Delilah Marvelle - Forever a Lady

His father bumped Matthew with the crate. “What did you do?”

“Nothing. All I did was ask how he was. He mustn’t be used to people being...friendly.”

They fell into silence.

The clopping and clacking of carts and the occasional profanity and shouts of men from down the street reminded them that they weren’t on Barclay Street anymore. No more vast treed square, no more pristine lacquered carriages or elegant men and women of the merchant classes. Only this.

“I should have never entrusted Rawson,” his father confided in a strained tone. “Because of me, you have nothing. Not even a prospect of marriage. If it weren’t for me, you would have been married to Miss Drake by now.”

Matthew whipped both sacks to the pavement at hearing that woman’s name. “I can do with the poverty, Da. I can do with the stench and everything that goes with it, but what I can’t do with is listening to you blather as if this was your goddamn fault. To hell with Miss bloody Drake. If she had loved me, as I had stupidly loved her, she would have followed me here. Like I had asked her to.”

His father paused and eyed him. “Would you have followed yourself here?”

Matthew hissed out a breath, trying not to let it hurt knowing he had meant so little to her. “I’m only twenty, Da. I have my whole life ahead of me. One day, I’ll find myself a good woman capable of respecting me, no matter my financial worth.”

His father dug into his vest pocket, balancing the crate on his hip. “God bless you, Matthew, for always making the best out of even the worst.” He tossed him a quarter. “Buy us something to eat. And try to ration it. We have yet to find jobs. I’ll go settle us in. Hand up those sacks, will you?”

Matthew snatched both up from the pavement and stacked them atop the crate. His father tucked the upper wool sack beneath his chin and strode through the open doorway, angling himself up the narrow stairwell.

Puffing out a breath, Matthew swung toward the dirt road, scanning the wide street of squat buildings plastered with crooked wooden plaques. Unevenly stacked crates of browning fruit and half-rotten vegetables sat unattended alongside open doors. A floating swarm of insects hovered in unison over one crate of food before darting to the next. It was as if the insects themselves were questioning the quality at hand.

He already missed their cook.

A strangled sob made his gaze jerk toward a commotion just across the street. A russet-haired gent in a frayed shirt and patched trousers held a boy roughly by the hair, shaking him.

Matthew drew in a breath. It was the boy with the oversized boots.

As a coal cart trudged past, the unshaven giant leaned down, shaking the boy by the hair again and again, saying something. The boy sobbed with each violent agitation, stumbling in an effort to remain upright.

Matthew fisted the quarter his father had given him. He’d never formally boxed, but he sure as hell wasn’t about to stand by and watch this. Tucking the quarter into his inner vest pocket, Matthew dodged past women carrying woven baskets and dashed across the unpaved street toward them.

“Tell your whore of a mother,” the man seethed, “that I want me money and I want it now. She owes me fifteen cents. Fifteen!”

“She don’t have it!” the boy wailed, grabbing at his head.

Matthew jerked to a halt beside them, his pulse roaring. He tried to remain calm, lest this turn into a brawl the child didn’t need to see. “Let him go. I’ll pay whatever his mother owes.”

A sweat-sleeked, sunburned round face jerked toward him. The stench of rotting cabbage penetrated the stagnant air. The man shoved the boy away and stepped toward him, that rather well-fed thick frame towering a head over Matthew’s own. “She owes me twenty cents.”

The bastard. “I heard fifteen.” Matthew dug into his waistcoat pocket. “But here is what I’ll do.” Matthew held up the quarter his father had given him. “I’ll give you an extra ten cents to leave off this boy from here on out. You do that, and this is yours.”

The man hesitated, then reached out a calloused hand. Grabbing the quarter, he shoved it into his own pocket. “That be fine with me. He’s got nothing I want. His hag of a mother be the problem.”

“Then I suggest you take it up with her. Not him.” Matthew veered toward the child, bent down toward him and nudged up that small chin. “Ey. Are you all right?”

The boy pedaled back, tears still clinging to those flushed cheeks. He nodded, touching his small hands to his head.

The man grabbed Matthew’s arm and pulled him back toward himself. With a smirk, he fluffed Matthew’s white linen cravat. “Rather fancy and all, aren’t you? I know I’ve always wanted me one of these.”

Matthew jerked back, out of reach, and narrowed his gaze. “I suggest you leave.”

The man lowered his unshaven chin and tightened his own penetrating gaze, those fuzzy red brows creeping together. Raising a thick hand, the man now tilted a sharp blade toward Matthew’s face, the metal glinting against the sun. He leaned in and tapped its smooth edge on Matthew’s cheek. “Are you going to take it off? Or would you rather I slice it off?”

It was unbelievable. Barely twenty minutes in these parts and he was being robbed for assisting a child. Fisting both hands, lest he jump and get sliced, Matthew offered in a low, even tone, “Put away the knife and we’ll talk.”

A full-knuckled fist slammed into his head. Matthew gasped in disbelief against the teetering impact.

The man casually tossed the blade to his other thick hand, announcing that the worst was yet to come. “I say what goes. Now take it off, lest the boy sees something he oughtn’t.”

Shifting his jaw, Matthew grudgingly unraveled the linen. He wasn’t stupid. Sliding it off, he wordlessly held it out.

The man snatched it away, wrapping it smugly around his own thick neck, and stepped back, tucking away his blade. “Next time, do as I say.”

As if he was going to wait for a next time. Knowing the blade was out of the game, Matthew gritted his teeth and jumped forward, throwing out a straight-faced punch.

The giant grabbed his fist in midair, causing Matthew’s arm to pop back from the swift contact of his large palm.

That gaze threatened. “You’re dead.” A blow hit Matthew’s skull, jaw, nose and eye in such rapid fire, his leather boots skidded against the pavement with each teeth-jarring wallop.

Matthew jumped forward again, viciously swinging back at the bastard, but only decked air as the giant dodged.

The boy beside them swung his own small fists in the air, stumbling left and right and shouted up at Matthew, “Come on! Pound the dickey dazzler. Pound him!”

A brick of an unexpected whack to his left eye not only made Matthew rear back, but made everything in sight fade to a hazy white. Jesus Christ. He caught himself against a lamppost, his bare hands sliding against the sun-warmed iron.

“Enough!” a man boomed, stilling the boy’s shouts.

No blows followed.

Drawing in shaky, ragged breaths, Matthew squinted to see past the sweltering pain pulsing through his face and skull.

A broad figure with long black hair tied in a queue, garbed in a patched great coat, held a pistol to the side of Matthew’s assailant’s head. “Give this respectable man his cravat, James,” the man casually offered in an educated New York accent that was laced with a bit of European sophistication. “And while you’re at it, give him your blade.”

The russet-haired oaf froze against the barrel of that pistol set against his head. His grubby hand patted and pulled out the blade, extending it and the cravat to Matthew.

Pushing away from the lamppost, Matthew tugged his morning coat back into place, trying to focus beyond the heaviness and blur that clouded his one eye. He reached out, his arm seemingly floating and slid the scrap of linen toward himself.