A Kiss For Midwinter
“This is fine weather for September,” he tried.
“Is it?” She stared straight ahead, her mouth pinched in a way that could have sunk her to twelve.
“Yes,” he replied. “It is.”
They walked on in blighted silence.
“Much has changed in Leicester since my absence,” he tried again. “That’s a new façade on the hat emporium, is it not?”
She didn’t even look in the direction that he pointed. “Is it?” she asked.
Her terse responses brought out the devil in him. He’d not been lying when he said he had a few defects in his personality. He turned to her and spoke with no effort at politeness. “Did you know that before I spoke this sentence, you had uttered twenty percent of the words in the conversation? Now we are much closer to ten percent. It won’t do, Miss Charingford. It won’t do.”
Beside him, she tilted her head. “Won’t it?”
He clenched a fist, annoyed beyond measure. He’d used up his rather limited store of polite conversation already, and she wasn’t even trying. In fact, she was looking up at him resentfully.
“I think it will do,” she said. “I think it will do very well. I know what you are thinking, Doctor Grantham. You’re thinking that I’m easy prey.”
“I’m thinking that?” He wrinkled his nose.
She looked about, as if to verify that nobody was nearby. “That because you know of my faults, of what has happened to me, that I’ll be susceptible to your blackmail and flattery.”
“Blackmail!” he repeated in surprise.
“I don’t care what you think of my moral decay,” she hissed. “I am still alive, and I intend to remain so. I refuse to be ruined. If you try anything, you’ll be sorry.”
It was the look on her face that sparked his recognition—that defiant, accusing glare directed at him once more. It made him catch his breath, remembering the girl from five years ago. He’d worried about her after he left. Every time he’d seen an unwed mother or a prostitute in those intervening years, he’d wondered what horror his silence had brought to her.
The answer, apparently, was…nothing. Holding his tongue hadn’t had any consequence. Because she was here, accepted by all. She’d not only survived, she’d managed to do so with her reputation intact.
And she was glaring at him. “So stop measuring me for your bed, Grantham,” she told him. “You aren’t going to have me.”
He stared at her, collecting his confused feelings. He hadn’t recognized her, but she’d recognized him—the difference between fifteen and twenty, apparently, being far greater than the difference between twenty-one and twenty-six. She was being uncivil to him on purpose. She thought—oh, God—she thought he was trying to—
“Rest easy, Miss Charingford,” he said. “I wasn’t attempting to seduce you. I had come to no conclusions about your virtue. I was only talking to you because you were the eleventh prettiest young lady in Leicester.”
Faint dots of pink appeared on her cheeks. “Oh?” There was a dangerous tone to her voice now. “Eleven, am I?”
“That is—I mean—” He looked away. “Shite. I didn’t mean to say that.”
She didn’t gasp at that obscenity. “Work your way on to number twelve,” she snapped. “Number eleven wants nothing more to do with you.”
She lifted her nose in the air—the eleventh prettiest nose in the entire town—and stalked away. He watched her go, his insides a total muddle.
She’d lived. She’d survived. Her reputation hadn’t suffered. She crossed the park to another woman who had been waiting for her on a bench. Their heads bent together under their hats, black hair touching tawny honey, and then they laughed.
He’d never seen anything so vibrant, so full of life.
“Shite,” he breathed again.
Her laughter seemed like a complete repudiation of the superstitions of the last century. It was a great light cast on the dark miasmas of the last century of medicine.
Live, Miss Charingford. Live.
She linked arms with her friend—a young lady who hadn’t ranked at all—and strolled away.
He felt as if he’d been hit straight on with a cannon blast. One of the defects in his personality was a taste for the perverse. Being told he couldn’t have something only made him want it more. And at the moment, he wanted. He wanted her very badly.
Toford came up behind him. “Well? What number is she?”
“Eleven,” he answered.
“Not on the list, then.” Toford shrugged.
“No.” He still couldn’t take his eyes off her. “No, she is. This list goes to eleven.”
It was a lie. He knew it was a lie even as he said it. His rational mind, usually so predominant, kicked up a protest. He had hoped to establish his household within the next few months. And he had really been looking forward to securing that source of safe, regular sexual intercourse. There were literally dozens of women who would be willing to provide it—pretty ones, who actually smiled at him in encouragement instead of accusing him of seduction.
Miss Charingford didn’t even want to talk to him. It made no sense to consider her.
But it was too late. Miss Lydia Charingford wasn’t just on the list.
She was the list, and he hoped God would have mercy on his soul.
Chapter Two
Sixteen months later
MISS LYDIA CHARINGFORD STOOD UP FROM HER SEAT in the Nag’s Head Hostelry and began to gather her things.
“Good of you, Miss Charingford,” Corporal Dalling said next to her. “Very good indeed, to take on the role of secretary on such short notice.”
Lydia smiled at him as she put the stopper in her bottle of ink. “I told Minnie I would be happy to take her position on the Workers’ Hygiene Commission,” she said. “And you deserve as much commendation as I do, filling the shoes of those who…are no longer here.”
“Indeed,” Dalling said, with a sober bow. “Indeed we are.”
In the last month, Miss Wilhelmina Pursling—Lydia’s best friend, who she missed dreadfully—had married and gone to London. Shortly thereafter, Captain Stevens—Lydia’s former fiancé, who she missed not in the slightest—had been sentenced to six months of hard labor. Good riddance.
Lydia didn’t want to think of Stevens. Instead, she blew on her notebook one last time, slipped the blotting paper between the pages, and checked the stopper on her ink.