Sovereign Hope (20 page)

“
Just stop it, okay. Are you coming or not? And do I need to
get changed?”

The smile
dropped from his face and he stood up, leaning the guitar against
the wall. He paced towards me until he was less than a foot away
and grabbed hold of my hand. There was an intense expression on his
face as he pulled me towards him.

“
Yes, I’ll go with you,” he said quietly. “And your clothes
don’t matter. Aldan will put you in something era-appropriate.”
There was a burning quality to his voice that stirred something
deep and hot inside me, making my head swim. His eyes were half
closed. He was leaning towards me.
Is he
going to…?
I panicked. No. No, of course
he wasn’t. A stupid thought. A small smile ticked at the corner of
his mouth.

“
Are you ready?” he asked. The burning was still there,
visible in his eyes.

I nodded,
feeling stupid that I’d thought he was about to kiss me. “Where are
you taking me?”

“
London,” he said. “Home.”

******

If it wasn’t for the pressure of Daniel’s hand around mine, I
would have thought I was dreaming. Aldan was nowhere to be seen,
but according to Agatha he wasn’t supposed to be with us, anyway.
He was busy rifling through my mind. Instead, we were surrounded by
a crowd of people, thronging and shoving at one another to get by.
Daniel’s grip on my hand tightened. It was all so real; the people
were all so
alive
. Agatha had said they were just shadows, memories, but I
never remembered the people I passed in the street in this kind of
detail. Maybe a flash of unusual hair color or some other
distinguishing feature, but not the crow’s feet around their eyes,
or the finest details of their clothing.

And thinking of clothing, I was too scared to look at myself
for a moment. When I gave in and peeked down, a rush of horror
stabbed through me. It was a dress all right. You could have
made
eighteen
dresses out of all that fabric. A sea of silk exploded from
my waist, a metallic purple-blue in color. It was so heavy I felt
myself sinking where I stood. There was no need to check for a
crinoline—no dress would be so bouffy without the assistance of a
very large hoop. The corseted bodice was literally squeezing the
living daylights out of me, and the lace chemisette barely covered
my considerable cleavage. Where the hell had that come from? I
looked preposterous. Somewhere, sometime, Aldan was laughing
himself stupid.

Daniel, on the
other hand, was the absolute embodiment of a Victorian gentleman.
He was breathtaking in his black frock coat with turned velvet
collar. Its jade lining picked out the color of his eyes,
startlingly bright against the paleness of his skin. He wore a
necktie and a stovepipe top hat, under which locks of his black
hair escaped to curl against the nape of his neck. He clutched a
brass-topped polished cane in his free hand.

A surprising
realization overcame me as I stood drinking in every last detail of
him—that none of this would seem strange to Daniel. Maybe it even
felt normal, and perhaps traipsing around in jeans and a t-shirt
was the oddity to him. I was forgetting all the time that Daniel
was quite as old as he was, and that he was English, too. Or at
least he had been once upon a time. You could only hear the
faintest echoes of an accent in his speech, the way he enunciated a
word or two in a peculiar way that was decidedly un-American. He
was looking at me as though he’d seen a ghost.

“
Daniel?”

He continued to stare at me with a stunned expression on his
face—that was, until someone
barreled
into us,
knocking me clean off my feet. I gritted my teeth as the coarse
cobblestones bit at the fleshy heels of my palms, drawing blood.
Daniel was at my side in an instant, his hand at my waist, pulling
me up and through the crowd.

“
You okay?”

I nodded,
trying not to look quite as embarrassed as I felt. Ladies in lace
caps and spoon bonnets garnished with dried flowers and small faux
birds surrounded us. Men with top hats like Daniel’s and bushy
moustaches ploughed through the crowd, too, all struggling towards
the end of the cobbled street in front of us. Moving along with the
sea of people would have been quite easy, but Daniel apparently had
other ideas. He headed against the flow.

“
Daniel, what is it? What’s happening?”

He cast me a
sickened look over his shoulder. “A hanging. Are you okay? Can you
walk?”

“
I’m trying, but I keep tripping over this damn
dress.”

A sour-faced
lady at my side cast me a dirty look and tutted, muttering
something about manners. “What was that about?” I asked, trying to
hitch up an armful of my skirt so I could move.

Daniel slapped my hand down and pulled me forward. “You can’t
lift your skirt up like that. And you can’t say
damn
, either.”

“
But—”

“
But nothing, that’s just how it is. Now, I’m
not
going to get dragged
along to a hanging. If you want to go, that’s fine, but I’m going
this way.” He pointed off towards a large building in the distance.
I gave him an exasperated look.

“
Of course I’m not going to a hanging. I’m coming with you.”
Why the hell would I have wanted to go to a hanging? What sort of
ghoulish pastimes did he think I would fill my days with if I
could? I bit my tongue and let him drag me to the relative calm of
a side street. He paused for a moment, letting me straighten out
the ridiculous amounts of material that were caught and twisted
around me.

“
You look stupid, you know that, right?” he told me, peering
out onto the street. His top hat had been knocked into a jaunty
angle but on him it somehow looked like it was supposed to be that
way.

“
Yes, I am aware, but thanks for pointing it out.” I quashed
the urge to straighten his hat. “What is that building, anyway?” I
pointed far down the street, where I could make out the lacquered
tops of carriages and the nodding heads of coal-black horses
approaching through the crowd. Beyond them, a wide columned
building rose up like an imposing monolith in the distance,
blocking out a good portion of the horizon.

“
It’s the British Museum,” he told me, knocking his hat back
himself. “Are you ready?”

I shrugged,
wiping gravel out of the scrapes on my hands. “Sure.”

Without a
moment’s hesitation he pulled me into the crowd again. Thankfully
the majority of the people keen to see someone swing had already
rushed forward, leaving only the half-hearted followers trudging
towards the square at the other end of the street. Daniel stopped
short at the top of the road, pausing to allow a grand carriage to
pass.

I stared at it, slack-jawed. It looked like the Mercedes Benz
of horse drawn carriages. The doors were so highly polished that I
could see my own surprised reflection in its gleaming black
paneling, which was embellished with gold leaf
fleur-de-lis
. A moustachioed
gentleman scowled out of the window at us and flung the curtain
closed, calling to the driver to hurry on just as it started to
rain.

The clouds
overhead were swollen and grey, the light all flat and bleak, just
as I imagined it would be in England after all you heard about the
terrible weather. The smell was bad, too, like fetid garbage left
out in the sun for a few days. When I looked down, I saw that that
was precisely the case. The gutters were overflowing with all kinds
of rubbish, and of course, horse manure. And in amongst all that
filth there were scraps of children running barefoot, weaving their
way through the ebbing flow of people, clutching wilting bunches of
flowers in their dirty mitts. One raced up to Daniel, shoving the
limp posy out towards him.

“’
Ere mister, buy a flower?”

Daniel looked
down at the urchin, the boy’s dirt-streaked face with sunken
cheeks, and felt at his waistcoat. He withdrew a silver coin from
the pocket and tossed it to the boy, who caught it expertly out of
the air. He thrust a flower at Daniel, who took it and passed it
back to me without a word. A dog rose, a little tatty and missing
some of its outer petals, but still beautiful in its simplicity. An
odd lump rose in my throat.

Daniel had
given me a flower. I wasn’t foolish enough to think that he did it
wittingly. He obviously felt sorry for the boy even though he
wasn’t real, or at least was very dead by now, and had only paid
him the coin out of pity. There’d been no emotion as he passed it
back; he hadn’t even looked at me. And yet Daniel had given me a
flower.

He pulled me
across the street while I stared down at the pale pink, silken
petals. I barely noticed when he suddenly veered me around a fresh
pile of horse manure in the middle of the road. When I looked up, I
found him watching me.

“
What?”

The distant look that had been evident on his face, if only
for a second, vanished. “Nothing. I was just thinking about when I
used to live here. This was
my
London. I knew this place so well.”

“
Where are we exactly?”

“
Bloomsbury,” he said. “Very fashionable place to live back in
the day. Perfectly situated between Holborn and Euston Road. See
that square?” He gestured to a small, well-manicured garden that
bore numerous park benches, where ladies in expensive-looking
dresses and their drabber female companions sat feeding flocks of
pigeons. “Francis Russell, the fifth Duke of Bedford, laid the
ground for that square. The Russells practically made this area
what it is today. Well, back then. And now, I guess…” he said,
confused.

I stared up at
the museum, which was now looming ahead of us. Couples paraded the
steps at the entrance, the men with their stiff gaits and canes,
the ladies with their coiffured hair and parasols.

“
Why did you want to come here?” I asked. The building was
certainly impressive, but it wasn’t
him
. A whorehouse or a bawdy pub,
maybe, but not a museum.

A long pause
stretched out while Daniel searched up and down the street, his
cane grasped tightly in his hand. The beginnings of a frown lined
his forehead. “Because,” he murmured, “I used to come here when I
was a boy. Sometimes…”

He trailed
off, fixing his sights on a group of rag-tag children at the top of
the steps. They were running down the steps towards us, barefoot
like the other children, their clothes torn and dirty, being chased
by what appeared to be a museum guard. The skinny little boy at the
front of the group, maybe only six years old, squealed with delight
as he ran. His fine, dark hair was plastered to his head by the
rain.

“
Sometimes…” whispered Daniel, sinking to his knees. His face
was ashen, and he looked as though he’d just been kicked in the
stomach. The boy careened passed us, whooping and laughing in a
reedy, high-pitched voice. He paused to look over his shoulder and
gave Daniel a curious, intrigued look. Daniel just blinked back at
him.

“
Sometimes…I see Jamie.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Gatti’s

“
That was your
brother
?”

Daniel’s eyes
were on fire. The sun, a burnished golden ruin in the sky, was just
beginning to dip below the crooked rooftops that were dotted with
smashed chimney pots, casting a cold, unfriendly light across the
street. It had a dying quality to it, and framed Daniel with a
silvery halo that made him look like some kind of destroying angel.
He glared at me as though I’d just asked him if he was a serial
killer, and then clenched down on his jaw. “Yeah. That was my
little brother.”

I gawped at
him, entirely lost for words. When he refused to meet my eye, I
cleared my throat and looked up at the heavens, praying for some
kind of divine intervention to help deal with the situation.
Daniel, with all his complexities and horrific past, should have
come with a handbook. I was nowhere near prepared to handle
comforting him, especially when he didn’t seem to want comforting.
He scowled down at his shoes, which were polished to within an inch
of their lives. He looked just about as pale as I had ever seen
him. In fact, he looked like he might throw up.

“
Do you want to follow him?” I nervously twisted the
handkerchief that I’d found in a tiny pocket of my dress. My
initials were stitched into the corner.

He looked at me as if I were mad. “No, of
course
I don’t want to follow
him.”

“
I just thought, since we were here…”

“
He’s gone now, anyway.”

I craned my
neck to peer over the milling people in the street, gentlemen and
ladies walking arm in arm down the long boulevard, heads down
against the light rain. “I can still see him.”

“
Just leave it, okay?”

I turned back
to catch the look on Daniel’s face; his eyes were pained, shining
slightly, and his brow was creased. The devastated look on his face
said a lot, like he couldn’t bear me studying him the way I
was.

“
I don’t understand.”

“
You don’t have to.” There was a finality in his tone that
made me look down at my hands, gathered over my full skirts. They
were still throbbing. I wanted more than anything to put them in my
pockets, but I’d already searched the dress and found it decidedly
lacking in hand-sized pockets.