indignant and blustering.
Marianne moved closer to the man, saying something Jack couldn’t hear, and held out her hand. In a flash, it all changed. The proper gentleman’s face contorted, and he caught her about the throat and pulled her against his body with an arm like a vise. Jack’s heart, already hammering from the chase, skipped and stuttered. “No!” He lunged forward, ready to attack.
Then Marianne sank in a faint, poor thing, her knees buckling. Jack twisted to catch her—but no, she wasn’t collapsing as he’d thought. She’d got the man to loosen his hold, and she bent abruptly at the waist, flipping the much larger man over her body. Jack could only gape as the large man was somersaulted over Marianne, landing flat on his back on the pavement. With a single stride, Marianne went to the groaning man’s side and planted her foot gently on his throat.
“Stay down,” she said coolly, “and don’t cause any more mischief. And give my kitchenmaid back what your accomplice stole from him.”
“Accomplice...?” Jack had no idea what was going on. How had Marianne flung a grown man over her head like that? And where was the man who had stolen Jack’s money?
A constable arrived on the scene and took charge of the prone man from Marianne. A search of his pockets revealed not only Jack’s purse, but several others—more than enough to haul him off, despite his protests that he’d never stolen a thing.
“He’ll be giving up his accomplice within five minutes.” Marianne dusted her hands on her skirts, then straightened her hat. All perfectly untroubled, seeming heedless of the curious crowd about. “All right, then, Jack? I have to go back and get my basket from Mr. Haviland. We’d best count all the jars to make sure he hasn’t helped himself.”
“How...” Jack shook his head. “I don’t understand. How did you know who had my purse? That wasn’t the man who stole it.”
“The dip was so clumsy. He couldn’t expect to get away with it unless he handed off the goods to someone else, and I saw him do it. If you’d caught the first fellow, he wouldn’t have so much as a stolen farthing on him.” Jack must have been staring, for she added, “It’s not so uncommon a scheme here in London. Especially on a busy street.”
Jack kept a hand to his purse—impressed, intrigued, and not a little intimidated. “And you deal with this every day.” As they retraced their steps to the greengrocer’s, he asked the more pressing question. “Where did you learn to flip a grown man over your head?”
“Well, it wasn’t over my head. But I learned it from Miss Carpenter. She teaches geometry and mathematics at the academy.”
He remembered her pause when she was describing the job of Mrs. Lavery, who apparently liked eating colcannon. “She teaches something else too, I’ll warrant.”
“Oh—perhaps. You did all right for someone who hasn’t had her instruction. You almost had that first fellow.”
Retrieving the basket from the bemused Mr. Haviland, Jack resettled it on his arm. For the second time, he asked, “What sort of academy is this?”
Marianne grinned at him. “Maybe this evening, you’d like to find out.”
Chapter Three
JACK HAD LOOKED FORWARD to one of Miss Carpenter’s lessons that evening. It would be interesting, he thought, to learn her methods for flipping grown humans over one’s head.
Interesting? That was putting the matter mildly.
Within three minutes of entering the ballroom for the lesson, Jack had seen enough to realize Marianne had let that thief’s accomplice off easy by only tossing him to the pavement.
Within another two minutes, Jack had been volunteered—though not precisely voluntarily—to play the part of an attacker toward Marianne, and he himself had been heaved through the air and onto a sawdust-stuffed mat that wasn’t nearly thick enough.
“One can use the human body as a l-lever to move much larger masses,” explained Miss Carpenter, a square-shouldered, freckled young woman with red-blond hair and a deceptively sweet face. “A-as the Greek scientist Archimedes is thought to have said, ‘Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I can move the earth.’ But in Greek, of course.”
She regarded Jack, still prone on the floor, with approval. “G-good, Mr. G-grahame. You l-landed just r-right.” Her stammer came and went, present when addressing Jack but almost absent when speaking to the others in the room, whom she clearly knew well.
Besides Jack and Marianne, six others were present for the lesson. Jack recognized one as the art