“Lady Hastings should be first on our list. Mr. Cooke can wait… Oh! What on earth is this?” She held up a scrap of paper, about the same size as the other cards but thinner, as if cut from a letter or a flyleaf. On it, a messy hand had scrawled,To Eli, from Geórgios, followed by an address.
Eli’s heart stopped in his chest. He snatched the “card” from his mother’s grip, but it was too late. She’d already seen it. Far worse, Geórgios had already left it.
This wasn’t possible. How could he be in England? More importantly, how could he have found him?
“Oh, that’s right,” his father said. “Cuttle mentioned that an odd-looking fellow came by the house this week without any card. When Cuttle sent him away, he came back the next day withthat.”
“Odd-looking how?” Hannah peered at the card in Eli’s hand.“And the address is in Spitalfields! Who do you know who livesthere?”
“No one. Just a friend from when I was overseas.”
“Sounded foreign, Cuttle said.” Mr. Williams wrinkled his nose.
His mother and sister were staring at him. Eli tried to keep his voice light, as if this weren’t a perfect disaster. “I’ll look in on him presently. Don’t think of it any further.”
Good God, what am I going to do?
The address Geórgios had left was for a doss-house in a very questionable neighborhood in the East End. A worn sign out front proclaimed beds for five pence a night, and Eli judged that to be a poor bargain given the state of the building. He looked at the card again on the faint hope he’d misread. No luck. Well, whatever Geórgios was doing in England, it was safe to assume he was out of money.
Eli would happily give him some if it meant that his friend would leave town quietly before he came to the attention of anyone in the navy.
A sour old clerk at the entrance informed Eli that he couldn’t enter without the evening’s ticket, so he paid five pence for a little brass chip and went upstairs to search the common rooms where a resident might pass the waking hours. There were a few working men in the kitchens and a smoking room upstairs, speaking in French and several languages Eli didn’t recognize. He found Geórgios in a cramped room with grease-smudged walls, his hulking form bent over a game of draughts.
“Eli!” Geórgios boomed when he caught sight of him. He rose to his feet so quickly that he upset the game and drew a curse from his opponent. “You’ve come at last!”
“Hello.” Eli crossed the room and clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Might I ask what the devil you’re doing here?”
“I thought you’d be happy to see me,” Geórgios replied, disappointment taking his voice down to a more intimate volume. “I’ve come a long way.”
“I’m sorry,” Eli said quickly, with a look around the room. Surely the other residents weren’treallystaring. It was only his imagination. “Of course, I’m glad to see you again. This is just a delicate time for a reunion.”
He should be on the continent, where Eli had left him. Far from any inquisitive naval court judges.
“Is there someplace more private we could talk?” Most doss-houses like this didn’t rent rooms, only beds, but it was worth a try.
But Geórgios shook his head no, so they would have to tolerate the company. There were only three other men here anyway, and two of them were playing a heated card game. Certainly none of them were likely to have ties to the navy, this place being decidedly below that class.
“Why have you come to England?”
“To see you, my old friend!” Geórgios might look a bit rough at first glance, with his thick, untamed black hair and beard, but his easy smile betrayed his true nature quickly enough. “You told me so much about London, I wanted to see it myself.”
“But how did you know my address?”
“You are in the papers,” he explained. “Everyone I ask knows who you are.”
“I—” Eli tried to digest this statement, but found it too large to bite off at once. “When you say ‘everyone,’ how many people did you ask about me, exactly?”
“Not so many. Maybe twenty people?” Geórgios gave his response with enthusiasm, as if this were an amusing diversion and not thedifference between life and social death. “They say in the papers you were at a party at Lady Kerr’s house in Berkeley Square, so I went there, but she was away for some horse race. Her butler told me where your house is, but you were away too.”
“You were at Lady Kerr’s?” Eli had more than enough to deal with, without adding this to the mix. “Did you tell anyone how you knew me? Who did you say you were?”
“Your friend from Greece, come to see you. Don’t worry, don’t worry. I wouldn’t talk about anything important.”
Eli folded his hands over his face, offering up a silent prayer. Though it was increasingly clear that if any guardian angel was following the events of his life, they were having a grand time at his expense.
“Geórgios.” Eli had kept his voice low since the start of this conversation, but now he dropped it even further, so that his friend had to lean in to hear him. “I’m in a spot of trouble with the navy at the moment, and I need you to stop going about town talking about me. If you say the wrong thing, it might give people the notion that I deserted.”
“What is this?” He frowned at the unfamiliar word.
