“If you only knew how superior, Mrs. Gallagher.”
“It’s just... surely... the entire world cannot want to assault me. It cannot all be like a box of knives.”
“Is that your logic? The world is exactly like a box of knives. Especially for lovely young women who rattle around alone in it. Surely you know this.” He was incredulous now.
“But not all of it,” she insisted, almost desperately. “It can’t be. I do not believe it. I cannot believe it. Or why... or why live at all?”
Her voice frayed and she heard the despair she’d been holding back push its way through.
He was absolutely silent. Even in the dim light of the carriage, his eyes managed to seem bright as beacons.
“The world is a box of knives,” he amended slowly, gently, “and all of those knives are scattered about in a beautiful green meadow between the dandelions.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, much better.”
He laughed shortly. Then sighed.
“Do you know about green meadows, Mr. Hawkes?”
“I grew up surrounded by them,” he said shortly, abstractedly, after a little delay. “A thousand years ago.”
“In the country, with your mother and father and sister.”
He smiled slightly. “Yes.”
“I think I should like to live in a place with green meadows,” she said, wistfully. “Are they very nice?”
“They are, at this point in my life, very nearly my definition of paradise. A bit like what Mr. Bellingham described. Yes. They are nice.”
For a moment neither spoke, and neither bothered to look out the window.
“Mr. Hawkes...” she ventured softly, finally. “What happened to you?”
“Well, most recently I was stabbed—”
She shook her head very slowly.
“War, Mrs. Gallagher,” he said shortly. His voice was gruff.
“Is that the entire truth?”
He hesitated. “It encompasses the entire truth. The actual truth is like a box of knives.”
She didn’t press.
He thought he could happily spend the rest of his life circling the city of London with this woman. They could make love, raise children, in the cozy confines of this somewhat fetid hack.
“I have been kept safe for much of my life, Mr. Hawkes. Or what passes for safe for women. But I can tell you something. There is danger in too much safety. In too much shelter. And it seems to me things that appear safe often are not, and things that appeardangerous are often the very things we ought to run toward.”
“You have the right of it, Mrs. Gallagher.”
They quite clearly meant each other.
“And I know there are dangerous people and dangerous places, Mr. Hawkes. I know there is violence in the world! Do you think I lived sheltered from everything, under a great silver dome of a tureen, like a roast of goose?”
“Definitely not like that,” he said. “And now I’m hungry. Damn you to hell anyway, Mrs. Gallagher.”
She gave a little shout of laughter then covered her mouth as if loath to disturb the silky, quiet dark of the hack.
