It was more than a scream. Mimic had called up the most harrowing human sound I knew. The crest of it was sheer fright and desperation, but it gained momentum from something much darker than my own emotions of the moment. It told of something much more dire than the theft of a silk jacket and a few buttons, and it went on and on. And on.
Mimic’s sound rose and fell and rose again like a riptide. The screaming blasted the soot-stained walls and foamed up to the wan slice of sky above us. It lapped against my own skin, raising the small hairs on my neck and chilling me to my core.
My attackers drew back as if physically buffeted. One of the smaller girls fell into panicked tears, and Mr. Sears’s fingers scrabbled for purchase against the bricks like he was being dragged by an undertow.
And then Tom Rampling was there, saying my name and glaring round at the faces now peeking timidly from behind shutters and around corners. “You might have stepped in!” he shouted at the red-faced man who stood, now, in the curtained doorway. “Don’t you know who she is?”
The man crossed his arms and grinned. “Don’t much care,” he retorted, “but she makes a good fuss, don’t she?”
“He will care, when you tell him,” Tom said. Gently he drew together the torn edges of my bodice. Gently he clasped an arm round my shoulders and led me, stumbling and swaying, from the alley.
“Milady,” he murmured, “there now, milady,” and I realized the scream had stopped but had left behind a kind of panting moan that must have been almost as alarming to Tom’s ears. I forced myself to be quiet, fighting the tight, agonizing pressure in my throat.
Tom shepherded me several blocks in this stumbling fashion, until I had to stop and lean forward, hands on my knees, to ease the dizziness.
“I’m s-sorry,” I said, and the word became a sob.
“No,” he said. “No, no need.” He looked at me, and his fingers brushed my cheeks as if he might save the tears before they fell. Then he patted my hand and said, in a deliberately light tone, “I should call you Lady Luck. I’ve never heard of Mr. Sears’s gang falling back once they’ve snared someone in their alley. I should think your name will be famous in Seven Dials for years to come.”
I couldn’t quite smile. Seven Dials was part of the St. Giles Rookery, one of London’s most notoriously dangerous neighbourhoods. It had been beyond foolish of me to wander this way alone. “If I am lucky it is only b-because you c-came upon me. I thank you for your r-rescue.”
Tom shook his head. “I wouldn’t have been able to call them off without your … your voice.” He hesitated. “It wasn’t by luck I found you, either. The boy, Will, snuck out the back way and fetched me. He said you’d followed him into the Dials, and I thought I had better come see you safe.”
I remembered then why I’d been pursuing the little boy in the first place. My rescuer was not, perhaps, the gentle hero he pretended. He might instead be the basest kind of criminal: a pocket-picker who got innocent children to do his vile work. And that painted girl—Daisy—had called him her sweetheart. Another wave of faintness swept over me.
Tom touched the sore spot on my forehead, and I winced. “You’ve had a shock atop injury,” he said. “You need a rest. Something hot to drink. Please, let me take you to my grandmother’s rooms. She lives not far from here.”
I thought of refusing, but I could not see how I would last long enough to make it all the way back to Hastings House on foot. And some part of me still refused to believe Tom guilty, or still trusted him despite the possibility of guilt. Whatever he is, I reasoned foggily, he isn’t dangerous. At least not to me.
Ten minutes later I found myself seated on a thread-bare sofa in a tiny sitting room, sipping warm cider, nibbling a biscuit, and being introduced to Tom’s grandmother, Mrs. Alcott. The old woman’s grey braid snaked over her shoulder and struck my lap as she leaned to cup my face in her hands. She was nearly blind, Tom had told me, and her clouded eyes were sunk deep into her leathery cheeks. “She’s pretty, is she not? Tom, is hers a pretty face?” Her voice was girlish and kind.
“Yes,” Tom said quietly. “Yes, very pretty.” I couldn’t see him past Mrs. Alcott’s body.
Her hands hovered at my head. “Her hair is quite wild for a lady.”
I shuddered, recalling the stolen pins and the violent pulling.
“Tom, come put this to rights,” Mrs. Alcott said, and Tom circled the sofa and, without ceremony, began to smooth my hair, combing it with his fingers and rearranging the remaining pins. He seemed oblivious to any strangeness in his attending me like Bess would. His touch was light as a caress, and I couldn’t suppress a sigh.
“Clever fingers, that lad has got. Braids, twists as fast as you please!” Mrs. Alcott settled into a rocker by the window. “And, do you know”—she leaned forward conspirato-rially—“he is also a first-rate lockpick and cutpurse!”
I blinked. It occurred to me that Mrs. Alcott’s mind might not be wholly sound, and a quick glance at the way Tom bit his lip confirmed my suspicions.
“Show her your spoils, Tom!” she persisted.
“Grandmamma, I hardly think Miss Somerville—”
“Look to that table, my dear, just beside you.”
I looked. Laid out across the table’s surface was a gleaming array of miniature brass gears, wheels, and springs. And three or four gold watch cases.
Tom took a chair across from me. His usually pale cheeks were crimson, and his eyes were fixed on the floor.
Now you should speak, I silently begged him. Now you should redeem yourself.
Mrs. Alcott continued, unaware of her grandson’s discomfort. “My Tom can fix anything, build anything from nothing. Look there! Built that one just last week, he did.” She pointed at a small wooden box on the table.
“Grandmamma, really. Miss Somerville will think me a braggart. Or a lagabout.”
“A braggabout!” Mrs. Alcott’s laugh was heartier than her speaking voice. Despite the circumstances I felt my mouth twitch into a smile.
Tom’s ears were still red, but he brought the box over to me and wound a tiny handle on its side. He clicked a switch, and I squeaked in surprise. A tune played, and a pair of glass birds with metal beaks whirled and tilted to tap out a tinkling rhythm on a copper plate.
Tom moved to switch it off again, but I stayed his hand. “A m-moment more,” I begged, and held the box tight between my hands.
It was like light captured in a net of sparkling sound. It was like a kaleidoscope of colour behind my eyes. Though the melody was delicate as thrushsong, I was sure that Tom and I could not speak to each other and be heard. The birds’ waltz was erratic, but I knew it obeyed the dance master of the clockworks beneath the plate. The innards of the box beat and whirred through my fingertips like a racing pulse.
Certain that the tiny room should be glowing, that the mildewed wallpaper and greying cushions should be washed clean and gilded with angelic light, I looked up and gave a shaky laugh.
Mrs. Alcott had fallen fast asleep in her chair.
Tom’s gaze followed mine, and then we looked at each other. I felt another smile tug at my mouth and saw colour rise in his cheeks and an answering smile, shy and supremely vulnerable.
In that instant I wished more than anything that I could forgive Tom Rampling for being a thief. The music box was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And this fine-boned man, whose sharp knee nudged into mine when he shifted on the cushion? He was beautiful, too. The curve of his pale cheekbone, the bluish vein at his temple, the fine, luminous skin—he appeared to me to be constructed of the same ethereal magic as his creation.
Tom was watching the music box in my lap as its music and movement wound down. “It is not what you think,” he said, and inclined his head toward the table spread with watch parts. “I am not—”
“I saw Will d-do it,” I interrupted, eager to stop him before he lied to me.
A muscle moved in Tom’s jaw. “He never did it before today. I swear it to you. And I told him he must never do it again.”
“These are all your own s-spoils, then.”
“Yes, but—”
“Are they for Mrs. C-Clampitt? Do you b-bring them there?”
“No! Miss Somerville, it is not what you think,” he repeated. “’Tis not simply a lark.”
I turned the music box over and watched the tiny gears tick to a halt.
“I bought the parts for that one,” he said quickly.
“Larks?” I said, turning the box upright again. “Is that what these b-birds are?” Then, with Mrs. Alcott’s precise degree of fondness and mirth, Mimic said, “Braggabout!” and I laughed Mrs. Alcott’s hearty laugh.
Tom replaced the music box on the table and perched again on the chair opposite me. “If you are not haunted, why do you do it?” he said. All signs of shyness and vulnerability were gone.
“I c-cannot help it.” My cheeks were very hot. “It c-comes un-b-bidden, when I do not know w-what to say.”
“Your screaming, that scared off Mr. Sears—”
I nodded. “That was Mimic too.”
“Who?”
“My s-sister’s name for it. ‘Mimic.’”
“No. I meant who were you mimicking, when you were under attack?”
It was the first time someone other than my cousin Archie had asked me about Mimic’s sources. In fact I was a bit ashamed at the misery Mimic had called up in the alleyway, at the way I’d traded on another person’s woes to free myself. When I’d apologized and wept after he rescued me, my apology hadn’t been wholly for Tom Rampling. I’d been sorry, rather, for using another person’s sorrows in my own interest.
“Would you tell me?” There was no judgment or derision in Tom’s face, only curiosity. So I told him, haltingly, of the summer my father had performed mass funeral services nearly every week. The cholera had taken so many, so quickly, that there wasn’t time for elaborate rites. Christa and I had been shut up at the house for months for fear of infection, so I remembered mostly relief at being allowed to attend the service once the threat of infection had waned. Mrs. Cavendish, I learned later, had been one of the village’s most stalwart nurses, caring for dozens of her ill and dying neighbours after her own family had all passed away. But at this funeral she’d flung herself from her pew into the aisle, crawled on all fours to the centre of the church, thrown back her greying head, and launched into a wailing scream that no amount of entreating and consoling by her friends could silence.
My father had waited calmly some moments through the interruption. Then he’d descended from the pulpit and approached the heartbroken woman, taken her in his arms, and, on his knees in the middle of the church, prayed over her. Even so the sound did not stop, and I remembered finally being taken from the chapel by my nurse and walking home amid a hushed and shuffling crowd benumbed by grief.
When I finished my story Tom smiled and shook his head.
“W-what is it?” I ventured.
“Mimic was your great friend and ally today.” His voice warmed, dropped lower: “Miss Luck, I shall call you, with her at your command.”
“I don’t c-command her. There is n-no ‘her.’ Just m-me, and a tongue I cannot c-control.” I swallowed and struggled to look away but failed. His smile crinkled the fine skin at the corners of his eyes and sparked the grey irises with warmth. Again I thought of the music box and its merry tune, and I wondered which was the real Tom Rampling: the sneak-thief or the savior? The solemn, stone-faced one or this one radiating happiness?