks overlooking the broad, glistening River Thames. Tory was delighted at the sight of so many working ships sailing right into the heart of the city, at the brickwork stairs leading down to the riverside wharves at the end of every street. She had never seen such a bustling port city with no ocean nearby. The waterfront district was the rougher part of the city, with its grog shops and taverns, paid-off sailors and burly stevedores, lazy-looking tarts, pickpockets and beggars, but it was familiar territory to her. She had always loved the waterfront, with its promise of escape and freedom, although now, on Jack’s arm, she had nothing she wanted to escape from.
Starting up the road for the Strand, again, they were just about to pass a dingy rag and bottle shop when Jack stopped, transfixed, before the grime-encrusted squares of its mullioned window. Hung up on a peg in the window, above a messy profusion of ink wells, blunted cutlery, second-hand books, damaged tinware and the odd used beaver hat, was some species of bulky cloak or overcoat. All Tory could make out of the design were the wide, deeply cuffed sleeves and a swirl of material that might have been a hood or a cape at the shoulders.
"It’s an old redingote in the Garrick style," Jack explained, gazing up at it as if bewitched. "Not strictly the fashion any more, but when I was a boy, they were quite the rage."
"Named for Garrick, the actor?" Tory had heard endless tales of Garrick in the Green Room.
Jack nodded and the crooked corner of his mouth quirked into a half-smile. "It’s silly, I suppose."
Tory glanced at him, again. As critical as he was about every detail of stage dress, Jack never paid the slightest attention to what he wore offstage, as long as it was relatively clean and tidy. He was still wearing the same plain, sober, charcoal grey frock coat and stirrup trousers he’d bought with his first wages in Kelsingham, which he kept for all public occasions. But she saw a flicker of something in his expression, now.
"You must have a closer look," she said, drawing him to the sagging shop door.
Before he could argue with her, she threw open the door herself and hauled him in by the elbow. The stench of mold and old dust and varieties of rot she didn’t care to identify hung like fog in the close air inside. There was a rodent-like rustling in the dim shadows at the back of the shop, but there was light enough from the window for them to inspect the redingote. Jack took it off its peg and fingered the double capelet and the wide collar that could be buckled up high round the neck. There were buckles and straps and drawstrings stitched all over the thing, to cinch it up here or expand it there, as needed. Despite the musty smell, Tory encouraged Jack to shrug it on over his own clothes. It fell to halfway down his legs, but when he folded back the wide cuffs, fastened up the front and cinched in the back, it looked rather dashing. Rakish, even, when he turned up one half of the collar that stood as high as his cheek, and grinned at her. Even in this dim light, the warm, dark, oxblood shade of red looked wonderful with his eyes. Then there was more rustling behind them, and the head rat materialized out of the gloom.
"'Tis a fine gentleman’s garment, that there is," wheezed the stubble-cheeked proprietor, as gloom-encrusted as the rest of his shop. "Had it off me own dear uncle what passed on. Scarcely ever worn. Kept it for Sundays and funerals, he did."
Rip-roaring funerals, Tory supposed, from the cloak’s worn elbows and fraying hems and missing buttons.
"Then I’m sure you can’t bear to part with such an heirloom." Jack grinned, shrugging out of it, again.
"Why, there is a great deal of sentimental value attached to it, at that, guv’nor, a very great deal . . . "
"I’ll give you a crown for your sentiment," Tory interrupted.
"Ah, Miss, I could never live with meself did I let it go for less than . . . fifteen shillings."
"I can buy new for that, and less worn with sentiment. Eight shillings."
"Twelve."
He settled for ten and six when Tory turned for the door. And in a subtle movement he could not perceive in the shadows, Tory reached through a hidden fold of her skirts for the little purse strapped round her waist and dug out two crowns and sixpence. Then she led Jack out into the streaky May sunlight with their prize. They were scarcely out the door before Jack began to protest, but Tory cut him off.
"Let me do this one thing for you without an argument," she told him. "I’ve never had the means to buy you a gift, before. Don’t deny me the pleasure of making you happy."
Jack closed his mouth with an effort, stopped and looked down again at the redingote thrown over his arm. It looked more threadbare in the daylight, but the color was richer.
"This is the most frivolous extravagance I’ve ever heard of," he said, at last. "Alphonse will go berserk." Then he glanced up at her and grinned. "Thank you, compañera."
"They forgive his sins and indiscretions," Jack whispered, "and there are a great many of them, because once he was the magnificent Kean. And every now and again, onstage, for a moment or two — he is again."
"What a shame he is so ill and old," Tory murmured.
Jack gazed at the stage for a long, reflective moment. "He’s not yet forty," he said, at last. "Less than ten years older than me."
Perhaps it was this wistful encounter with mortality, or the after-piece they saw about a family inheritance, or the platoons of beggar children who jostled with prostitutes and flower girls to accost the emerging playgoers outside the theatre that night. But Tory found herself wondering about something Jenny had asked her, once, if Jack minded not producing any children. Now that he was back home where he belonged, did he wonder what sort of legacy he would leave behind? Did he want to secure his place in the world by planting a child? Would he ever even mention it to her, if he did?
As they bought a small feast of bread and cheese and apples and ale to carry back up to their tiny room, Tory began to wonder what a child of Jack’s would be like. He would be long-limbed, like his father, dark-eyed and playful and full of laughter. He’d be an excellent, acrobat, Jack would see to that, and smart and generous and kind, bred to the stage, but well-educated for anything else he might wish to pursue . . .
But then Tory realized she was describing Jack, himself. The Jack she already had.
"You’re very quiet," Jack broke gently into her thoughts as he handed her a slice of cheese on a torn crust of bread.
With Jack, she knew, the best plan was to plunge ahead.
"We haven’t spoken of this in a long time," she said, simply. "Do you never think of having a child?"
Now it was his turn to grow quiet. He regarded her for one long, serious moment, then slowly shook his head.
"No. I never do. With our gypsy life . . . " and he shook his head again. "Although, I must admit, I have sometimes been charmed by the fantasy of a little Victoria toddling about in her petticoats."
Tory was surprised. "I was thinking of a boy."
"Boys are a lot of trouble," said Jack. "Noisy, arrogant, always getting into scrapes."
"But girls break their mothers’ hearts. They grow up and marry and go away."
"Boys break their mothers’ hearts," Jack replied softly. But then he smiled. "Besides, babies are not found under every bush . . . "
"You were!"
"But this baby . . . our baby . . . would have to be born. You would have to deliver her. And I couldn’t bear it, Rusty. I could never risk losing you." He reached out to caress her cheek. "I need you more than I could ever need any child. The world is already full of children who need a loving home, but there is only one of you."
Tory caught Jack’s hand, pressed her mouth gently into his palm and let the image of Little Jack skip away. She knew she ought to feel regret, the way women made for mothering must feel, the way Jenny must feel about her own estranged child. But she couldn't find that urgency for motherhood in her heart, that conviction that her life would never be complete without a child. And what sort of a mother could she hope to be without it?
"I never want you to be disappointed, hombre," she whispered to Jack. "I know how much you love children."
"Clowning for children in public and being a suitable father are entirely different things," he replied. "I could never replace you, mi vida. I can’t lose you."
Top: Drury Lane (detail), Louise Rayner, ca 1860
Above right: Old Covent Garden Market, George Scharf, 1825
Above left: Vintage redingote
Above: Edmund Kean, by George Clint, 1820
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