“Twenty.”
“Promised in marriage?”
“No.”
“Do you always chew on your lip that way?”
“What?”
“When you are thinking.” He leaned back in the seat and some of the rigidness seemed to leave his body. “As you were a moment ago.”
As if to betray her, her traitorous bottom lip slid under her teeth again. Did she? One look at Bridget told her she did.
Her maid ducked her head with a smile.
“I suppose it is a habit I must break.” Isabella held out her arm to keep the baskets from falling as the coach lurched with a pothole. “Although I do not own to realizing it existed before this moment.”
“I suppose none of us are without our peculiarities. Take me, for instance. When angered, I’m prone to stand on my head and recite the Latin alphabet.”
Her jaw dropped. Did he jest her?
As if to answer her question, his eyes twinkled with merriment and a small laugh filled the carriage. “It seems you have never seen a man stand on his head.”
“Indeed I have not.”
“Men do many things women never see.”
“Such as?”
“Making fools of themselves mostly. Had you a brother, you might have spent all your years laughing at such follies.” Was it her imagination, or did his voice fade lower with the last sentence?
“Miss Gresham.” Bridget’s very quiet murmur brought Isabella’s attention back to their surroundings. They had arrived on Tomfriars Lane, a street on the East End that swallowed the carriage in the stench of dung, desperation, and depravation.
And sometimes death.
Isabella fluttered a handkerchief from her reticule and handed a basket to Bridget, then one to Mr. Kensley, before looping the remaining two on her arms. “Shall we?”
Mr. Kensley hopped out first, handed both her and Bridget to the ground, and apologized for the mud hole already seeping brown water into their hems. Even if he had carried them halfway across the street, however, they could not have escaped such peril.
The street was a river of mud.
Urchins played barefoot close enough to the carriage that the horses pranced at the noise. A ragpicker ambled his way to a grungy pawnbroker shop, and farther up the street, two scantily clad trollops lingered outside a disreputable establishment.
Isabella curled her nose. Why Father insisted they always make these trips was beyond her. What good did a few baskets do in the face of such misery?
“You come here alone?” Mr. Kensley took one of her baskets as they departed down the street.
“Sometimes Miss Trewman accompanies me, other times Bridget. But Father always insists the driver walk with us for protection once we arrive.”
Mr. Kensley nodded and did it again—surveyed their surroundings.
What was it he kept looking for?
They stopped at the first two squalid houses, delivering baskets to old Mrs. Whalley, then to the equally old gardener who had once tended their townhouse flower boxes.
Mr. Kensley held a hand to her and Bridget as they crossed the street and navigated behind a crumbling two-story building. Blackened grime dripped down the bricks, and the narrow alley was covered in planks to keep walkers an inch or two above the sewer.
Isabella coughed into her handkerchief, the odor nauseating her stomach. “This way,” she mumbled through the white cloth.
