He motioned towards one of the cushioned wooden chairs by the table and the young woman, closing her parasol, took it.
‘I do not think I shall ever be anything other than a stranger in London. I am rarely allowed out to see any of it. My mother is convinced that I must be chaperoned everywhere I go. If I am not, she believes I will end by running off with a shoe-black off the streets.’
‘Yet here you are in Cremorne Gardens. Unchaperoned.’ And you visited a gentleman’s lodgings in Doughty Street, equally unaccompanied, Adam thought, although he said nothing of it.
‘I have given my mother the slip. She has gone to see her banker in Lombard Street, leaving me, as she thinks, reading a novel in our rooms at Brown’s. I took a cab ten minutes after she left.’
Adam could not help but laugh at the conspiratorial air with which the young woman made her confession.
‘Was it awfully improper to suggest meeting you here?’ Emily asked after a moment’s pause.
‘A little unconventional, perhaps.’
‘I am quite certain that I have done any number of things that were awfully improper in the weeks since I arrived in town. There are so many more rules in London than there are in Salonika. But I grow very weary of them.’
She heaved a great sigh as if to indicate the extent of her weariness.
‘Am I not to enjoy the freedom that men take for granted, Mr Carver? Can a respectable young lady not walk where she wishes without attracting sullen stares or unwanted conversation?’
Adam was unsure what to say. The truth was that an unaccompanied lady in the streets of London was only too likely to attract exactly the kind of attention Emily described. Or worse.
‘And yet I trust that I have not been too forward. Too…’ She paused to search for the word. ‘Too unmaidenly.’
‘I am certain you are incapable of appearing unmaidenly, Miss Maitland.’
‘I shall have to do as you have done, Mr Carver,’ Emily said, laughing. ‘Write a book about my travels! The adventures of a naive young girl from Salonika in the wilds of London!’
‘And of what have your London adventures consisted?’ Apart from visiting gentlemen unannounced, Adam thought to himself.
‘Very little, if truth be told.’ Emily looked cast down at the thought of all the adventures she had been missing.
‘There must be something to fill the pages of this book you will write.’
‘Well, we have been to the theatre on several occasions. We went to the Queen’s last night. Lady Audley’s Secret.’ She used the tip of her parasol to trace some pattern in the gravel around her chair. ‘Such a dismal drama. Nothing but murder, bigamy and madness. We were greatly disappointed by it. Although the ladies’ hats were much to be admired.’
‘I am sorry that your visit to the theatre was not a success.’
‘Oh, you should not be.’ Emily laughed. ‘No play can be considered a complete failure if one comes away from it with a new idea for a bonnet.’
‘I have to confess that I have never gone to a play and studied the hats of my neighbours with any great attention.’
‘You certainly should do, Mr Carver.’ Emily sounded as if she was recommending a moral duty that was not to be lightly shirked. ‘Hats are fearfully revealing. I think that you can judge much about a person’s character from the shape of his or her hat. Take the hat belonging to the gentleman in the blue jacket who is standing by the little gateway onto the dancing platform. The black coachman’s hat.’
Adam turned his head very slightly so that he could see the person Emily meant.
‘And what does that hat tell you about its wearer?’
‘That the gentleman in question is not a gentleman at all. That he is not to be trusted.’ Emily was firm in her conviction.
‘And does my own headgear reveal anything about my character?’ Adam asked. The young woman put her head on one side and pretended to consider the question.
‘That you are a gentleman and that you are to be trusted, I would say.’
Adam smiled. He tipped the headgear in question, a low-crowned grey top hat, in Emily’s direction.
‘Thank you kindly, miss,’ he said, ironically. ‘And is there anything which you would care to entrust to such a trustworthy gentleman?’
‘There is certainly a secret which I should entrust to somebody,’ the young woman said, looking at him with disconcerting directness. ‘But I am not yet certain that the gentleman in question is that somebody.’
‘Is there anything the gentleman in question could or should do to assist you in reaching the certainty you seek?’
‘Not at present. There is nothing to be done.’ She looked away towards the dancing platform. Adam was left to contemplate her profile and struggle to think of more to say. Emily showed no signs that she would be the one to renew the conversation.
‘How long will you and your mother remain in town?’ he asked after half a minute’s silence, which had seemed to him like half an hour.
‘Who can tell? Perhaps a week. Perhaps a month. I suppose we shall be gone before the end of August. Surely everybody has left by then?’
Adam thought the streets of London would probably be no less crowded at the end of August than they were in the middle of June. Besides, he wondered whether Emily and her mother were quite so conversant with the higher echelons of society as her remark seemed intended to suggest.
‘You will return to Salonika, perhaps? I am sure that Salonika offers society to entertain your mother and yourself,’ Adam said. On the basis of his own experience of the city, he was unsure of any such thing but thought it politest to claim otherwise.
‘Society!’ Emily said, with great scorn. ‘Nothing but a set of old frumps and foozles, I can assure you. Nobody talks about a thing but the price of this and the price of that and when the next ship from Constantinople is due. I have been like to scream with boredom the entire time we have lived there.’
‘I am sorry to hear that, Miss Maitland. So there is little to draw you back to Salonika.’
‘Not a thing. My mother is considering the possibility of travelling to Switzerland. She thinks a month amongst the glaciers would be of inestimable advantage to the health of us both.’
‘And do you agree with her?’
‘A daughter should probably always agree with her mother. But I am inclined to believe that we will thrive well enough without the benefit of mountain air and Alpine walks.’
Since they had first begun to talk, Adam had noticed that Emily’s feet had been restlessly tapping beneath the table. Now she began to wave her arm in time to the music drifting over from the bandstand.
‘We must dance before we leave, Mr Carver.’
Adam was startled. He had not thought that they were leaving. He still had no notion about ‘the affairs of consequence to us both’ of which Emily had written in her letter. He had assumed that he had been summoned to Cremorne Gardens to hear more of them. Now, after little more than idle chatter about hats, the theatre and the Alps, together with an enigmatic remark about a secret that should be told, the young woman was talking of dancing. And of leaving. In his surprise, he scarcely noticed that she had been so forward as to suggest taking to the dance floor herself.
‘I am no dancer,’ he said. ‘My left foot rarely seems to know what my right foot is doing.’
‘This is a galop,’ Emily replied. ‘And the galop is no dance. At least, not one worthy of the name. Little more than a dash down the room, a swift turn, and then a dash back. Even so poor a dancer as you claim to be can take the floor for a galop.’