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Chapter Nine

In the morning, Lark met Viv in front of Lady Melforth’s house. London stood gray and solid under a pale blue sky except where a few fearless blades of grass had sprung up between the paving stones. The prolonged spell without rain had dried the usual muck of the streets, and passing vehicles stirred up dust. “No carriage?” he asked. “Where are we off to today then?”

“Shopping.” She pulled on her gloves. “No woman is at home in a city until she knows where to find the things she needs for her household or her work.”

Lark thought that only Viv would mention work in that way, as something a woman would inevitably have. They were a short walk from three great shopping streets. “What things did you have in mind?”

“Everything from linens to pressed paper,” she said. “So, if you have any manly objection to choosing textures and patterns, you may leave me to it.” She set off toward Cavendish Square.

As they passed the plain brick St. Peter’s Church, he let her outpace him. He admired the tilt of her chocolate silk hat above the intertwined coils of her hair, and the set of her dove-colored cape on her shoulders. Today, printed blue cotton skirts rustled with her quick stride. She was everything neat and contained. In a vivid flash he saw her at her dressing table that dark, honey-colored hair spilling down, hair pins scattered on the carpet, a silk wrapper loose around her. He corrected the vision at once. Viv’s pins would be in a little porcelain dish. The blue silk wrapper would be properly tied at her waist.

He guessed that in her head she was leagues ahead of him, peering in shop windows, opening doors, examining goods for sale. “Your method is wrong, you know,” he said.

She glanced back at him without slowing. “My method? What do you mean wrong?”

“If you always have an objective on your walks, how will you discover anything?”

She halted and turned, a look of strained patience on her face. He knew that look. He was sure that his own face wore it when he explained some obvious point that Rook refused to understand. “You enjoy provoking me, don’t you?” she said.

He shrugged. It was a new pleasure, an unexpected one. He couldn’t deny it.

“Do you have another method to suggest?” she asked.

“I do.” He caught up with her, and they started walking again, until she turned the corner at Holles Street. Abruptly, she stopped and whacked him with her bag, which, he noted, was not weighted with stones.

He laughed. “Do you want to hear my method?”

“Tell me.”

Lark was in no hurry. At Oxford Street he took her arm in his and turned them west. The long street, lined with hundreds of shops of every sort, dipped and rose toward the distant corner where in centuries past the Tyburn gallows had stood.

She pulled back in his hold, offering him a questioning look. “I was thinking of Regent Street. Oxford Street…is…”

“Vulgar, gaudy, beneath your dignity?”

“There are pickpockets, aren’t there?”

“Undoubtedly, but there are beadles to chase them away. You won’t need your pistol.”

She shot him a quick glare. “I know that.”

“Trust me, for shopping pleasure, Oxford Street is what you want.” He tugged her into motion again. “Regent Street jacks up its prices to convince buyers of the quality of its goods, and Bond Street pretends not to engage in trade at all, but merely to confer the mantle of fashion on the select few.”

He waited. He’d got her thinking, revising her plan. He counted on Oxford Street itself to draw her with the sheer energy of so many Londoners in motion. In the jammed roadway, the rattle and rumble of individual sets of wheels merged into a single roar. On the pavement the bustling crowd streamed and eddied, snagged by shop windows full of goods.

Once again old memories stirred. Years before when Lark returned to London from Dav’s country estate, Oxford Street, for all its bargains, had been above his touch. He and Rook had not been in the city a month before they’d sold the clothes Dav had given them to get their first room. Without those fine clothes, they had been out of place on Oxford Street, chased away, whenever they lingered, by shopkeepers’ clerks and beadles. Lark shook off the memories. He was no longer that boy. One of the benefits of their charade was that Lark could move freely among the most fastidious of shoppers even on Bond Street.

“First, slow down,” he told Viv. “You want to notice details. You want to become part of the scene.” Oxford Street was definitely a scene.

“Part of the scene? I’m an observer, a chronicler.”

“You say you want women to move freely about London without being targets.”

Viv nodded.

“So, they have to belong to the scene. They’ve got to be unhurried. It takes practice.”

He slowed their pace to a stroll. Her skirts barely whispered. He liked having a hold of her arm. It made them a pair. They passed a window with a hundred pairs of shoes laid out like a splendid banquet, the merchant confident that the demand of London was great enough for even a shoe seller to make a fortune.