She bit her lip. “Explain what?”
“You’re a woman. Your ambitions are…” He paused, waiting for her to finish his sentence.
Her fingers clamped together and she looked away. “Unwomanly,” she said in a quiet, choked voice. “Unattractive. Unappealing.”
“There. That’s their rubbish. Push it away, Daisy. Your ambitions are a fire that will keep anyone worthwhile warm.”
“But—”
He held up a finger. “No buts. Push it away. That’s theirs. You don’t need to keep hold of it anymore, thank you.”
She exhaled. “Crash. I don’t know.”
“They’ll hand you a sack of rubbish and then make you apologize for holding putrefying refuse. They act like their rules are holy and moral, but their only rule is that people like me—people like you—must lose.”
She looked up at him. “But we do lose.”
“Not always. Try another one. Tell me what you fear.”
“I’m…” She let out a shuddering breath. “I’m only worth anything now because I’m pretty.” Her voice shook. “I’m ten years from being too old, too ugly, too anything, and if I don’t establish myself now, I’ll have to leave my mother.”
To have a sell-by date, as if she were a notation scrawled on a can of potted meat. To feel that responsibility.
“Push it away. That’s false. That’s their rubbish. Can you see the truth?”
She didn’t say anything, not for a long while. He waited, letting her think.
“In ten years, I’ll be just as clever. I’ll be me with more experience. Beauty need not matter.”
“Almost right. In ten years,” Crash said, “you’ll still be pretty. Don’t let them tell you that youth is a woman’s only beauty. That gray hair and wrinkles will rob you of your appeal. It’s a load of rubbish. You should meet my aunt. She’s beautiful. Push it away, Daisy.”
She shut her eyes. “I’m not…worth anything because I’m not a virgin,” she said in a low voice.
“Oh, Daisy.” That one stung to hear. He did touch her then, setting his hand on her shoulder.
She raised her eyes to his. A sea of hurt reflected in her pupils.
The thing about being raised as he had? He’d thought of what he would do if she were with child. He hadn’t given one thought to the fact of her virginity. It was not something his aunts and her friends thought important, except as an afterthought.
“You don’t become less for caring. For loving. For existing, for being a person who does all those things.”
She looked over at him.
“Push it away,” he said. “Push it all away.”
“How?” Her hands fluttered once in front of her. “How? How, when everyone says otherwise, do you…” She swallowed.
“Do I what?”
“How do you smile when people say these things to you? How do you laugh and say that you’re proud of your background, when…”
Crash looked Daisy in the face. Her chin was tilted down, her eyes turned to the side. “When what?” His voice seemed dangerously low to his ears.
“When you cannot be,” she whispered.
Long ago, he’d heard similar words from her as condemnation. He hadn’t heard them as a prayer for mercy, nor as a plea for help. But that was what they were.
“I say that I come from a proud line of dock whores and sailors,” he said in a low voice, “because I am proud.”
She swallowed.
“Nobody except my family takes pride in what we are, so we’ve had to invent it ourselves. I don’t know what race I am. I don’t know if the question makes any sense. But I know where I come from. My grandmother was born a slave on the island of Tortola. She accompanied the trader who held her on his voyages as…never mind. One day, a mile from the shore of England, she jumped overboard.”
“Why?”
He managed a short, frowning glance. “Because slavery was not recognized in England,” he said shortly. “She couldn’t swim. She made it to shore anyway. At the time, she was pregnant with my aunt.”
Daisy looked up at him.
“When people hear ‘dock whore,’ they imagine some poor specimen of a woman who wanders up and down the wharf, thinking of nothing but her next john. My grandmother took in laundry. She sewed. She did all these things for sailors, and one of them fell in love with her. How could he not?” He smiled. “The only people who called her a whore were ladies who had no other words for a poor woman with a prior bastard child. My grandfather was an Indian lascar who had been abandoned in London by a shipping company because he had injured his knee. No clergy would solemnify their marriage. It didn’t lessen the affection in it. The gentry saw her as nothing but a prostitute. But those of us who knew her? She was an extraordinary woman. I was ten when she died, and the crowd at her funeral wouldn’t fit in the tavern.”
Daisy let out a long breath.
“My mother, they told me, was sweet. She worked for a seamstress and lived with my grandmother. And yes, I suppose she was a whore, too, in the sense that she took coin in exchange for intercourse from more than one man. But nothing is simple. The life of a sailor is hard. They see no women for months on end; they’re expected to be tough as nails all the time. My mother was the shoulder they cried on, the woman they imagined during the worst storms. She was the one who held them and reminded them that they were human, that they mattered. Men would give her everything they had—not to purchase her favors, but because she was everything they had. She died when I was two. I have no memory of her, but I remember men coming to our flat for years after, asking after her. I remember them weeping inconsolably when they were told she had passed away.” Crash shrugged. “More than one of those men claimed to be my father. He was probably from China, but there was a man from Portugal, and a French fellow… Well, never mind. Three men claimed they were my father, and every time they docked, they’d come see me. They brought me toys and books. They’d leave their earnings with my aunt for my care. They taught me to cheat at cards. They all knew about each other, but they didn’t care.”
She was watching him with wide eyes. Listening.
“So there you have it, Daisy,” he said. “My grandmother was a woman so strong of will that she threw herself over the side of a ship, not knowing how to swim, because she would be free. My mother was a woman so loved that she gave me three fathers after her death, not just one. And my aunt was the one who told me about them—story after story when they had passed away. Every time someone told me to keep my head down or slapped me for thinking myself above my station, my aunt was there. Holding me. Whispering to me that they were wrong, that the blood in my veins was every bit as red as theirs. That I was worth something. Anything.”
Daisy looked down.
“I am descended,” Crash said, “from a line of dock whores and sailors. Men and women who were told they were nothing. They refused to accept the label. Yes, Daisy, I’m proud.”
She exhaled.
“I should never have called you a waste.”
Daisy was still considering her feet. “Now what?” she said. Her eyes drifted to the dingy water of the canal. Her question encompassed not just the next hour, but…more. “Now do I get on the velocipede and ride fast?”
“Now,” he said, “now you give the speech you intend to deliver at the final competition in a few days. This time, you don’t waver. You don’t stop. You don’t apologize. You believe that you’re right, that you can win, that you deserve it. And you don’t let up.”
Chapter Seven
It should not have been so exhausting to deliver a speech Daisy had already memorized to an audience of one. But with Crash listening, Daisy heard her words with a new ear.
Everything she said came out sounding stilted and wrong. She could hardly make it through a sentence without an interruption.
“Even though women—”
“You’re apologizing,” Crash told her. “Stop apologizing for having a store for women.”
&nb
sp; She swallowed. “Because women are the main clientele, I expect loyalty, word-of-mouth sales, and…” She trailed off. “And a savvy eye for bargains?”
“Reasonable,” Crash said, “but why are you asking me a question?”
Her hands curled into fists. Two sentences later…
“Although the main clientele will be—”
“Although?” Crash folded his arms and raised a disapproving eyebrow. “Don’t apologize. Start over.”
By the time she’d run through it all once, she wanted to scream.
“Good,” he said. “Now do it again, this time without prompting.”
At the end of the second time through, she wanted to pull out her hair.
“Excellent,” Crash said. “Now do it, imagining that you’re on a velocipede. All arrogance; no hesitation. Start.”
By the fifth time around, she wanted to pull his hair out. Even Crash had begun to look weary. His eyelids drooped a little.
She looked at the flickering street lamps. “I must be going,” she said. “You’ve done enough. You must be exhausted.”
He gave her a tired smile. “Don’t worry about me. I’m game for another five rounds. Never let anyone say I’m anything other than indefatigable.”
“But I have to go now.”