“Next song, chum,” he said in a slickly refined English accent. Lilly said nothing, but her startling blue eyes danced more merrily than she.
Dearest Will, Please forgive me for not writing more often.
“You’ve hogged her enough, I think,” I said. Then a direct appeal to her: “Hello, Lilly. Spare a single dance for an old friend?”
“Don’t you see she’d rather with someone who actually can? Why don’t you crack open another oyster and leave the dancing to real gentlemen?”
“Quite so.” I smiled. And then I smashed my right forearm into his Adam’s apple. He dropped straight down, clutching his throat. I finished the job with a quick downward jab to his temple. Hit a man hard enough in that spot and you can kill him. He crumpled into a ball at my feet. He might have been dead; I did not know or care. I seized Lilly’s wrist as all around us the fists began to fly.
“This way!” I whispered in her ear. I shoved through the throng, dragging her behind me, toward the buffet tables, where I spied a red-faced Warthrop stamping his foot in frustration. It was not quite a quarter past ten. He had lost again. A chair sailed across the room; a man bellowed, “Dear God, I think you’ve broken it!” over the din; and the music broke apart into a confusion of discordant shrieks, like a vase shattering; and then we were out the side door into the narrow alley, where a trash fire burned in a barrel: gold light, black smoke, and the smell of lavender as she struck me across the cheek.
“Idiot.”
“I am your deliverer,” I corrected her, trying out my most rakish grin.
“From what?”
“Mediocrity.”
“Samuel happens to be a very good dancer.”
“Samuel? Even his name is banal.”
“Not like the extraordinarily exotic William.”
Her cheeks were flushed, her breath high in her chest. She tried to push past me; I didn’t let her.
“Where are you going?” I asked. “It’s positively reckless going back in there. If you’re not struck by a serving platter, the police will be here soon to clear the place out. You don’t want to be arrested, do you? Let’s go for a drive.”
I wrapped my fingers around her elbow; she pulled away easily. My mistake: I should have used my right hand.
“Why did you hit him?” she demanded.
“I was defending your honor.”
“Whose honor?”
“All right, my honor, but he really should have yielded. It’s bad form.”
In spite of herself she laughed, and the sound was like coins tossed upon a silver tray, and that at least had not changed.
I was urging her toward the mouth of the alley. The cobblestones were slick from an early afternoon rain, and the night had turned cold. Her arms were bare, so I shrugged out of my jacket and dropped it over her shoulders.
“First you’re a brute; then you’re a gentleman,” she said.
“I am the evolution of man in microcosm.”
I hailed a cab, gave the driver the address, and slid into the seat beside her. The black jacket went well with her purple gown, I thought. Her face flickered in and out of shadow as we rattled past the streetlamps.
“Have I been kidnapped?” she wondered aloud.
“Rescued,” I reminded her. “From the clutches of mediocrity.”
“That word again.” Nervously smoothing the folds in her gown.
“It is a lovely word for a terrible thing. Down with mediocrity! Who is Samuel?”
“You mean you don’t know him?”
“You failed to introduce us.”
“He’s Dr. Walker’s apprentice.”
“Sir Hiram? Imagine that. Well, it isn’t too hard to imagine. Like attracts like, they say.”
“I thought the saying was quite the opposite.”
I waved my hand. The gesture came from the monstrumologist; the disdain was wholly my own. “Clichés are mediocrities. I strive to be wholly original, Miss Bates.”
“Then I shall alert you the moment it happens.”
I laughed and said, “I have been drinking champagne. And I wouldn’t mind another taste.” We were close to the river. I could smell the brine and the faint tartness of decaying fish common to all waterfronts. The cold wind toyed with the ends of her hair.
“You’ve taken to alcohol?” she asked. “How do you hide it from your doctor?”
“For as long as I’ve known you, Lillian, you’ve called him that, and I really wish you’d stop.”
“Why?”
“Because he isn’t my doctor.”
“He doesn’t mind that you drink?”
“It’s none of his business. When I return to our rooms tonight, he will ask, ‘Where have you been, Will Henry?’ ” Lowering my voice to the appropriate register. “And I will say, ‘From walking up and down the earth, and to and fro in it.’ Or I may say, ‘It’s none of your damn business, you old mossback.’ He’s become quite the fussbudget lately. But I don’t want to talk about him. You’ve grown out your hair. I like it.”
Something had been loosed within me. Perhaps the alcohol was to blame, perhaps not; perhaps it was something much harder to define. Upon her face, light warred with shadow, but within me there was no such conflict.
“And you’ve grown up,” she said, touching the ends of her hair. “A bit. I did not recognize you at first.”
“I knew you right away,” I replied. “From the moment you walked in. Though I’d no idea you were back in the States. How long have you been home? Why did you come home? I thought you weren’t coming back for another year.”
She laughed. “My, haven’t you become the loquacious one! It is so un–Will Henry–like. What’s gotten into you?”
She was teasing me, of course, but I did not miss the hint of fear in her voice, the tiny quiver of uncertainty, the delicious thrill of confronting the unknown. We were kindred spirits in that: What repelled attracted; what terrified compelled.
“The ancient call,” I said with a laugh. “The overarching imperative!”
The cab jerked to a halt. I paid the driver, tipping him handsomely in a gesture of contempt for the doctor’s parsimony, and helped her to the curb. Sound carries better in colder air, and I could hear the rustle of her skirts as she stepped down and the whisper of lace against bare skin.