Carver's Quest (24 page)

He took a seat at one of the tables overlooking the dancing area. Behind the railings which fenced off the floor and the tiered and fretted pagoda where the orchestra played, only a couple of
dozen couples were dancing. It was early yet. Adam ordered a bottle of ale from the waiter and looked about him. Two elegantly dressed swells, arms linked, sauntered past, talking loudly about the
play they had seen the previous night. Above him, he could also hear raised voices, possibly those of squabbling lovers, coming from one of the upper-floor supper rooms. At the next table was
another man, alone like Adam. He was holding a battered nosegay of flowers which he was picking apart and scattering on the ground. He looked to be half-drunk. The air was suddenly full of shrieks
of laughter from the dancing platform as the orchestra struck up a swifter tune and the dancers picked up their pace.

‘Such indecorous antics, eh?’ Adam’s neighbour remarked, with a slur and a bitter smile. Adam glanced at him but the man clearly expected no reply. He threw the remains of the
nosegay to the floor and, rising unsteadily to his feet, stumbled off. Adam watched him go and then returned to his scrutiny of the people walking round the circular palisade that fenced off the
dancing area. He had chosen his seat with care. It provided a clear view of all the paths that converged here. Even at a distance he was able to recognise the young woman who had visited him in
Doughty Street as she approached. He felt his heart beat faster and his spirits lift as he saw her. She was truly a beautiful woman.

She was dressed from head to toe in fine white muslin and was holding a white parasol above her head, as if the noonday sun was still blazing down on Cremorne and she needed all the protection
it offered. She was stepping out with an almost manly confidence and pace. Heads in the crowd turned as she passed. Adam rose from his seat. As he did so, Miss Maitland noticed him and gave a
slight wave of her parasol. She quickened her already swift pace and arrived by the table breathless and laughing.

‘I was stricken with a sudden fear that you might not be here, Mr Carver. Or that I might not be able to find you. There are such crowds in the gardens.’

‘There are always crowds almost everywhere in London, Miss Maitland.’ In truth, Adam had been thinking only a moment or two earlier that Cremorne was quiet for a June evening.
‘It takes time for a stranger to accustom himself – or herself – to the hustle and bustle of the city.’

He motioned towards one of the cushioned wooden chairs by the table and the young woman, closing her parasol, took it.

‘I do not think I shall ever be anything other than a stranger in London. I am rarely allowed out to see any of it. My mother is convinced that I must be chaperoned everywhere I go. If I
am not, she believes I will end by running off with a shoe-black off the streets.’

‘Yet here you are in Cremorne Gardens. Unchaperoned.’ And you visited a gentleman’s lodgings in Doughty Street, equally unaccompanied, Adam thought, although he said nothing of
it.

‘I have given my mother the slip. She has gone to see her banker in Lombard Street, leaving me, as she thinks, reading a novel in our rooms at Brown’s. I took a cab ten minutes after
she left.’

Adam could not help but laugh at the conspiratorial air with which the young woman made her confession.

‘Was it awfully improper to suggest meeting you here?’ Emily asked after a moment’s pause.

‘A little unconventional, perhaps.’

‘I am quite certain that I have done any number of things that were awfully improper in the weeks since I arrived in town. There are so many more rules in London than there are in
Salonika. But I grow very weary of them.’

She heaved a great sigh as if to indicate the extent of her weariness.

‘Am I not to enjoy the freedom that men take for granted, Mr Carver? Can a respectable young lady not walk where she wishes without attracting sullen stares or unwanted
conversation?’

Adam was unsure what to say. The truth was that an unaccompanied lady in the streets of London was only too likely to attract exactly the kind of attention Emily described. Or worse.

‘And yet I trust that I have not been
too
forward. Too…’ She paused to search for the word. ‘Too unmaidenly.’

‘I am certain you are incapable of appearing unmaidenly, Miss Maitland.’

‘I shall have to do as you have done, Mr Carver,’ Emily said, laughing. ‘Write a book about my travels! The adventures of a naive young girl from Salonika in the wilds of
London!’

‘And of what have your London adventures consisted?’ Apart from visiting gentlemen unannounced, Adam thought to himself.

‘Very little, if truth be told.’ Emily looked cast down at the thought of all the adventures she had been missing.

‘There must be something to fill the pages of this book you will write.’

‘Well, we have been to the theatre on several occasions. We went to the Queen’s last night.
Lady Audley’s Secret
.’ She used the tip of her parasol to trace some
pattern in the gravel around her chair. ‘Such a dismal drama. Nothing but murder, bigamy and madness. We were greatly disappointed by it. Although the ladies’ hats were much to be
admired.’

‘I am sorry that your visit to the theatre was not a success.’

‘Oh, you should not be.’ Emily laughed. ‘No play can be considered a complete failure if one comes away from it with a new idea for a bonnet.’

‘I have to confess that I have never gone to a play and studied the hats of my neighbours with any great attention.’

‘You certainly should do, Mr Carver.’ Emily sounded as if she was recommending a moral duty that was not to be lightly shirked. ‘Hats are fearfully revealing. I think that you
can judge much about a person’s character from the shape of his or her hat. Take the hat belonging to the gentleman in the blue jacket who is standing by the little gateway onto the dancing
platform. The black coachman’s hat.’

Adam turned his head very slightly so that he could see the person Emily meant.

‘And what does that hat tell you about its wearer?’

‘That the gentleman in question is not a gentleman at all. That he is not to be trusted.’ Emily was firm in her conviction.

‘And does my own headgear reveal anything about
my
character?’ Adam asked. The young woman put her head on one side and pretended to consider the question.

‘That you
are
a gentleman and that you
are
to be trusted, I would say.’

Adam smiled. He tipped the headgear in question, a low-crowned grey top hat, in Emily’s direction.

‘Thank you kindly, miss,’ he said, ironically. ‘And is there anything which you would care to entrust to such a trustworthy gentleman?’

‘There is certainly a secret which I should entrust to somebody,’ the young woman said, looking at him with disconcerting directness. ‘But I am not yet certain that the
gentleman in question is that somebody.’

‘Is there anything the gentleman in question could or should do to assist you in reaching the certainty you seek?’

‘Not at present. There is nothing to be done.’ She looked away towards the dancing platform. Adam was left to contemplate her profile and struggle to think of more to say. Emily
showed no signs that she would be the one to renew the conversation.

‘How long will you and your mother remain in town?’ he asked after half a minute’s silence, which had seemed to him like half an hour.

‘Who can tell? Perhaps a week. Perhaps a month. I suppose we shall be gone before the end of August. Surely everybody has left by then?’

Adam thought the streets of London would probably be no less crowded at the end of August than they were in the middle of June. Besides, he wondered whether Emily and her mother were quite so
conversant with the higher echelons of society as her remark seemed intended to suggest.

‘You will return to Salonika, perhaps? I am sure that Salonika offers society to entertain your mother and yourself,’ Adam said. On the basis of his own experience of the city, he
was unsure of any such thing but thought it politest to claim otherwise.

‘Society!’ Emily said, with great scorn. ‘Nothing but a set of old frumps and foozles, I can assure you. Nobody talks about a thing but the price of this and the price of that
and when the next ship from Constantinople is due. I have been like to scream with boredom the entire time we have lived there.’

‘I am sorry to hear that, Miss Maitland. So there is little to draw you back to Salonika.’

‘Not a thing. My mother is considering the possibility of travelling to Switzerland. She thinks a month amongst the glaciers would be of inestimable advantage to the health of us
both.’

‘And do you agree with her?’

‘A daughter should probably always agree with her mother. But I am inclined to believe that we will thrive well enough without the benefit of mountain air and Alpine walks.’

Since they had first begun to talk, Adam had noticed that Emily’s feet had been restlessly tapping beneath the table. Now she began to wave her arm in time to the music drifting over from
the bandstand.

‘We must dance before we leave, Mr Carver.’

Adam was startled. He had not thought that they were leaving. He still had no notion about ‘the affairs of consequence to us both’ of which Emily had written in her letter. He had
assumed that he had been summoned to Cremorne Gardens to hear more of them. Now, after little more than idle chatter about hats, the theatre and the Alps, together with an enigmatic remark about a
secret that should be told, the young woman was talking of dancing. And of leaving. In his surprise, he scarcely noticed that she had been so forward as to suggest taking to the dance floor
herself.

‘I am no dancer,’ he said. ‘My left foot rarely seems to know what my right foot is doing.’

‘This is a galop,’ Emily replied. ‘And the galop is no dance. At least, not one worthy of the name. Little more than a dash down the room, a swift turn, and then a dash back.
Even so poor a dancer as you claim to be can take the floor for a galop.’

‘There is no “down the room and back” at Cremorne, Miss Maitland. As you can see, the dancing area forms a circle round the orchestra.’

‘Then we shall go round and round,’ she said firmly, standing and holding out her hand.

With the young woman already on her feet, Adam could not be so churlish as to refuse. He pushed back his chair and stood himself. The two of them moved through the gathering crowds to the circle
of the dance floor. It was not a galop that was now playing as they made their way through one of the gaps in the low fence that surrounded it. The orchestra, doubtless sweating from their
exertions in the raised box above the dancers, had turned to a slower measure. Adam took the young woman into his arms and the pair of them began to swirl decorously across the circle. He was
acutely aware of the pressure of her body in his arms. Should his hand be
there
, he asked himself, as they swept past two flagging couples, perhaps themselves exhausted by the galop?
Should he move it higher? Lower? No, definitely not lower. He wondered how closely he could hold her without causing offence. It was not a dilemma that he had faced before. With the girls that he
and Cosmo picked up in the dance halls in town, and indeed occasionally at Cremorne, it was not a question that arose. Provided he paid for their drinks and their supper, he could hold them just as
tightly as he wished. With the young ladies he had partnered on the rarer occasions he had attended what might be called a society ball, the etiquette was also clear. The young woman was to be held
with lightest of touches, like a porcelain figurine in the delicate hands of a connoisseur. But where did Emily fit into the social equation? She was undoubtedly a lady. Everything about her
appearance proclaimed that fact. And yet what lady would have come unannounced and unaccompanied to Doughty Street? What lady would have chosen to meet him in the early evening at Cremorne Gardens?
More questions raced through Adam’s mind but Emily herself answered many of them by moving closer into his tentative embrace.

‘You have deceived me, Mr Carver,’ she said with a smile. ‘You dance very well. Your left foot knows
exactly
what your right foot is doing.’

‘No, it is partnering you that has worked a miracle, Miss Maitland. I assure you that I am usually as clumsy as a carthorse when I dance.’

The two of them moved beneath the large sign that read ‘All the Nations of the World are Welcome to Cremorne’ and continued to circle the orchestra. At this time of the day, only a
handful of couples were dancing. Other groups of men and women, and some solitary men, strolled around the perimeter fence, watching those who had taken to the floor. Adam felt proud to be seen
with such a beautiful woman as Emily but his curiosity about her remained. He decided that directness was, perhaps, his best policy.

‘I am puzzled by the affairs of consequence to us both to which you referred in your letter, Miss Maitland. I am uncertain what affairs we can have in common.’

‘Oh, the dance floor is no place to talk of them!’ Emily moved even closer into his arms. Adam was only too aware of the warmth of her body pressed against his as they completed a
first circuit of the orchestra and embarked upon another. However, he was determined to find out more about his mysterious partner.

‘I was delighted by your visit to my rooms in Doughty Street,’ he persisted, ‘on the day that Quint’s clumsiness with the plates seemed to frighten you away. But I was
perplexed as to the reason for it.’

He paused and strove to catch the young woman’s eye. She looked away from him, as if scanning the rows of spectators for a familiar face.

‘And for the call you made upon me the previous Friday,’ he added.

Emily now turned her head and stared at him, almost sullenly. As if by mutual agreement, the two of them began to move even more slowly than the music demanded. After a moment they came to a
complete halt. Another couple, surprised by their stopping, nearly collided with them, before laughing and reeling off at an angle.