pages, and I returned them rolled tight in the empty milk bottles, with all the best and most bloodthirsty lines circled.
He always looked up as he left, always stared long enough for me to know he’d seen me, and raised a hand. Sometimes, if Wilda wasn’t looking and I was feeling daring, I touched my fingertips to the windowpane in return.
Mostly I spent my time conjugating Latin verbs and doing sums beneath the watery eye of my tutor. I sat through my weekly lessons with Mr. Locke, nodding politely while he lectured about stocks, regulatory boards that didn’t know what was what, his youthful studies in England, and the three best varieties of scotch. I practiced deportment with the senior housekeeper and learned how to smile politely at every guest and client who came to call. “Aren’t you a darling little thing,” they simpered. “And so well-spoken!” They patted my hair as if I were a well-trained lapdog.
Sometimes I was so lonely I thought I might wither into ash and drift away on the next errant breeze.
Sometimes I felt like an item in Mr. Locke’s collection labeled January Scaller, 57 inches, bronze; purpose unknown.
So when he invited me to accompany him to London—on the condition that I was willing to listen to every word he said as if they were God’s own commandments—I said yes so enthusiastically that even Mr. Stirling jumped.
Half my stories and dime novels were set in London, so I was confident in my expectations: dim, foggy streets populated by urchins and nefarious men in bowler hats; black-stained buildings that loomed in a satisfyingly gloomy way over one’s head; silent rows of gray houses. Oliver Twist mixed with Jack the Ripper, with perhaps a dash of Sara Crewe.
Maybe parts of London are really like that, but the city I saw in 1903 was almost exactly the opposite: loud, bright, and bustling. As soon as we stepped off the London and North Western Railway car at Euston station we were nearly stampeded by a group of schoolchildren in matching navy outfits; a man in an emerald turban bowed politely as he passed; a dark-skinned family was arguing in their own language; a red-and-gold poster on the station wall advertised Dr. Goodfellow’s Genuine Human Zoo, featuring Pygmies, Zulu Warriors, Indian Chiefs, and Slave Girls of the East!
“We’re already in a damned human zoo,” Locke grouched, and dispatched Mr. Stirling to find a cab to take us directly to the head offices of the Royal Rubber Company. The porters crammed Mr. Locke’s luggage into the back of the cab, and Stirling and I dragged it up the white marble steps of the company offices.
Mr. Locke and Mr. Stirling vanished into the dim hallways with a number of important-looking men in black suits, and I was instructed to sit on a narrow-backed chair in the lobby and not bother anyone or make any noise or touch anything. I contemplated the mural on the opposite wall, which showed a kneeling African handing Britannia a basket of rubber vines. The African wore a rather slavish, starry-eyed expression.
I wondered if Africans counted as colored in London, and then I wondered if I did, and felt a little shiver of longing. To be part of some larger flock, to not be stared at, to know my place precisely. Being “a perfectly unique specimen” is lonely, it turns out.
One of the secretaries was watching me with narrow-eyed eagerness. You know the type: one of those squat white ladies with thin lips who apparently live their entire lives longing for the chance to rap someone’s knuckles with a ruler. I declined to give her the opportunity. I jumped up, pretending to hear Mr. Locke calling for me, and skittered down the hall after him.
The door was cracked. Oily lamplight oozed out, and men’s voices made soft, hungry echoes against oak paneling. I inched close enough to see inside: there were eight or nine mustached men surrounding a long table piled high with all of Locke’s luggage. The black cases were opened, and crumpled newspapers and straw were strewn everywhere. Locke himself stood at the head of the table, holding something I couldn’t see.
“A very valuable find indeed, gentlemen, all the way from Siam, containing what I’m told is powdered scale of some kind—quite potent—”
The men listened with unseemly eagerness in their faces, their spines curving toward Mr. Locke as if magnetically compelled. There was something odd about them—a kind of collective not-quite-right-ness, as if they weren’t men