the odds that I'd happen across you again, not a fortnight after my return? Like a rose in this urban wilderness," she cries, dropping Fido's wrists to gesture across the crowded City.
Fido catches sight of the straw-coloured curls of Colonel Anderson, making his way back across Farringdon Street, so she speaks fast. "I used to wonder if you had new, absorbing occupations—another child, even?"
Helen's giggle has half a shudder in it. "No, no, that's the one point on which Harry and I have always agreed."
"The little girls must be ... what, ten or so?" The calculation discomfits her; she still pictures them spinning their tops on the nursery floorboards.
"Eleven and twelve. Oh, Nan and Nell are quite the sophisticated demoiselles. You won't know them."
Then the Scot is at her elbow. "Rather a nuisance, Mrs. C.," he reports. "They've only eight of the magenta in stock, so I've asked for them to be sent on to you in Eccleston Square when they're ready."
Fido's mind is suddenly filled with the tall white walls in Belgravia that she once called home. "The same house?" she asks Helen, under her breath. "Were you able to put the tenants out?"
"The same everything," she answers. "Harry and I have picked up our former life like some moth-eaten cloak from the floor of a wardrobe."
"Doesn't someone in Trollope tell a bride, 'Don't let him take you anywhere beyond Eccleston Square'?" asks Colonel Anderson.
Fido laughs. "Yes, it's still the last bastion of respectability."
"Are you a Belgravian too, Miss Faithfull?"
"Bloomsbury," she corrects him, with a touch of defiance. "I'm one of these 'new women'; they'd never have me in Eccleston Square."
"Even as ''Printer to Her Majesty'?"
"Especially under that title, I suspect! No, I live snug and bachelor-style on Taviton Street. I read the Times over breakfast, which rather scandalizes my maid."
They all laugh at that.
"I was just setting off home after a morning at my steam-works, over there at Number 83," says Fido, gesturing up Farringdon Street. "The Friend of the People—a weekly paper—is in type, and goes to press tomorrow."
"How exciting," murmurs Helen.
"Hardly. Mulish apprentices, and paper curling in the heat!" Even as she's saying the words, this automatic disparagement irritates Fido. The fact is, it is exciting. Sometimes when she wakes in the morning, every muscle in her limbs tightens when she remembers that she's a publisher, and no longer just the youngest of Reverend Ferdinand Faithfull's enormous brood.
"I'll hail a cab at the stand, then, shall I," Anderson asks, "and drop you ladies home?"
"I have a better idea," cries Helen. "Ever since reading about the Underground Railway, I've been longing to descend into Hades."
Fido smiles, remembering what it's like to be sucked into this woman's orbit: the festive whims and whirls of it. "I don't mean to disappoint you, but it's quite respectable."
"You've tried it?"
"Not yet. But as it happens," she adds on impulse, "my physician believes it might be beneficial."
"My friend's a martyr to asthma," Helen tells the colonel.
My friend: two simple words that make Fido's head reel.
"The Underground's uncommon convenient," he says, "and certainly faster than inching through all this traffic."
"Onwards, then: a journey into the bowels of the earth!" says Helen. Her hand—the bare one—is a warm snake sliding through the crook of Fido's elbow.
Yet another building site has opened up like an abscess since Fido was last on this street. Anderson helps the ladies across the makeshift plank bridge, Helen's yellow skirt swinging like a bell. The wasteland is littered with wheelbarrows and spades, and the caked foreheads of the navvies remind Fido of some detail about face painting from a tedious lecture she recently attended by a South Sea missionary.
"I barely recognize London—the way it's thrown out tendrils in all directions," remarks Helen.
"Yes, and the government refuses to make the developers consider the poor," Fido tells her, "who're being evicted in their tens of thousands—"
But Helen has stopped to brush something off a flounce, and Fido feels jarred, as if she's walked into a wall. The old Fido—meaning, the young Fido—knew nothing more of the state of the nation than she'd picked up on parish visits with her mother in Surrey. That girl never spouted statistics; she talked of novels, balls, matches, who had dash and go. The long hiatus, the seven years during which Fido and Helen have been unknown to each other, seems to gape like a tear in a stocking.
In the station, a train is waiting, the hazy sunlight that comes through the roof catching its gilt name: