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There was not one sound in the whole of the chop-house. The silence hissed. No one moved. All eyes were on the man, Emma’s included. Staring with fascinated horror. Five ruffians against one man. The outcome was certain.
The black-haired man stepped closer to the man, squaring up to him, violent intent spilling from every pore.
She swallowed. Felt a shiver chase over her skin.
The man did not seem to feel the same. He smiled. It was a cold, hard smile. His eyes showed nothing of softness, not one hint of fear. Indeed, he looked as if he welcomed what would come. The blood. The violence. Five men against one. Maybe he really did have a death wish after all.
‘Someone stop them. Please,’ she said, but it was a plea that had no hope of being answered.
An old man pulled her back. ‘Ain’t no one going to stop them now, girl.’
He was right. She knew it and so did every single person in that taproom.
The black-haired brute cracked his knuckles and stretched his massive bull neck, ready to dispense punishment.
Emma held her breath. Her fingers were balled, her nails cutting into her palms.
The man’s movement was so fast and unexpected. One minute he was standing there. The next, he had landed a head butt against the lout’s nose. There was a sickening crunch. And blood. A lot of blood. Black-Hair doubled over as if bending in to meet the man’s knee that hit his face. The speed and suddenness of it shocked her. It shocked the men in there, too. She could tell by the look on their faces as they watched the black-haired giant go down. The ruffian was blinking and gasping with the shock of it as he lay there.
Emma watched in disbelief. Every muscle in her body tensed with shock. She held her breath for what would happen next.
‘Too late to start grovelling,’ the man said.
Leaning one hand on the floor, Black-Hair spat a bloody globule to land on the toe of the man’s boot and reached for a nearby chair.
‘But if you insist...’ The man stepped closer to Black-Hair, his bloodied boot treading on the giant’s splayed fingers, his hand catching hold of the villain’s outstretched hand as if he meant to help him to his feet. But it was not help he offered. He gave the wrist a short sharp twist, the resulting crack of which made Emma and the rest of the audience wince.
Black-Hair’s face went ashen. He made not one sound, just fainted into a crumpled heap and did not move.
In the stunned amazement that followed no one else moved either. There was not a sound.
‘He might need a little help in holding his porter,’ said the man to Black-Hair’s friends.
‘You bastard!’ One of them spat the curse.
The man smiled again. And this time Emma was prepared.
The tough charged with fists at the ready.
The man’s forehead shattered the villain’s cheekbone while his foot hooked around his ankle and felled him. When the rat tried to get up the man kicked his feet from under him. This time Black-Hair’s friend stayed where he was.
The other three men exchanged shifty glances amongst themselves, then began to advance. One slipped a long wicked blade that winked in the candlelight.
‘Really?’ asked the man.
The sly-faced man came in, feigned attack, drew back. Came in close again, circling the man.
‘Too scared?’ asked the man.
A curl of lip and a slash of the blade was his opponent’s only response.
But the man kicked him between the legs and there was an ear-piercing scream. Emma had never heard a man scream before. It made the blood in her veins turn to ice. She watched the knife clatter to the floor forgotten while the sly-faced villain dropped like a stone, clutching himself and gasping.
The man looked at the two remaining thugs.
For a tiny moment they gaped at him. Then they turned tail and ran, pelting out of the chop-house like hares before a hound.
The man stood there and watched them go.
But Emma was not looking at the fleeing villains. Rather, she was looking at the man. She could not take her eyes off him. There was what looked like the beginning of a bruise on his forehead. The snow-white of his shirt was speckled scarlet with blood from Black-Hair’s nose. His dark neckcloth was askew. He was not even out of breath. He just stood there calm and cool and unperturbed.
The slamming of the front door echoed in the silence.
No one spoke. No one moved. No one save the man.
He smoothed the dishevelment from his hair, straightened his neckcloth and walked through the pathway that cleared through the crowd before him.
They watched him with respect. They watched him with awe. Soft murmured voices.
Fists and feet were what gained a man respect round here. Standing up for himself and what he believed in. Physicality ruled. The strongest, the toughest, the most dangerous. And the man had just proved himself all three.
Some regulars from the crowd half dragged, half carried the injured away.
The man returned to his table, but he did not sit down. He finished the porter in one gulp and left more coins beside the empty tankard than were needed for payment. He lifted his hat and then his eyes finally met Emma’s across the taproom.
Within her chest her heart was still banging hard against her ribs. Through her veins her blood was still rushing with a shocked fury.
He gave her a nod of acknowledgement and then turned away and walked out of the place, oblivious to the entire crowd of customers standing there slack-jawed and staring at him.
Emma stared just as much as all the others, watching him leave. And even when the door had closed behind him she still stood there looking, as if she could see right through it to follow him. Six months in Whitechapel and she had never seen a man as strong, as ruthless or as invincible.
‘Don’t think he’ll be having any trouble for a while,’ said Nancy, who was standing, hands on hips, bar cloth in hand, watching.
‘Who is he?’ Emma asked in soft-voiced amazement.
‘Goes by the name of Ned Stratham. Or so he says.’
Emma opened her mouth to ask more, but Nancy had already turned her attention away, raising her voice loud and harsh as she called out to the taproom audience, ‘Show’s over, folks. Get back to your tables before your chops grow cold and your ale grows warm.’
Emma’s gaze returned to linger on the front door and her thoughts to the man who had just exited through it.
Ned Stratham.
A fight seemingly over a pint of spilled porter. And yet Emma was not fooled, even if all the others were.
Ned Stratham did not know anything about her other than she served him his dinner and porter. He was a man who had barely seemed to notice her in the months he had been coming here. A man who kept to himself and quietly watched what unfolded around him without getting involved. Until tonight.
It had not been fighting in any sense that a gentleman would recognise, it had been raw and shocking and, if she were honest, much more effective. It followed no rules. It had not been polite or genteel, nor, on the surface of it, honourable or chivalric.
‘Backlog of chops in the kitchen, Emma,’ Nancy’s voice interrupted.
Emma nodded. ‘I am just coming.’
Seemingly a taproom brawl over a clumsy accident and yet... In her mind she saw again that blue gaze on hers, so piercing and perceptive.
‘Emma!’ Nancy yelled again. ‘You want it in writing?’
Lifting her tray, Emma headed for the kitchen. Ned Stratham’s table had been nowhere near Black-Hair’s and any man who could tumble a disc over his knuckles had no problems with balance.
And she knew that, despite his method, what Ned Stratham had just done was chivalric in every sense of the word. She knew that what he had just done was save her from Black-Hair.
* * *
Ned Stratham saw the woman again a week later on his visit to the Red Lion. His meal had been delivered by the other serving wench, but it was Emma who came to collect his cleared plate and empty tankard.
Her dark hair was clean and pinned up, her pale olive skin clear and smooth, unmarked by pox scars. Her teeth were white and straight. She was too beautiful for Whitechapel. Too well-spoken, too. It made her stand out. It made her a target for men like the dark-haired chancer last week. He already knew that she wore no wedding band upon her finger. No husband. Unprotected in an area of London where it was dangerous for any woman, let alone one like her, to be so.
‘Do you wish another pint of porter, sir?’ Her voice was clear, her accent refined and out of place on this side of town.
‘Thank you.’ He watched in silence as she shifted his plate, cutlery and tankard to sit on her empty wooden tray. But once the table was cleared she did not hurry off as usual. Instead she hesitated, lingering there with the tray in her hands.
‘I did not get a chance to thank you, last week.’ Her eyes were a dark-brown velvet. Warm eyes, he thought as he looked into them. Beautiful eyes.
‘For what?’ he asked.
‘Spilling your drink.’
‘A clumsy accident.’
‘Of course it was.’ She smiled in a way that told him that she understood exactly what he had done. The hint of a dimple showed in the corner of her mouth.
It made him smile, too.
She was always polite and professional, and friendly with it, as if she genuinely liked people. But unlike most other serving wenches he had never seen her flirt with any man, even though that would have earned her more tips. She did her job with a capable efficiency and sense of purpose that he liked.
He turned his gaze to focus on the tumble of the small pale-ivory token across his knuckles. No matter how beautiful she was, there was a part of him that wanted her to just walk away as she had done all the other times, to attend to other punters on other tables. There were things on his mind more important than beautiful women. Things he had spent a lifetime chasing. Things upon which he had to stay focused to bring to fruition. He did not want distractions, not of any kind.
And the truth was he had not wanted to intervene last week, but he could not have just sat there and turned a blind eye while a woman was forced against her will, whatever the level of it. He had known men like the black-haired tough all his life. What started out as ‘fun’ soon escalated to something else.
He watched the rhythmic smooth tumble of the token over the fingers of his right hand. It was a movement so long practised as to no longer be a trick but a reflex, a part of himself.
‘I will fetch your porter.’ He didn’t look up at her but he knew she was still smiling. He could hear it in her voice.
Ned said nothing more. Just kept his focus on the token, effectively dismissing her.
He heard her turn and walk away. Shifted his eyes momentarily to her retreating figure, to the soft sway of her hips. The smallest of glances; no risk to the ripple of his fingers that was as instinctive and easy to him as breathing. And yet, in that moment, for the first time in years, he fluffed the move like a novice. The token tipped from his hand, straight off the table, landing edge up on the floorboards to roll away with speed.
His heart skipped a beat. He was already on his feet and following, but the token was way in front and heading for the crowded bar. But Emma, as he’d heard her called, reached a foot forward and, with the toe of her boot, gently stopped it, balanced the tray on her hip and retrieved it from the floor.
Ned watched as she rubbed the token against the bodice of her dress, dusting off the dirt that marred its smooth pale surface. Her gaze moved over the worn ivory, studying it.
She turned to him as he reached her.
Their eyes held for a tiny second before she passed the token to him.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘For what? I trust the inadvertent and clumsy tread of my boot did your property no harm.’ Her eyes held his.
He couldn’t help himself. He smiled.
And so did she.
Her eyes watched the token as he slipped it safely inside his jacket. ‘What is it?’
‘My lucky charm.’
‘Does it work?’
‘Without fail.’
Her eyebrows rose ever so slightly, but she softened the cynicism with a smile that did things to him that no other woman’s smile ever had. It kept him standing here, talking, when he should have walked away.
‘You don’t believe me.’
‘A lucky charm that works without fail...?’ She raised her eyebrows again, teasingly this time. ‘Perhaps I should ask to borrow it.’
‘Are you in need of good luck?’
‘Is not everyone?’
‘Emma!’ Nancy shouted from the bar. ‘Six pints of porter here!’
‘Ned Stratham.’ He did not smile, but offered his hand for a handshake.
‘Emma de Lisle.’
Her fingers were feminine and slender within his own. Her skin cool and smooth, even within the warmth of the taproom. The touch of their bare hands sparked physical awareness between them. He knew she felt it, too, from the slight blush on her cheeks and the way she released his hand.
‘Emma!’ Nancy, the landlady, screeched like a banshee. ‘Get over here, girl!’
Emma glanced over her shoulder at the bar. ‘Coming, Nancy!
‘No rest for the wicked,’ she said, and with a smile she was gone.
Ned resumed his seat, but his eyes watched her cross the room. The deep red of the tavern dress complimented the darkness of her hair and was laced tight to her body so that he could see the narrowness of her waist and the flare of her hips and the way the material sat against her buttocks. There was a vitality about her, an intelligence, a level of confidence in herself not normally seen round here.
He watched her collect the tankards from the bar and distribute them to various tables, taking her time en route to him. His was the last tankard on the tray.
