9. Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

‘How’s the happy groom?’

Phineas kept his eyes focused on his ledger. ‘Happy,’ he replied in his usual monotone.

‘You sound happy.’ Taylor chuckled. ‘I thought married life might treat you a little better.’

Was happy the word to describe life with Rosanna Hempel in his house? A week into it, and he doubted his logic in trying to keep her alive. The staff hummed or sang incessantly, his wife used the same knife for raspberry jam and marmalade, inevitably mixing the flavours, his courtyard smelt of horse, and Felix had started wearing cologne. His life had become a circus.

‘It’s tolerable,’ Phineas quipped.

Barely .

Not all of it was intolerable, though. Jean, the cook, had been raised by her French grandmother, and while the squawking she called singing left no doubt as to why she hadn’t secured a role on the stage, the croissants she sent to the table each morning were exceptional. Hours later, he could still taste the wafers of pastry dissolving on his tongue. And when she wasn’t goading or sniping, Rosanna simmered with a measured happiness in the simple things, then accelerated without notice into an abundance of emotion. A daisy growing between the cracks in the courtyard brought forth a small smile. The delivery of new gloves made her coo with joy. And the day before, when he had returned home to learn that her brother Johannes had helped her to wallpaper her bedroom, she had beamed with unconcealed pride at their accomplishment. No faux modesty with Rosanna. She expected praise where she earned it, even if it did give her wrinkled hands and wispy threads of glue in her hair.

Those moments were a little more than tolerable. Damn himself, they were delightful.

‘Only tolerable?’ Taylor chuckled. ‘Most men in this room would give their good hand for a night with what’s yours for life. In this second, I think they’d be happy with five minutes.’

Taylor’s gaze flicked over Phineas’s shoulder. Instinct made him turn his head.

How she had got past the clerk in reception and made her way to the entrance of this dingy hollow of despair and penmanship, to the dregs of the bank, to its most emasculated workers, to men who wielded pens as pens, never mightier than the sword… He couldn’t imagine. Perhaps that dress had done the convincing for her. Lace knitted a web of desire and envy over cotton, the ivory fabric underneath overlaid with vibrant, embroidered flowers—claret red, magenta, saffron yellow, and deep teal, all linked by emerald leaves and vines. The contrast of innocent lightness and mature darkness was the perfect complement to her sun-warmed, honey skin. Just that morning, during her inane prattling at breakfast, she had announced that she was dispensing with laced corsets, bustles, and petticoats, claiming them pointless now she was a married woman. No point dressing to impress when I am unobtainable. I’ve always wanted to try the styles of artistic dress—now is my opportunity.

Phineas had to stifle a moan. Thank the heavens for the artistic dress movement.

Both decadent and minimal, like Rosanna herself, her dress gathered beneath her breasts before falling in a gentle drape over her figure, its hem an inch from the floor. Forest green thread sat stark against the soft swell of her bosom. As she took a slightly puffed breath, the fabric pulled taut. Phineas traced the path of a vine to distract himself, but the soft fall of her skirt over her rounded hips and the voluptuous line of her legs were no less distracting.

With effort, he blinked hard, then scanned the room. Could the other clerks not be more discrete with their ogling? She was his wife .

‘Phineas!’ Rosanna called, and raised one gloved hand in greeting before launching into the room at a half skip. Her skirt flipped with her momentum, and when she stopped short before him, a delicious breath of roses and sunshine filled the air between them. ‘I had hoped we might have lunch together.’

‘Lunch?’ he asked.

‘I missed you,’ she said, swaying slightly like the coquette she wasn’t.

Did the room sigh?

‘I’ve been at the hotel all morning,’ she continued. ‘I was on my way home and thought you might be available.’ She turned to Taylor. ‘Only for an hour. If it’s acceptable. I promise, I won’t make it a habit.’

‘Taylor isn’t my supervisor—’

‘Of course,’ Taylor interrupted with a grin. ‘How could we deny a newly married man such a request?’

As they left with all eyes in the room on them, Phineas couldn’t tell if he wanted to crow like a rooster or punch every man in the face. He settled for shoving his hands into his pockets and reminded himself that he had no right to do either.

She wasn’t his to fret over.

Outside, shards of sun forced their way between heavy clouds and soot. Scattered puddles along the pavement glistened with fragments of the sky before patches of cloud obscured the light and doused everything in a deeper grey.

‘I would have waited until this evening, but as you dine elsewhere and I never know if you’re at home or not, I thought it best to find you here. I didn’t want to wait until morning. And I didn’t want to disturb you in your rooms. Again.’

The road clanged with midday activity. Newspaper boys called out headlines, horse hooves clapped on the stones, hawkers shouted for attention, and boot spits kicked dirt into the air as they drummed up business. How extraordinary it was that, even surrounded by so much noise and bustle, silence could settle between two people and make the short distance between them brittle and cold.

‘I’m not an escaped convict.’ Phineas addressed the stones, barely catching the slight tilt of Rosanna’s head in his direction from the corner of his eye. ‘My stepfather bribed the judge. I served a year, then was released.’

‘But you are a deserter?’ she asked.

‘The ink doesn’t lie.’

‘Was it worth it?’

Her question caught him off guard. He’d never thought of worth or value to his absconding, just the deep conviction that he was right to do so, and that those who punished him for it were wrong. Spying on resistance groups and men suspected as being enemies of the empire—it had sounded noble when he’d been promoted, but the reality was that he watched peasants and labelled them as threats when they did not show enough deference. The rash choice to leave the army despite having promised to serve for the rest of his life had set in motion an entire train of events completely out of his control, each one crashing into the next moment of his life. Being caught. The whipping. The sentence. Sharing a cell with a forger. Fashioning himself a new name, and then another. Every necessary moment had converged into the ordinariness of walking the streets of London with Rosanna beside him, with her white bonnet concealing her long dark hair and a too-heavy smudge of rouge across her cheeks.

‘I have many regrets, but not that,’ he replied. ‘I loved every damn second before I was caught. If I could have that time over, I would do it again.’

Keeping the beat with his step, Rosanna slid her hand around his elbow. Her body hummed with nervous energy, raw and bright. ‘As intrigued as I am by the transition from convict to clerk, that is not why I came to see you. You’ll never guess who from Argonauts Trading is staying at the hotel. Right now. This very minute.’

Phineas chewed his lip. ‘Mr Vincent.’

‘Oh.’ She deflated a little. ‘I thought I had done some proper sleuthing. But it seems you know everything.’

‘I just weighed the information at hand and made a logical deduction. The other men reside permanently in London. Mr Vincent does not.’

‘And I suppose you won’t be at all surprised to know that last night he dined with one of the names from your list. A Mr Redgrave.’

Phineas spun so fast that Rosanna stumbled. He wasn’t accustomed to having a lady on his elbow, and he had to grab her arm to catch her before she fell. ‘The crooked solicitor is at the hotel? Did Collins and Sanders join them? Are they meeting again? Have they requested a private dining room, or will they be in the main area?’

‘Why don’t you come and see for yourself?’ Rosanna asked as she straightened.

He shoved his hands into his pockets. ‘Because I’m supposed to return to my desk in an hour. And I don’t undertake field investigations. Not anymore.’

‘Not anymore? That’s an interesting titbit.’

Typical. His directions on jam, she completely ignored. But now she listened to him. She played at adjusting his collar and smoothed his lapels. ‘Mr Babbage, you are a recently married man who has not gone away for his honeymoon. You have a wife with a divine new dress, and an entire roomful of clerks who are aware that she misses you terribly. I think it would be suspicious if you did return to your employment this afternoon.’

Phineas’s temples pumped with energy at the scenario Rosanna spun to life. And she was right. If he was properly married to her and she had turned up at his workplace dressed as she was to beg a lunch with him, he would whisk her home for a completely different type of meal. He wouldn’t care a jot for the lecture he’d receive the following day.

‘I’ve seen your ledgers.’ While she rubbed an imaginary smudge from his coat, he stole another sweet breath of her. ‘Would you like to see mine?’

Lawrence Hempel may have staggered a bit on landing, but after an awkward lunge into the world, he had found his feet. The Aster was nowhere on the scale of other more well-known hotels like the Langham, but it offered something they didn’t—boutique exclusivity, discrete entrances, exorbitant prices, and an attentive owner and manager who could pre-empt every comfort and set every trend. Hempel understood the rules concerning old and new money in London society, but more than that, he was an expert navigator of the grey area in between. He made the upper classes feel at ease, as if they were visiting a dear friend, yet he protected his employees with the vehemence of a mother hen. He paid them in line with union requests, plus a shilling per week more. He lived his life in comfort but was never ostentatious. His staff loved him, the guests respected him, and yet he spent time with neither outside these walls. His wife, family, and a few well-chosen friends were his world.

Which was why Phineas had deliberately baited him and kept him at a distance. Friendship with a man like Lawrence would only lead to disaster.

Rosanna stepped into the hotel foyer. As she crossed the tiled entrance with the name ASTER boldly inlaid in a black and white mosaic, her posture shifted from stiff to comfortable. She nodded at an acquaintance on the staff and greeted an impoverished but aristocratic guest with a broad smile and a slight curtsy. Like her father, Rosanna understood the veneer between living in opulence and servicing its facade. Her family was likely richer than many of the clientele, yet she knew how to make them feel that their fortunes were reversed.

Stepping behind the front desk, she glanced at Phineas and beckoned him over with a scowl. As he sidled in beside her, she opened the reservations book and ran a gloved finger down the columns. Her eyes darted across them rapidly, and he followed the delicate curve and snip of the slight upturn to her nose, observing the plump swell of her lips as she mumbled names to herself. She wasn’t pretty in any conventional sense—Rosanna was too full of life to be anything so mundane. In London society, pale skin, visible veins, and fragility were lauded, whereas Rosanna radiated strength and sunshine. The slight bunch of muscles at her dress sleeve, along with the light dusting of colour and the spray of freckles across her nose, spoke of a busy life pursuing something other than ornamentation.

‘It was here. Right here.’ She turned another page in slight frustration, then paused. ‘There. That’s it. Mr Redgrave and his wife, room 204. Oh, here they come!’

Mr Redgrave, a man in his mid-fifties, yet carrying the air of someone twenty years younger, stepped into the foyer, accompanied by a woman of maybe thirty years of age. The pair nodded at the desk, then headed for the stairs.

‘His wife will likely know secrets,’ Rosanna whispered. ‘Information. She might let something slip or have something incriminating in her possession. I could speak with her. She might—’

‘That’s not his wife.’ Phineas followed the bustle’s sway as the pair ascended the stairs and the gathered swathe of fabric disappeared.

‘I am not mistaken.’ She flipped a few pages of the hotel’s guest register and tapped at another entry for a few weeks before. ‘There they are again, Mr and Mrs Redgrave, in the second-best suite.’

‘Redgrave’s wife is fifteen years his senior. She was a widow, and he flattered his way into her fortune. I am telling you, that is not his wife.’

Rosanna’s brow creased. She flipped through the pages of the book, as if searching for evidence to prove him wrong.

‘Good job, Hempel. This is even better. It’s his mistress.’ Phineas couldn’t help but grin. ‘Is there any chance, Mrs Babbage, that you would like to re-enter society?’