She bit her lip. “Explain what?”
“You’re a woman. Your ambitions are…” He paused, waiting for her to finish his sentence.
Her fingers clamped together and she looked away. “Unwomanly,” she said in a quiet, choked voice. “Unattractive. Unappealing.”
“There. That’s their rubbish. Push it away, Daisy. Your ambitions are a fire that will keep anyone worthwhile warm.”
“But—”
He held up a finger. “No buts. Push it away. That’s theirs. You don’t need to keep hold of it anymore, thank you.”
She exhaled. “Crash. I don’t know.”
“They’ll hand you a sack of rubbish and then make you apologize for holding putrefying refuse. They act like their rules are holy and moral, but their only rule is that people like me—people like you—must lose.”
She looked up at him. “But we do lose.”
“Not always. Try another one. Tell me what you fear.”
“I’m…” She let out a shuddering breath. “I’m only worth anything now because I’m pretty.” Her voice shook. “I’m ten years from being too old, too ugly, too anything, and if I don’t establish myself now, I’ll have to leave my mother.”
To have a sell-by date, as if she were a notation scrawled on a can of potted meat. To feel that responsibility.
“Push it away. That’s false. That’s their rubbish. Can you see the truth?”
She didn’t say anything, not for a long while. He waited, letting her think.
“In ten years, I’ll be just as clever. I’ll be me with more experience. Beauty need not matter.”
“Almost right. In ten years,” Crash said, “you’ll still be pretty. Don’t let them tell you that youth is a woman’s only beauty. That gray hair and wrinkles will rob you of your appeal. It’s a load of rubbish. You should meet my aunt. She’s beautiful. Push it away, Daisy.”
She shut her eyes. “I’m not…worth anything because I’m not a virgin,” she said in a low voice.
“Oh, Daisy.” That one stung to hear. He did touch her then, setting his hand on her shoulder.
She raised her eyes to his. A sea of hurt reflected in her pupils.
The thing about being raised as he had? He’d thought of what he would do if she were with child. He hadn’t given one thought to the fact of her virginity. It was not something his aunts and her friends thought important, except as an afterthought.
“You don’t become less for caring. For loving. For existing, for being a person who does all those things.”
She looked over at him.
“Push it away,” he said. “Push it all away.”
“How?” Her hands fluttered once in front of her. “How? How, when everyone says otherwise, do you…” She swallowed.
“Do I what?”
“How do you smile when people say these things to you? How do you laugh and say that you’re proud of your background, when…”
Crash looked Daisy in the face. Her chin was tilted down, her eyes turned to the side. “When what?” His voice seemed dangerously low to his ears.
“When you cannot be,” she whispered.
Long ago, he’d heard similar words from her as condemnation. He hadn’t heard them as a prayer for mercy, nor as a plea for help. But that was what they were.
“I say that I come from a proud line of dock whores and sailors,” he said in a low voice, “because I am proud.”
She swallowed.
“Nobody except my family takes pride in what we are, so we’ve had to invent it ourselves. I don’t know what race I am. I don’t know if the question makes any sense. But I know where I come from. My grandmother was born a slave on the island of Tortola. She accompanied the trader who held her on his voyages as…never mind. One day, a mile from the shore of England, she jumped overboard.”
“Why?”
He managed a short, frowning glance. “Because slavery was not recognized in England,” he said shortly. “She couldn’t swim. She made it to shore anyway. At the time, she was pregnant with my aunt.”
Daisy looked up at him.
“When people hear ‘dock whore,’ they imagine some poor specimen of a woman who wanders up and down the wharf, thinking of nothing but her next john. My grandmother took in laundry. She sewed. She did all these things for sailors, and one of them fell in love with her. How could he not?” He smiled. “The only people who called her a whore were ladies who had no other words for a poor woman with a prior bastard child. My grandfather was an Indian lascar who had been abandoned in London by a shipping company because he had injured his knee. No clergy would solemnify their marriage. It didn’t lessen the affection in it. The gentry saw her as nothing but a prostitute. But those of us who knew her? She was an extraordinary woman. I was ten when she died, and the crowd at her funeral wouldn’t fit in the tavern.”
Daisy let out a long breath.
“My mother, they told me, was sweet. She worked for a seamstress and lived with my grandmother. And yes, I suppose she was a whore, too, in the sense that she took coin in exchange for intercourse from more than one man. But nothing is simple. The life of a sailor is hard. They see no women for months on end; they’re expected to be tough as nails all the time. My mother was the shoulder they cried on, the woman they imagined during the worst storms. She was the one who held them and reminded them that they were human, that they mattered. Men would give her everything they had—not to purchase her favors, but because she was everything they had. She died when I was two. I have no memory of her, but I remember men coming to our flat for years after, asking after her. I remember them weeping inconsolably when they were told she had passed away.” Crash shrugged. “More than one of those men claimed to be my father. He was probably from China, but there was a man from Portugal, and a French fellow… Well, never mind. Three men claimed they were my father, and every time they docked, they’d come see me. They brought me toys and books. They’d leave their earnings with my aunt for my care. They taught me to cheat at cards. They all knew about each other, but they didn’t care.”
She was watching him with wide eyes. Listening.
“So there you have it, Daisy,” he said. “My grandmother was a woman so strong of will that she threw herself over the side of a ship, not knowing how to swim, because she would be free. My mother was a woman so loved that she gave me three fathers after her death, not just one. And my aunt was the one who told me about them—story after story when they had passed away. Every time someone told me to keep my head down or slapped me for thinking myself above my station, my aunt was there. Holding me. Whispering to me that they were wrong, that the blood in my veins was every bit as red as theirs. That I was worth something. Anything.”
Daisy looked down.
“I am descended,” Crash said, “from a line of dock whores and sailors. Men and women who were told they were nothing. They refused to accept the label. Yes, Daisy, I’m proud.”
She exhaled.
“I should never have called you a waste.”
Daisy was still considering her feet. “Now what?” she said. Her eyes drifted to the dingy water of the canal. Her question encompassed not just the next hour, but…more. “Now do I get on the velocipede and ride fast?”
“Now,” he said, “now you give the speech you intend to deliver at the final competition in a few days. This time, you don’t waver. You don’t stop. You don’t apologize. You believe that you’re right, that you can win, that you deserve it. And you don’t let up.”
Chapter Seven
It should not have been so exhausting to deliver a speech Daisy had already memorized to an audience of one. But with Crash listening, Daisy heard her words with a new ear.
Everything she said came out sounding stilted and wrong. She could hardly make it through a sentence without an interruption.
“Even though women—”
“You’re apologizing,” Crash told her. “Stop apologizing for having a store for women.”
&nb
sp; She swallowed. “Because women are the main clientele, I expect loyalty, word-of-mouth sales, and…” She trailed off. “And a savvy eye for bargains?”
“Reasonable,” Crash said, “but why are you asking me a question?”
Her hands curled into fists. Two sentences later…
“Although the main clientele will be—”
“Although?” Crash folded his arms and raised a disapproving eyebrow. “Don’t apologize. Start over.”
By the time she’d run through it all once, she wanted to scream.
“Good,” he said. “Now do it again, this time without prompting.”
At the end of the second time through, she wanted to pull out her hair.
“Excellent,” Crash said. “Now do it, imagining that you’re on a velocipede. All arrogance; no hesitation. Start.”
By the fifth time around, she wanted to pull his hair out. Even Crash had begun to look weary. His eyelids drooped a little.
She looked at the flickering street lamps. “I must be going,” she said. “You’ve done enough. You must be exhausted.”
He gave her a tired smile. “Don’t worry about me. I’m game for another five rounds. Never let anyone say I’m anything other than indefatigable.”
“But I have to go now.”
“Tomorrow, then.” He frowned. “No. Tomorrow I’ve appointments to see more space for my velocipede shop. Friday, although that’s cutting it rather close.”
“Friday. And now, my mother will be wondering where I am. Good heavens. You must really want to win those wagers.”
He frowned at her and looked away. Then he gave his head a tired shake. “I didn’t take wagers, Daisy.”
Her mind went blank. Of course he had taken wagers on the competition. His entire point in assisting her was to make a little money. He had to… She couldn’t… Feelings swarmed her, assailing her from all sides.
“You said.” The words came out all choked up. “You said, you told me, that people placed bets on the competition.”
“Technically,” he said, looking upward, “I merely implied they had done so and let you come to a false conclusion.”
A hard lump formed in her throat.
“But we’ve never much been technical, have we, Daisy?” He gave her a weary half- smile. “Yes, if you want to put it that way. I lied to you. Of course I didn’t make wagers. It would be wrong for me to take bets as if I were an independent observer and then try to influence the outcome. You should know that.”
She couldn’t help herself. She was exhausted, emotionally drained, and… She began to laugh. “Most people would say that it was wrong to make bets where a woman was involved. That’s your reason why you didn’t? You have the strangest version of morality I have ever heard.”
He looked honestly confused. “Is it supposed to be a compliment for me to say that I’d not risk my money on you? I didn’t wager because… Oh, for God’s sake, I’m not going to explain it now. I just didn’t.” He shook his head. “English morality is utterly ridiculous. It doesn’t make a lick of logical sense.”
Talking to Crash about morality was like talking to a wall. You could never talk the wall down, and no matter how you bounced things off it, it always stayed right where it was. Immovable. Unchanged. After an hour of shouting, one was left with the distinct impression that the wall was probably in the right place to begin with. Crash made the rest of the world seem utterly mad in comparison.
Maybe it was.
They stood in silence, Daisy not wanting to speak. She had too many questions. Why didn’t you take the bets? If it wasn’t the wager, why did you intervene? Why are you here? It was the last question she most wanted answered, and he wasn’t talking.
“Why?” She made sure her voice didn’t shake. “Why did you…”
“Why did I lie to you?” He shrugged. “Well, that’s easy. I was fairly certain that if I told you the truth, you wouldn’t want my help.”
“Crash.” She tried to imbue the single syllable of his name with the deepest reprimand.
“Daisy.” He didn’t mirror her tone. He said her name quietly. Once before, he had used to say her name like that. Like her name was a precious thing, an important thing. Like those two syllables were an honor on his lips.
She couldn’t look at him. “If you knew I didn’t want your help, you should have…”
“What,” he said, “done nothing? I suppose I should have let it go. But I am notoriously terrible at letting things go.”
She understood precisely what he was telling her. She’d walked away from him, and nobody had ever done that. He wanted her the way she’d once been—silly, unwise, willing to throw over all good sense when he tossed a smile in her direction. And she, fool that she was, could feel herself falling back into her old ridiculous yearning.
This is not going to happen. This was the moment when she should bar her shutters and wait out the storm.
She was tired.
“It was simple,” he said. “If you want to know why I did it, it’s because of your sweetheart.”
This brought her up short. She turned to him, frowning. “My sweetheart?”
“Yes, your sweetheart.” He looked in her eyes. “I wanted to… Well, that is…” He frowned. “Maybe I wanted you to miss me a little. I used to imagine him forgiving you for who you are. It made me angry. I wanted you to know you were wrong. That neither you nor I needed forgiveness.”
She felt her throat close.
“What are you talking about?” she finally managed to say.
He frowned at her. “You must be exhausted.” He sounded patient. “We’re talking about your fiancé, Daisy. The man you’re supposed to marry? How hard is it to understand that I want you to be happy? That I think he should care about you?”
She felt utterly stricken. She had no fiancé, and the one she would eventually try to acquire would, by necessity, not know her at all.
What came out of her mouth was this: “Crash. You idiot.”
“What?”
She took a step toward him.
“You colossal, stupid, ridiculous—” She’d run out of adjectives, but she still had nothing to say to him. “Don’t pretend to be a fool. You know.”
“What do I know?”
She snapped off the next words. “You know I made him up. There is no sweetheart. There is nobody waiting for me. There isn’t anyone who cares what I do aside from my mother.”
He stared at her in such dazed noncomprehension that she wanted to slap him.
“You knew it,” she told him. “I told you and you looked at me just like that and you said ‘Of course I believe you.’”
“Of course I said I believed you,” he said stupidly. “Because of course I believed you. Why wouldn’t you have a sweetheart? Why wouldn’t some officer out there—” He jerked his thumb in the vague direction of what might have been Portsmouth “—dream of you every night, and want you to be his? It sounded perfectly reasonable to me.”
“Look at me.” She gestured. “Oh my God, Crash, look at me.”
“I am.” He frowned at her. “I have. And I know you hate to admit it, but we’ve known each other quite a while. I know you extremely well. You’re lovely. You’re loyal. You’re funny, and you always put the best face on anything bad that comes your way. Who wouldn’t want you?”
“You must think I’m the most gullible woman on the planet.”
“Wait one moment,” he said. “Are you telling me you don’t have a sweetheart?”
It took her a moment to realize that he was serious. That all this time, he’d thought… He had actually thought…
He was frowning now. “I returned. I sought you out. You thought you had to lie to me about having a sweetheart to keep me away? Did you not think I would listen to you? Did you not trust me? Were you afraid of me?”
“Always,” Daisy said. “Every day. Every time I saw you.”
He looked surprised. “Daisy, I was an ass. But I would never force myself o
n you. If I have somehow allowed you to believe otherwise—”
She couldn’t listen to him any longer. “I was afraid,” she said, “that I would do this.” She stepped close, wrapped her hands in his coat lapels, and drew herself up.
One instant, when she felt his shocked breath against her lips. One crazed instant, where she wondered what she was doing—and why—and then she imagined herself on a velocipede, heading pell-mell down the street at top speed.
So she kissed him. She didn’t hold back. All the months of hurt, of pain, of loneliness poured out in her kiss. In the feel of his chest against the palms of her hand, his body, radiating warmth against her.
His arms wrapped around her, holding her close. His mouth opened to hers.
God, she’d missed kissing him. Missed the taste of him, that mix of coal-smoke and spice. The all-encompassing feel of his hand on her spine, drawing her in.
She’d missed the brush of his lips, the way he drew her bottom lip in his mouth and bit it, lightly, before he descended on her again. She’d missed feeling beautiful and strong and desired.
She’d missed feeling his heart beat faster, knowing that she was affecting him. She’d missed him, and they’d hurt each other so much, and maybe…
She pulled away. He was looking down at her, his eyes dark with desire. Their kiss had turned into a question, the question she hadn’t answered yet for herself. Letting this moment linger on would make her response irrevocable. She was tired and upset and…
And she needed time, time to think it all through.
“My mother is waiting,” she said.
“I know.”
“I’m sorry—” She bit off that apology. “No, never mind. I’m clearly in need of more practice on that front. Let me start again: I refuse to apologize for kissing you.”
The corner of one lip tilted up. “Nicely done, Daisy.”
“Good day, sir.” She stepped out of the circle of his arms.
“Friday, then?” he called after her. “After you finish at the shop? You need to practice more, and…”
He paused. How was it that she could hear him smirking in silence?