“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose you’d be lost.”
When he finally woke up, early the next morning, she was still awake, watching him. He looked at her intensely, with an expression of such tenderness it made her shiver. He had never looked at her like that before, not even on their wedding night. It was more than infatuation or desire. It was a look that came from years of real love, tested by hardship—the kind of bursting, painful emotion she herself sometimes felt when she cried over tiny babies she’d seen in prams, and he took her in his arms and held her without saying a word.
He tried to stand but ended up knocking over their open vanity cases in the process.
“I’ve got to get you some more ice,” she told him. “You be a good boy while I’m gone.” She tied his wrist to the bed, for fear he would somehow stumble out of the room and fall overboard.
“I’ll get loose,” he said, falling back on the bed. “I’ve broken outta prisons, you know.”
“Not in this condition you won’t.”
They arrived in Southampton battered and bruised, Harry from his disastrous short trips around the deck for fresh air, and Bess from her many late-night struggles to get him to stay in bed. The port itself was far from glamorous—even more crowded than New York had been, and dirtier. They had to navigate their trunks through a maze of horse droppings to find the railway station. Beck had given them the address of a boardinghouse in London, and they had not even settled in before Harry had swallowed a half gallon of water, washed his face, and sat down at the table with a map of the city to plot out a route to Scotland Yard.
Bess sat down beside him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “How do you know they’re expecting you?”
“Beck said so.”
“What’ll you do if they’ve never heard of you?”
Harry shrugged.
She turned his head toward hers and kissed him. “Don’t go just yet. We’ve only just gotten here. You’ve only just recovered.”
“We’re out of money.” Harry pulled away. “I’ve got to go to work.”
She knew he was right. “I want to go with you,” she said.
Harry looked at her sadly. “My sweet, sweet girl. You know you can’t.”
“I am your assistant, you know.”
Harry thought about it. “I think I have to go in on my own here. Or else they’ll think you’re helping me somehow. That you sneaked in some kind of lock pick.”
Bess surveyed his appearance. “At least change your clothes. You’ve been wearing those same pants for three days.”
Harry looked down. “Have I? I can’t remember when I put them on.”
After he had gone, in a clean shirt and pressed pants, she fell into a deep sleep. She dreamed of a man who’d grabbed her hand outside her school when she was twelve, a vagabond with swift eyes and tiny crystals of perspiration on his face, and the nun who’d come out of the school lobby and saved her, and the cool glass of water she’d given Bess in her office afterward, and her soft voice saying, “No one will ever hurt you.” Except when she looked up the nun wasn’t there anymore, and it was Harry standing over her, with his hand on her shoulder.
She had forgotten where she was. She looked out the window and saw clothes flapping from lines in the alley, and two children kicking dust clouds out of the dirt, the shafts of light between the buildings like two wide-open eyes.
“Here’s how we fasten the Yankee criminals who come over here and get into trouble,” Superintendent William Melville told Harry at the police headquarters. He wrapped Harry’s arms around a pillar in the middle of the station and handcuffed him. “Stage handcuffs, they’re one thing, but these are real.” Melville smiled. “Beck said you’d give me a real laugh. I might just leave you here to teach you a lesson.”
Harry smiled back at him, and Melville checked his watch and turned to the door. It was lunchtime.
“Wait,” Harry said. “I’ll go with you.”
When Melville turned around, he saw that Harry had freed himself and was leaning against the pillar, the cuffs dangling from his pinkie finger.
“Here’s the way Yankees open handcuffs,” he said. Melville looked at him in astonishment, then burst into laughter.
Harry recounted the story to Bess afterward, pacing the room with excitement. “And I convinced him,” he went on, “that I’m the real thing, and he put me in touch with an agent here, who booked me for two weeks at fifty dollars a week. He wants me to do the handcuff trick and the Metamorphosis trick.”
“Us,” Bess corrected. “He wants us to do the tricks.”
Harry nodded. “That’s what I meant.” He took her elbows in his hands. “You and me.”
“I think you did it, Harry,” she said. “I think we’re gonna be something.”
“This act isn’t going to separate us,” Harry said. “It’s going to bring us together.”
Bess grinned. “Let’s go have some tea. Isn’t that what people do when they’re in London?”