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The hand he stuck out over the door was deeply ingrained with dirt. Playing for time, Jem took a half-smoked cigarette out of his waistcoat pocket and relit it, pausing to inhale deeply.
‘How long ago were you there?’
‘I dunno—a few years. Like you said, I was a tiger. Just a kid.’ He thrust his hand forwards. ‘Now, if you’d give me what’s mine, I’ll get back to work.’
Frowning, Jem exhaled a column of smoke. ‘The thing is, I’m not sure now that it is yours. It seems like a sentimental thing; if you’d lost it, you’d probably know…’ He began to unfold the paper. ‘You don’t remember misplacing anything?’
Mullins’s eyes were fixed on the paper. Opening the last fold, Jem slid the St Christopher into his other hand and flipped it in the air. It glinted and flashed for a second before he caught it. ‘If you can tell me what it is, it’s yours.’
‘A sovereign.’ Mullins’s voice cracked. He gripped the top of the stable door, his ruddy face suddenly waxy. ‘It’s a bloody sovereign, isn’t it? That bastard—’
Backing away, he gave a bitter and broken sort of laugh, and rubbed his black-nailed fingers across his forehead. ‘You can keep it. I don’t want it.’
‘What makes you think it’s a sovereign?’
A pulse had begun to throb uncomfortably in Jem’s temples. Inside the stable Mullins spun round, grasping the fork he’d been using to muck out the stall. ‘I said I don’t want it, whatever it is. And I don’t want to talk about it, neither. Now bugger off and leave me alone.’
For a long moment they stared at each other, then Jem nodded. ‘All right,’ he said softly. ‘All right. But if you change your mind, you know where to find me. My name’s Jem Arden. I think you know who I am.’
It was a gamble, and one that he’d lost before. But he’d never been this close to the truth; he’d never found himself face to face with someone he was pretty sure had the answers he was looking for. Mullins held all the aces.
Jem walked back across the cobbles with his head bent, his hand closed around the St Christopher in his pocket, the curse Mullins called out after him ringing in his ears.
The church clock was striking the half hour when Kate came out of the chemist with her packages of tooth powder, witch hazel, and oil of cloves. Usually she would be glad to have finished her errands and have time to browse the shops for her own pleasure, but the exchange in Pearson’s had unsettled her.
There was a cool nip in the air, a bite that hadn’t been there the last time she was in town, but that wasn’t what made her pull the collar of her coat up around her face. All this time she had been afraid of being discovered and exposed, had thought she was safe in this small, cut-off town in the Derbyshire Peaks. The people here knew her as Mrs Furniss, respectable housekeeper of Coldwell Hall, but it seemed she was just as ignorant of their lives as they were of hers. She felt self-conscious, tainted by a secret that everyone seemed to know but her.
She walked slowly, aware of her own ghost in step beside her, slipping in and out of the corner of her vision in the shop windows. She passed the tea shop where, when the weather was cold, she sometimes ordered a pot of Darjeeling to sip while she watched the passers-by on the street, savouring her aloneness and anonymity.
Little did she know that she hadn’t been anonymous and unremarkable at all, and that people must have been talking, whispering, about who she was and where she was from. It wasn’t her past associations that tainted her here but her present one, with Coldwell.
She stopped in front of Holdsworth’s Pawnbrokers, hitching her basket onto the other arm as she peered in through the window’s small panes. Some shopkeepers favoured a methodical approach to showing off their wares—symmetrical towers of tins and packets, serried rows of produce, but here everything was piled into the dusty window space without design or forethought. Kate’s gaze moved over china jugs, children’s shoes, smelling salts bottles, and pocket watches, until a small box in the far corner of the window caught her eye.
A dragonfly nestled on folds of blue satin, its enamelled wings delicately veined in gold. She stared at it wistfully, thinking back to the day of the fair, and the walk back to Coldwell over the steaming moor.
It took a moment to notice that someone had come to stand beside her, and another to realise that it was Jem. Neither spoke, but she felt the comfort of his presence; a loosening of the tension in her shoulders, as if she had stepped out of the teeth of a gale into shelter.
She heard his soft outward breath, like a sigh, and felt him move fractionally closer. The effervescent joy she had felt when he had jumped up onto the wagon had dissipated, leaving a quieter, more wistful longing in its wake. Almost like sadness.
After a while he said in a low voice, ‘I wanted to come and find you, but—’ He glanced round, over his shoulder. ‘There’s nowhere we can go, is there? Nowhere that we won’t be seen, and people won’t talk.’
The reflections of people on the street behind them slid across the window. The inside of the shop was dark and murky, but Mr Holdsworth would be lurking somewhere in its depths. He would be watching them.
Someone was always watching them.
Jem turned away from the window. With an impressive show of nonchalance, he leaned against the wall, flipping a silver coin from one hand to the other.
‘It’s the way it is,’ she said quietly. ‘The way it has to be.’
Since the night of the downpour, they had survived on snatched moments and stolen kisses, furtive glances and fleeting smiles. It was harder than she’d imagined, but she sometimes wondered how she had got through the days before—the blank, flat years without him. She had only been half-alive. Frozen, like a fly trapped inside one of the blocks of ice hauled up from the icehouse. He had quickened her blood again. He had brought her back to life, and however difficult it was, she couldn’t regret it.
He put the coin back into his pocket and turned to look up the street. A muscle flickered in the hollow of his cheek, and inside her gloves her fingers ached to touch him.
‘I wish I could court you properly,’ he said softly. ‘I wish I could hold your hand and sit across a table from you in a tea shop, like any other man with his sweetheart…’
He made it sound so ordinary. So blissfully commonplace. She couldn’t help smiling.
‘You want to buy me tea?’