I glanced down the squalid street to the left as we crossed it, at the gray linens swinging on lines under a sunless sky, the little soot-darkened children dodging rats as they hurried home from climbing chimneys. I felt the burden of “not enough” coming down on my shoulders again, but for different reasons.
“No, I don’t believe so,” I said. I had the painful sense that I’d wasted my life. My heart. My second chance from God.
I could feel Jack eyeing me. “It was too much bringing you here, I suppose. I’ve taxed your delicate constitution.”
I looked down at my feet, which I’d spent years torturing. For show. For vanity. I couldn’t see the exact place from here, but somewhere among these streets was the place I’d stumbled and fallen all those years ago, frantic with regret and fear after what I’d done, at my ugliest inside, and that’s exactly where God had found me. Where he’d made himself known to my conflicted heart, and rather than judgment, it was a hand of mercy reaching out to me. The hand of a Father. I’d been granted forgiveness and a chance, and I’d gone and spent that life ... on theater. “I just don’t see the point.” I said it quietly, but he heard. He always did.
Only this time, he didn’t truly hear. “Thepointis infusing beauty where it’s lacking. Bringing hope to despair. Taking bodies that are regularly degraded and drawing out something of beauty—making cheap merchandise into art. Proving to themwhat could be.” His voice was firm but gentle, lacking condemnation. “I train them, then bring some into the corps at Craven. The pay is worse, but the work slightly more dignified. Some are quite eager for the chance.”
“You bring these women ... into Craven?” I was stunned. Touched. Convicted.
“Half the corps at least, and a few of the sujet.” He sighed. “This is why I could never sign on for any sort of religion. Call me a heathen, my dear nun, but I could never feel righteous by sidestepping places and people like this to keep myself ‘wholesome.’”
I cringed at the silly name I’d somehow earned at Craven. All at once I was weary—of struggling to rise, of working harder, of trying to prove myself. Of covering up how very human I actually was.
We didn’t speak for a few streets, and we descended into our own thoughts as we crossed back into the gaslit streets of Covent Gardens bordered by parks and columned theaters. “Jack?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t think I care so much for that name anymore.”
His long stride slowed in the orange air of sunset as it prismed in the fog. “Fair enough. Perhaps I’ll simply call you Ella.”
I gave him a crooked smile. “I’d like that.” We ambled around a lamppost on a corner and continued east, crossing over to Bow Street to head north. “Have you been to church before, when you were younger?”
He shrugged. “Years ago, but not lately. I’ve mostly kept away.” A rotund lamplighter just up the street paused to lift his flame to the gaslight on a long gold stick, pausing in the descending night until light glowed behind the glass. “There’s no single version of me they find acceptable. To the pious,every orphan is a thief, every scruffy lad looking for trouble, and every circus man incurably immoral. I don’t have to tell you what they think of the theater.”
Moments later we slowed before the Bow Street entrance of the Theatre Royal and looked up at the thirty-foot Grecian columns supporting a triangular vestibule leading into the grandest of atriums.
“As I said, I simply never saw the point in a weekly torment. My logical mind could not make sense of it all, and my heart could not abide any moral system too twisted and clogged for human decency to pass through.”
“Please. Don’t write off God because of mere people who are too shortsighted to love as they should.” Including myself. Outward purity had been my priority, but not God’s. Not the main one, anyway—he had far bigger things in mind. “Itdoesmake sense, if you give it a chance, and it has everything to do with acceptance—not by people, but by—”
“You will not change my mind, Miss Blythe.”
Miss Blythe?“What happened to Ella?”
He huffed a sigh. “How should I know? It seems she’s turned back into the nun.”
I recoiled, drawing into my cape.
He deflated at the shoulders, expelling breath. “My apologies. That was wretched of me, and I’ll not use the name again. On my honor as a gentleman.” He turned me to face him. “Now, if I may be so bold as to invite you to therealouting of the night ... Lady Ella?”
I straightened, lifting a small smile. “You may.”
He led me around the theater to the piazza, and through a dark door off to the side.
“Where are we going?”
“Let us forevermore strike that question from our acquaintance, shall we? I’ll never answer it.” He gave me a wicked grin in the dark and led me up a rounding narrow staircase flanked with candles set into recesses along the walls. Muffled orchestra music thrummed somewhere nearby, every crash of a cymbal making my heart skitter.
“Isn’t this a private entrance? Are we allowed to be here?”
“So many questions,” he whispered. “Perhaps we should strike them altogether.”
“Will we be in trouble?”
“Only if we’re caught. Come, now. This is lesson number three.” We exited the stairwell, and he led me through a long anteroom beset with tall white statues of Greek mythology and laid with soft blue carpeting. Chandeliers dripped crystals high above our heads, and Jack Dorian walked as one quite at home in such surroundings.
