I glanced down at my new dress, and my pulse sped, for she was right.
“I had better not say,” I confessed softly. “It’s complicated.”
The set of her shoulders grew brittle after she shrugged. “You always did keep secrets, and everything is complicated these days.”
Extraordinary contradiction, I thought, that she could always condone even the most operatic of my falsehoods, so long as none were directed at her.
“I’d tell you if it didn’t mean betraying another party.”
My friend took rapt interest in the traffic outside the window. “It’s all one to me.”
“Where did you learn slang?” I teased, wanting the light to return to her eyes. “You always spoke so properly, even in Rotherhithe.”
“We were speaking with each other mainly, so it was easy to keep pure back then.” Surely I imagined the dryness in her tone, having spent too long in Mr. Thornfield’s company.
“Oh, won’t you say what you’ve been doing?” I begged. “The matter which brought me to London doesn’t involve just myself, you see. Pax, please. I’m desperate to know—you never bought that rigging with street-chaunting coin either, and my vocabulary is every bit as disgraceful, and you really must take pity on me. We were so lucky, when we arrived here, to find shelter so quickly, and afterwards when I pictured you . . .” Faltering, I cleared my throat. “If anything had happened to you, it should have been my fault.”
Clarke’s gaze grew a shade less hard.
“No.” She sighed. “I was the one who left, after all.”
“But what came next?”
“I continued singing, but finding lodgings was harder than I imagined, since for all those years you’d taken care of me—I was sharp enough at school, but a complete ninny when loosed to the streets. At times, I slept in doss-houses with the dollymops, and it was . . . Don’t frown like that, Jane. Most of them were kind, for all that they were filthy and coarse. I could have gone straight back to my parents. I did, for a fortnight,” she admitted, wincing. “When they seemed only half relieved to see me, I asked them for a few pounds and struck out again. They claimed what I was doing was ‘admirably Bohemian.’”
She sounded so bitter at this last that I hastened to inquire, “How did your fortunes change?”
A wistful look glazed Clarke’s eyes. “I was singing near to Elephant and Castle when a woman—Mrs. Priscilla Pellanora is her name—stopped to speak with me. She asked if I had ever sung in a company before, harmonies and the like, and of course I had at Lowan Bridge, and she offered me a place in the chorus of her production.”
“But that’s absolutely wonderful!” Laughing, I imagined Clarke in a wooden-walled theatre, her freckles blurred by the faint glow of the footlights, the smell of peanuts and ale thick in the air. “You excelled, of course, which is why now you are so fashionable.”
Clarke lifted one shoulder, though she seemed pleased; she had always been peculiarly uninterested in her own talents, the same way she viewed everyone else’s attributes and shortcomings as stamped in the stars, inevitable. “Mrs. Pellanora is an excellent tutor.”
“Oh! May I come see you? Do please say yes. Are you at the Olympic, or maybe the Delphi?”
Biting her lip, Clarke shook her head.
“The Lyceum, then! I know you must think . . .” I stopped, eyes prickling. “That is, I don’t know what you must think of me, but I should so love to hear you sing again.”
“I’m not at the Lyceum,” she husked strangely.
“Do you sing for penny concerts, then? I’ll come to the Surrey side to see you, only tell me which it is. The Victoria? The Bower Saloon?”
“Jane, I sing at Mrs. Pellanora’s private club,” she snapped.
My ears buzzed in the ensuing silence, drowning out the soft clinking of tableware and the susurration of strangers’ voices. A man with a Yorkshire accent was demanding to know where his pudding had got to as the words private club echoed in my skull.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Clarke groaned, then abruptly lowered her voice. “Surely this cannot be quite so surprising as some of your own past revelations. Wipe that expression off your face, if you please—no one touches me, the stage is gorgeously appointed, I’ve room and board with a set of bang-up girls, I’m petted and toasted all over town, and the costumes are nothing like what you’re picturing. They’re not far off from what I’m wearing now, come to that, only more . . . theatrical, and with trousers, and apt to get kohl stains.”
“I’m sorry,” I protested. “I wasn’t thinking anything, only that you were always so scrupulous, you see, but now I comprehend it’s all quite aboveboard.”
“No, it isn’t either,” she hissed.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s outrageously bawdy, the content of the programme.”
“Oh,” was all I could muster.
“That must please you, that I work in a dirty cabaret.”
“No! I mean I’m happy—so long as you are.”
“You don’t look happy, Jane.”