“Where shall we go now? Is there a Tube station nearby?”
“We passed one on the way—it’s just at the corner. But would you mind walking for a while? If we go south it’s about twenty minutes to Charing Cross. We can get on a District line train there.”
It seemed that nearly every other building they passed was a theater, almost all of them disgorging hundreds of patrons, and before long it became an effort to stay together. Then it began to rain, albeit lightly, and the people around them became even more impatient to carve a path through the crowd, never mind how many others they had to shove or elbow out of the way.
They were crossing Shaftesbury Avenue, heads down against the rain, when a man bumped into Miriam, his shoulder catching hers and all but spinning her around. She stumbled, almost dropping to her knees, but managed to take an unsteady step forward. She was almost at the curb and out of harm’s way, but with her next step she felt her heel sink into a hole of some sort. She looked down to discover that her shoe was stuck fast in a metal grate.
“Ann!” she cried out, and her friend, turning, crouched to help her. They tried to wrestle it loose, all the while enduring the complaints of passersby, but it was no use. The shoe would not come free.
“You’ll have to undo the strap,” Ann said. “Then we can at least stand on the curb. No sense in getting knocked down for the sake of a shoe.”
“But these are my only good—”
“May I help you?” came an unfamiliar voice.
Miriam looked up, and then farther up again. A rather enormous man was standing next to them, his arms outstretched in an attempt to protect them from the passing crowds. “I saw you stumble,” he explained. “Are you all right?”
“I think so. It is only my pride that is hurting me.”
She’d managed to undo the buckle at her ankle, but she was reluctant to give up on her shoe.
“You ladies should stand on the curb,” the stranger suggested. “I’ll see if I can wriggle this loose. Any sane motorist would think twice before running me down.”
“What about the mad ones?” she asked.
He grinned. “There’s not a thing I can do about them,” he admitted. Kneeling down, he took hold of her shoe and began to twist it back and forth, pushing it down and sliding the heel along the grate. “Almost there . . . aha. Here we go.” He held up the freed shoe triumphantly.
“Thank you,” Miriam said, taking it from him. “It was very kind of you to stop and help.” She hopped to the corner and, after slipping on the shoe, crouched to fasten the buckle.
He was still there when she straightened. Not a handsome man, not compared to Ann’s mysterious aristocrat, but there was something compelling about him all the same. His appearance was the furthest thing from chic she could imagine, for his clothes, though evidently of good quality, were ill-fitting and marked here and there with blotches of ink, and the knees of his trousers were stained with mud from where he’d knelt in the street. There was a button missing from his vest, which did not match his coat at all, and his bow tie was almost comically lopsided. If he were to tell her it was his habit to dress in the dark, and furthermore that he liked to choose his garments from the nearest pile of laundry, she would not have been surprised in the least.
He was very tall, for the top of her head only came to his shoulders, and his hands, as ink-stained as the rest of him, were similarly enormous. Yet he wasn’t the least bit intimidating. Perhaps it was his pale eyes, much magnified by his spectacles, and the way they seemed to radiate kindness. Or perhaps it was the way his sandy hair, silvering at the temples and dampened by the rain, so badly needed a haircut. Whatever other failings might afflict this man, vanity was not among them.
As grateful as she was for his help, and as pleasant as he seemed at first glance, his failure to simply disappear into the crowds made her uneasy. Whatever did he have to gain from lingering?
“Thank you again for your help. I am certain you will wish to—”
“You’re most welcome,” he said, and held out his hand for her to shake. She did so, unable to ignore the way his hand enveloped hers so surely. “I’m Walter Kaczmarek.”
“I am Miriam Dassin,” she said. “This is my friend Miss Hughes. We are on our way home,” she added pointedly. “Ann?”
“Oh, yes. Of course,” Ann agreed. “On our way home. Shall we . . . ?”
They began to walk, side by side as the crowds were thinning, and Mr. Kaczmarek, moving to the curb side of the pavement, fell into step beside them. “Were you at the theater tonight?” he asked, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to make conversation with strangers. What sort of Englishman was he?