‘In the meantime, perhaps you could find me a cab,’ he drawled, eyeing the shop across the street one last time.And then, because he got a perverse kind of pleasure from playing up to the worst of what people expected of him, he added, ‘I dislike being abroad in daylight.’
Chapter Two
Mary dashed across the main shop, through the velvet curtains that divided it from the working areas, and pounded up the three flights of stairs that led to the workroom. The one place where she had learned to feel secure.
She had no idea why the way that man had emerged from the shadows on the other side of Curzon Street, with his black clothes, black hair and forbidding expression, had shaken her so badly. Or why, for an instant, she had got the peculiar impression that the shadows themselves had thickened, solidified and spawned the living embodiment of her nightmares.
It was terrifying, though, to feel as if your nightmares had invaded your waking life. Particularly since those nightmares were so vague.
All she could remember when she woke up from one of them was that there had been something hovering behind her. Something she dared not turn and face. Because she was sure that if she did, it would rear up and swallow her whole. And so she would curl up, trying to make herself disappear, so the Thing would not notice her. But she could always feel it coming nearer and nearer, its shadow growing bigger and bigger, until eventually, in sheer terror, she would leap up and try to run away.
In her dreams, she never managed to move one step. But her legs would always start to thrash around the bed.
‘Wake up, Mary,’ one of the other girls would complain, prodding her with their sharp elbows. ‘You’re having one of your dreams again.’
They would tell her to lie still, and she would, clutching the sheets to her chin, staring up at the ceiling, terrified to close her eyes lest the dream stalked her again.
She sighed, rubbing the heels of her hands against her eyes. Deep down she knew that shadows did not turn into men, and chase girls down the street.
Though it had not stopped her running from him.
Just as she fled from whatever it was that stalked her dreams.
‘Mary!’The angry voice of her employer made every girl in the workroom jump to attention. The fact that Madame Pichot had left her office at this hour of the morning did not bode well for any of them.
‘What is the matter with you now? You are as white as a sheet! You are not going to be ill again, are you?’
Mary could not blame her for looking so exasperated. She was nowhere near as robust as the other girls who sewed for Madame. Never had been.
‘That doctor promised me that if you took regular walks, your constitution would improve,’Madame complained. ‘I cannot afford for you to take to your bed at this time of year!’Although the workload had slackened off slightly, now that the presentations in the Queen’s drawing rooms had mostly taken place, there were still enough orders coming in for Madame to keep her girls working from dawn till they dropped into bed from sheer exhaustion.
Madame Pichot stalked across the bare floor and laid her hand on Mary’s forehead.
‘I am n-not ill,’ Mary stammered, as much alarmed now by Madame’s censure, as by what had happened in the street. ‘B-but there w-was a m-man…’
Madame Pichot rolled her eyes, raising her hands to the ceiling in one of her Gallic expressions of exasperation. ‘The streets are always full of men. I am sure none of them would be interested in a little dab of nothing like you!’ she snapped, tugging off Mary’s gloves, and untying her bonnet ribbons.
‘N-no, he was shouting,’ Mary exclaimed, recalling that fact for the first time herself.
‘There are a lot of men hawking their wares at this time of the morning,’ Madame scoffed. ‘He wasn’t shouting at you.’
‘But I think he was,’ she murmured, trying to examine what had happened without letting the panic that had gripped her on the street from clouding her perception. ‘He chased me!’ Though why some man she had never seen before should suddenly take it into his head to pursue her, shouting angrily, she could not imagine. But she had definitely seen him roughly pushing a tradesman out of his way. With his vengeful, dark eyes fixed on her. And for one awful moment, it had felt as though the curtain that separated what was real, from what existed only in her head, had been ripped in two. She had not known where she was. Or who she was.
That had been the most frightening moment of all.
‘Mary, really,’ Madame said, tugging her to her feet, and undoing her coat buttons, while the other girls in the workroom began to snigger, ‘just because you saw a man running in the street, does not mean he was chasing you. Who on earth would want to chase a scrawny little creature like you, when there are willing, pretty girls for sale on every street corner?’
It should have been reassuring to hear Madame repeat the very fact that had her so bewildered. Except that she knew he had been chasing her. Her.
‘Now, Mary,’ said Madame firmly, shoving her back down on her work stool, and thrusting her spectacles into her hands, ‘I forbid you to have one of your turns. There is no time for it today. Not when you have the bodice for the Countess of Walton’s new gown to finish. Whatever happened outside, you must put it out of your head. Do you hear me?’
‘Yes, Madame.’ In truth, there was nothing she wanted more than to put it out of her mind. She was really glad she had such a complicated piece of work to do today. For concentrating on making something utterly beautiful had always had the power to keep her demons at bay. Even when she had been a little girl…
With a startled cry, Mary dropped her glasses. It always gave her a jolt, when one of these little glimpses of a past that was mostly a complete blank flared across her consciousness without warning.
Hearing Madame’s huff of disapproval, Mary dropped to her knees to grope for them. They would not have slid far along the rough planks of the workroom. She would find them in mere seconds, pick them up, and be quickly able to get on with her work.
Why, she thought in anguish, could her mind not be as nimble as her fingers? Whenever she tried to catch hold of one of these little slivers of light that flashed into her mind, it was just like trying to take hold of a candle flame. There was nothing of any substance to latch on to. Except pain.
Well, only an idiot would keep on putting their hand into a flame, once they had learned that it burned, she thought, hooking her glasses over her ears. Instantly, everything beyond a few feet from her went out of focus, isolating her on her stool, like a shipwrecked mariner, clinging to a lone rock shrouded by fog.
When she had been a little girl, she sighed, unable to silence the echo of that memory straight away. Hastily she picked up a needle, but not fast enough to blot out the feeling that when she had been a little girl…with her head dutifully bent over her needlework…
‘Pay no mind to anything but your sampler,’ she heard a gentle voice telling her. And for a fleeting moment, it was not Madame standing over her, glowering, but a kindly, protective presence that she instinctively recognised as her mother.
‘For the Lord’s sake, keep your head down,’ the voice…her mother…continued as she became aware there had been someone else with them. Looming over them. A man with a loud voice and hard fists…and fear rushed up to swamp her.
Past and present swirled and merged. The child in her bent over her sampler, to blot out the raised voices of the adults, the violence that hovered in the air. And the woman hitched her stool closer to her embroidery frame. She leant so close