Stop flirting with me, she had said.
As if he wanted to flirt with her. Every time he saw her, every time she threw her so-perfect fiancé in his face, he became more and more certain that he’d had the luckiest of escapes. All those months spent worrying while he was in Paris…they’d been for nothing. He’d hoped for a letter. A telegram. A single word.
Not a damned thing had come. He’d not thought her the sort of person who would treat him like a shameful secret, one to be hidden as soon as possible. He was done flirting with Daisy.
She could have her emporium and her sweetheart. He’d learned long ago not to waste tears on anyone who pushed him away. Not shopkeepers. Not stablehands. Not even sweethearts he’d once intended to marry.
He smiled and poured little jiggers of rum for the women who had raised him. They had told him not to listen when the country shouted that he was nothing. They had taught him to walk with his head held high, to act as if he meant something even though nobody else would agree.
He wouldn’t spare a thought for the woman who’d decided he meant nothing. He didn’t want her back. He didn’t care how she felt about him.
All he wanted was for Daisy Whitlaw to realize how wrong she’d been and to regret her stupidity. He wanted her to marry her stupid sub-lieutenant and have equally stupid children and look out her stupid window and think occasionally: I suppose Crash was right after all. I made a mistake.
Aside from that? He didn’t care one bit. He wouldn’t let himself do it.
Chapter Three
Daisy was always going to feel like an interloper on her Sunday visits to her best friend. She’d resigned herself to that fact.
It didn’t matter that Judith ushered her into a front salon as if she were regular company. The walls of the luxurious room were covered in a white-and-gold damask silk. The table Daisy sat at was laden with goodies: biscuits, sandwiches, scones.
Once, Judith had lived just across the street from Daisy. At first Daisy had felt she was the luckier of the two. Her father might have failed as a grocer, but he’d had a bit of an annuity, and her mother had been frugal enough, and genteel enough, to teach Daisy everything she had needed to know. Then Daisy’s life had jagged down. Her father had died; his annuity had disappeared. Her mother had become ill. Alongside that, Judith’s luck had jagged up, and then up again. She’d married a wealthy, powerful man she had known from her childhood. Now, instead of exchanging bread recipes and household tips, the two women sat at a table where three years of Daisy’s labor would not pay for all the china.
“Here,” Judith said with a smile. “Would you care for a roast beef sandwich?”
“Of course I would,” Daisy said with a smile.
Once, Daisy and Judith had gone shopping together and joked of purchasing kid gloves with diamonds. They’d talked about adding gold leaf to their meager meals. It had been silly, ridiculous—and utterly necessary for Daisy’s peace of mind. Their little game had provided perspective on her wants. Your wishes are silly. Be happy you have soup bones, Daisy. You could have less.
“How goes the flower shop?” Judith asked.
“It prospers.” Daisy gave her friend as confident a smile as she could muster. “In fact, I’ve been awarded additional compensation for my valiant efforts. We’re positively flush.”
Not a lie. Five pence more a week—it had gone a long way. She and her mother were actually saving money in winter now, not bleeding it slowly away in coal bills.
Judith smiled, as Daisy had known she would.
The sad thing was, their friendship was already over. Judith just didn’t know it yet. There was the literal distance between them—four miles, difficult for Daisy to manage on her own unless Judith sent a carriage, as she’d done today.
There was the way the maid’s eyes cut toward Daisy as she placed the tea on the table, as if Daisy were a bit of refuse that she longed to sweep from the room. There was the fact that Daisy suspected Judith’s servants earned more in a week than the owner of the flower shop bestowed on Daisy. Daisy would have been lucky to scrub floors for her friend.
“Tell me all the gossip,” Judith said. “I don’t want to miss a single story.”
Daisy went through all their former mutual acquaintances: Fred Lotting and his wife, Mr. Padge, Daisy’s mother… She talked of everyone but herself.
Daisy was lying, she realized as they spoke and laughed. They were still friends. They still had those years of poverty binding them together. Judith had been her support, the shoulder she cried on when everything went wrong. In turn, she’d held her friend through every reversal.
They were friends still, fragile though that friendship was. Their hours together felt like spider silk—ready to dissipate with one good sweep of a servant’s broom. One day it would break. One day. Still, it held. Spider webs tended to remain in place if you held your breath when you were close.
Daisy was trying not to breathe.
“Is there anything else?” Judith asked.
Daisy almost told Judith what she’d done about the charity bequest. She almost told her of entering the competition, of the grocer mocking her because she wasn’t a man.
She didn’t, though.
Daisy’s Emporium was a dream that was as unattainable and unrealistic as gold leaf on radishes. Deep down, Daisy knew it would never come to pass. Dreaming was one thing. Entering a competition she couldn’t win? That was a little worse.
Telling her friend about it? That would make this serious. Real. Judith would want to hear the details. She might even offer to help. And if she did…
Daisy would end up another one of Judith’s servants, running a storefront for her. And if the store failed the way her father’s store had…?
She did her best not to breathe on the attenuating cobwebs of their friendship.
“No,” Daisy said instead. “That’s all there is. All this about me, and we’ve scarcely spoken of you. How are you? How are the terrors?”
The terrors were Judith’s younger brother and sister.
Judith laughed. “I’m well, as you can see.” She gestured around the room. “Theresa’s being fitted for dresses at this very moment. Imagine her in silks, if you will.”
Daisy couldn’t imagine that sort of transformation. Judith’s younger sister was a hellion at the best of times. She’d rip a silk gown in a minute flat. She’d smear grease on the skirts.
But of course, the cost of repair would no longer matter to her friend. And who knew how a deportment teacher might have changed the girl she’d known just a few months ago?
“We’re well,” Judith said. “Very well, and I’m glad to see you. I miss you. A few stolen hours here and there are hardly enough.”
“I miss you, too.” A few hours was all Daisy had. “But I need to go back to my mother.”
“I know, dear.” Judith patted her hand. “Is there anything you need?”
Daisy could have laughed. Everything. She needed everything.
“Gold leaf,” she said instead. “Gold leaf and diamonds at my hem, and with that, I should be splendid.”
Judith smiled at her.
It wouldn’t be much longer until their friendship diminished to nothing. Until that moment, though, Daisy would let the servants frown at her. She wouldn’t flinch when they kept too-careful an eye on her as they conducted her to the door, hoping to catch her in the act of stealing the silver.
Daisy took her leave, her smile plastered firmly on her face. She kept it there for three whole minutes before the reality of her life set in again.
She’d entered a competition she couldn’t win. She’d
agreed to let a man she didn’t like assist her in her preparations.
Of course she hadn’t told Judith. Judith knew she was poor; she didn’t need to know that she’d gone witless.
Crash was already late. Five minutes ago, the clock had chimed three. Daisy still found herself waiting in front of the general store. She was exhausted from her day at the flower shop, the wind was cold, and her patience was running thin.
Late was perhaps a little unfair. She knew he was around somewhere because his velocipede was leaning against the side of a building. But he was not present, and she’d not so much free time that she could afford to waste a moment of it.
Especially not if he had arrived on his velocipede. Just looking at the thing made her palms itch. She had done her best not to learn about the contraption when he’d first started riding it a few months back. She had been certain that he was going to live up to his name and crash into something.
That was because Crash on a velocipede belonged in a circus act, one that should have been paired alongside lions and flaming hoops. If she’d had any idea what a velocipede was when he first mentioned the thing, she would have protested. He’d called it a vehicle. Some vehicle it was; it couldn’t even stand upright on its own. It was nothing but two wheels, one in front of the other. Nothing to stabilize it. No sticks to keep him upright.
Worse, Crash turned those wheels not by propelling himself with his feet on the ground. The wheels turned by means of little pedals attached to the front axle. A seat three or four feet above the ground might not seem so high, but he went flying past as fast as a horse could gallop.
She had to hide her face every time she saw him. She kept imagining him overbalancing. Or underbalancing. Or hitting a wall. She imagined him smashing into hard bricks at that speed…
She didn’t care about Crash, not one bit. But just because he’d broken her heart didn’t mean she wanted him to crack his skull.
Daisy was not the only one who had noted the velocipede’s presence; three other women had observed it, and were standing—lollygagging, really—outside the store. Now, she could see him inside through the dirt-smeared windows. A cap covered his hair; he’d unwound his scarf so it was loosely looped around his neck, long enough to dangle enticingly just past his hips. He was gesturing, describing something to the store owner.