To Live and To Breathe (Could Be #2)

Chapter 8

The next afternoon Mary slipped through the shifting crowd of after-church promenaders, thanking the Lord for providing an employer that gave her every Sunday off. She'd even managed to leave without Edith's detection. Since she'd spent the previous Sunday afternoon doing patchwork in her room, going out would arouse suspicion. There was no one more suspicious than a household servant hungry for gossip. As much as she liked Edith, she knew her weaknesses. They weren't unique ones.

And so Mary slipped out wearing her green cotton dress, wishing she could have made herself more presentable, even with her faulty red hair done up in a mess of braids upon her head, and her freckled cheeks powdered to conceal their flaws. She was ashamed to own that she was more embarrassed than ever of her appearance. When Timothy had known her as a girl, she'd at least been thin.

Shoving these thoughts out of her mind, she saw him first. He was standing—Standing! Think of it!—outside the pie shop, hands tucked into his pockets with an expression of pensive meditation stamped on his brow. He was considerably better turned out than he had been the previous day, black from head to toe, coat and hat complete. He might have cut a rather nice figure as ungainly as he was, if his clothes weren't so obviously tailored for someone much shorter than he was and much wider around the middle.

Timothy looked up as she approached and opened the door for her. "What brand of baking powder do you recommend?" he asked.

Mary stared at him as she entered, every anxious thought she'd had on the way there fled out of her mind. "I beg your pardon?" she asked as he hobbled in after her. Of all the things he might have said, she hadn't thought it would be that. "Good afternoon" would have been closer.

Timothy's expression softened when he noticed her confusion until she almost thought she saw his sense of humor peeking through. "I purchased Jacobsen's after you left because it was the cheapest, and I don't believe it worked. Mother's scones were as hard and flat as paving stones. Of course, it might just have been her cooking. I'm trying to discover the cause so that I don't chip any more teeth."

Mary laughed. Gone was the nervous disaster she'd met the previous day. There was something so comfortable and familiar in his manner now that she couldn't help but throw all her fears away. It was foolish of society to think that a man and woman couldn't be friends. He had been the dearest one she'd ever had. It'd been silly of her to be flustered yesterday. Silly of her to worry about her appearance now. "You get what you pay for with Jacobsen's, I'm afraid," she said as they found a table. "Bird's is much better."

"I knew it," Timothy grumbled, and paused as he eased into a chair across from her. "Do you like coffee?"

Mary stared at him again, but this time he wouldn't lift his gaze from the tabletop. "Are you asking me if I enjoy Elesolian bean water?"

Timothy actually snorted, and looked at her with that subdued brightness in his eyes that meant he was close to laughing. A familiar warmth filled her chest. "I know you already enjoy Solarian leaf water, so I suppose I am."

"Absolutely not!" Mary shook her head, hiding a smile. "Does St. Vincent?"

Timothy turned away as a serving maid appeared, but not before she saw his lip twitch. "No, I do," he said, and ordered one in front of her eyes, much to Mary's astonishment.

"And you, miss?" the maid asked, turning to her with a disdainful expression after Timothy was done.

Ignoring the maid, Mary looked at Timothy in dismay. "Aren't you going to eat anything?"

Again, Timothy wouldn't meet her gaze. "I'm not hungry. You go ahead."

Mary debated for another moment, unable to decide what his motives were for claiming such a preposterous thing, and then ordered tea despite being very hungry herself. Immediately afterwards she stared miserably at the tabletop, wondering why she couldn't make her own decisions. Food had been included in their original plan. She shouldn't be ashamed to eat.

When she glanced up again, Timothy was looking at her with that half understanding, half puzzled expression in those strange eyes of his that had so bewildered her before. She didn't want to be understood right now, so she sat back and affected nonchalance. "How does your writing fare these days?" she asked.

"Terrible," Timothy frowned at a blemish in the wood. "I can't get an interview, and—"

"That isn't what I meant," Mary interrupted softly. "It's been a long time since you had a story in the paper."

Timothy stopped in the middle of tracing the knot-hole with his finger, and every muscle in his being stiffened. When he looked up, Mary thought she'd never seen so much fear in a grown man's face on her account before. "You can't read," he gasped.

Mary couldn't understand it. Shouldn't he be pleased that she and her family had followed his literary exploits? She'd liked them because they had a heart the other stories lacked, even if they were sometimes too melodramatic for their own good. "I can't, but I know people that can," Mary retorted, furrowing her brow. "Sometimes we servants sit up of an evening and listen as someone reads the paper."

Timothy gestured with his hands as if he were at a loss for words. "But—but how? I use a pen name."

"I didn't suppose Vincent Carlyle could be anyone else," Mary laughed, but he continued to stare at her as if she'd caught him raiding the shelf of preserves. "I must say I've wondered why you didn't use your real name," she added, hoping that she'd break him out of his shock by saying something that required an answer.

He finally sat back and looked away, arms crossed. "'Timothy Wright' is too prosaic," he said. Was that sadness in his voice? "St. Vincent at least had the good fortune to be given a name with flourish. People want to read stories with flourish, not ones that sound like a factory manager's son wrote them."

The silence between them stretched long, and this time Mary was unable to break it. Her heart ached for Timothy. To have his one precious gift corrupted by necessity grieved her deeply. She knew what stories meant to him. The lesson must have come at a hard price.

The maid brought their drinks, and Timothy pushed the bowl of sugar cubes in Mary's direction. While she sweetened her tea and stirred in a bit of cream, she heard his chair creak. When she looked up, he was scrutinizing her again, this time with a line of worry creasing his brow.

"You've lost your accent," he said.

Mary dropped her spoon with a clatter, and a nervous laugh bubbled out of her before she could stop it. "If this is your way of avoiding the point at hand—"

Timothy leaned forward, hands clasped on the table, and shook his head. "No—it's been something bothering me, and I just now realized what it was. What happened?"

Mary picked up her spoon and stirred the tea even though it didn't need it. "After—after I worked for your father, I found employment in the house of an elderly spinster," she began slowly, then forced a chuckle. "'Speak the queen's Solarian, Mary,' she told me. If I said something like, 'I'm sorry miss, I am!' she told me to stop repeating myself. After a while, I suppose I learned the queen's Solarian. It was better than being fussed at every moment of every day."

When she looked up, she found her own pain mirrored in Timothy's eyes. "What happened?" he repeated.

Of course he would know what it was like to trade away a piece of himself in the search for acceptance. Hadn't he just told her he'd used a pen name rather than present himself as he was? She tapped her spoon off on the edge of the cup, and set it aside. "She—she died after two years, and I found employment elsewhere." The wounds Miss Griffiths had inflicted went far deeper than the loss of her Veridan brogue. She had routinely criticized Mary's origins, her accent, her face, hair, and dress. She'd even gone so far as to deprive her of her dinners for several weeks in the name of helping her obtain a more fashionable figure "because she never could abide plump servants." It meant they were too well-off. Mary's visits to her family had kept her from despairing, but even they never knew the whole truth.

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A delicious recipe for scones (that aren't as hard and flat as paving stones) can be found here:
https://www.fifteenspatulas.com/english-style-scones/

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