“We’re standing where real knights once rode into battle. Look, you can see where a cannonball hit the wall.” The stone walls of the castle were pockmarked with scars from ancient battles. She posed for several photos, posting them to the hashtag she would be using to document her adventure, #RubyGoesRogue. She even let Flynn take a silly selfie of them together in front of the entrance.
“Something to remember our day together by,” he said as he texted it to her.
She looked at it as they got back into his car. They were both smiling, leaned in close. Flynn’s arm was thrown casually over her shoulder. They looked good together, not that it mattered. Some of the happiest couples she knew didn’t look outwardly like they’d be a good match, super girly Megan with cowboy Jake, for example.
Flynn chatted easily the rest of the way into London. He had a knack for keeping the conversation going, while Ruby tended to be more concise with her words. She was perfectly happy to sit back and enjoy the landscape and Flynn’s descriptions of what she was seeing.
“Shall I drop you off at your hotel while I park the car?” he asked as they entered London’s bustling streets.
She’d gotten a quick look at the city when she arrived a few days ago, but it still impressed her. So much history. Everything seemed so grand and important. “Yeah. That would be great. I’ll check in and drop off my suitcase and then we can do some sightseeing.”
“Perfect.” He pulled the car to the curb in front of the rather ornate-looking front entrance of the Hilton where she’d booked herself a room.
“I’ll meet you in the lobby in a little bit,” he said. “Just come down whenever you’re ready.”
“Okay. Thank you.” She climbed out of the car as Flynn came around to help her with her suitcase, and the concierge met them to take her bag. She said goodbye to Flynn and walked inside, pausing for a moment to take in the grandeur of the lobby.
It just looked so…British. Everything around her had a feeling of old-world opulence, thick brocades on the floors and intricately carved moldings around edges and doorways. She approached the counter and soon was on her way to her room on the seventh floor, riding up in the elevator with the bellhop who had taken her suitcase.
She tipped him and let herself into her room, exhaling deeply as she sat on the bed. This was her first time traveling alone, and it was equal parts thrilling and terrifying. Having Flynn with her here today felt good, though. Letting him show her around didn’t in any way lessen her adventure, as Megan had said, and in fact, it might add to it. Surely, she was likely to see and do things with him as her tour guide that she might have missed otherwise.
She really appreciated that he hadn’t come up to the room with her. It seemed to cement her impression of him being a solid guy. It probably would have been fine if he came up, but she felt a lot more comfortable having this time to get settled on her own.
She freshened up, took a quick peek out of her window to see the view—more buildings—and headed downstairs to meet Flynn in the lobby. He sat on one of the plush chairs, phone in hand, lost in whatever he was looking at on his screen.
She stopped in front of him. “Hi.”
He looked up with a smile. “Ready?”
She nodded. “Where to first? I could go for some lunch.”
“You read my mind. I was thinking we could go over to Camden Market, find some food, maybe poke around in the shops a bit, if that sounds good to you?”
“Sounds great.”
“Okay. Would you like to take the Tube? It’s easier and quicker than driving in the city.”
“I’ve never ridden a subway before,” she told him. “Florida—where I grew up—is too low and wet to have anything underground, and Rosemont Castle is too far out in the mountains. So yes, let’s take the Tube. It sounds exciting.”
Flynn shook his head in amusement. “Never met anyone who found the Tube exciting, but it’s an experience, all right. Let’s do it.”
They headed outside. The weather hadn’t improved since they’d left the Langdon estate a few hours ago. Gray clouds hung heavy in the sky, threatening rain, but Ruby was beginning to suspect it was an empty threat, given that it had been this way for days now. The air was cool and moist, with just the faintest hint of drizzle, and she was glad for the lightweight jacket she’d put on over her shirt. The weather app on her phone told her that this was typical for London in the fall.
“Here we go,” he commented as he led the way toward the station.
Together they walked down a set of stairs from the sidewalk that led to a station beneath the street. Ruby inhaled the damp, musty smell of the Underground. People bustled this way and that, a whole new city here beneath the city they’d left behind on the sidewalk above.
She and Flynn made their way to the ticket machine, where she purchased a visitor’s pass called an Oyster card and loaded it with enough money to last her a few days. They made their way down an escalator to the platform just as a train whooshed into the station, pushing a wave of warm, stale air ahead of it.
“That’s our train,” Flynn told her, and they joined the stream of people boarding the car in front of them. The inside of the train was shaped almost like the tunnel it ran through, with an arched ceiling. Its walls were plastered in maps with different colored lines to indicate the various branches of the subway.
Instinctively, Ruby sat across from the map so she could study it as they rode. She might as well get familiar with it now, because she would be riding alone tomorrow. She would probably spend two or three days here in London before venturing on to someplace new. The beauty of this trip was that she had an open-ended itinerary she could customize as she went, like creating her own graph. Point A to point B to point C, and she could determine the location of each point whenever it suited her, change them if she wanted to.
The doors closed, and an automated voice told them they were on the Northern line headed toward Edgware before the train moved forward with a jolt. Ruby reached for the pole in front of her to steady herself, listening to the high-pitched whine of the train as it wound its way through the tunnel. Outside the windows, it was pitch black, but inside the train car, everything was lit in a bright electric glow.
“It’s bigger than I imagined,” she said, tipping her head toward the map on the wall opposite them. It was a maze of different colored lines and too many stops to count. She’d need to download a copy of it onto her phone for navigating tomorrow.
“London’s a big city.”
