Re: Vauxhall Gardens
Within him dwells that villain’s doubt, the unease of the inkling of this being a brand of cruel joke. Her kind is not well known by him to be so giving without a burial price, and here he receives the relic-cloth as she speaks, staring down at the artifact with mouth apart, moistening his lips with one dart of a curled tongue, requiring air from both nose and throat when the image is stifling. Her words are but mere murmurs for the course of a moment, reflections on a frozen lake and trapped hands pressing underneath ice. He is sure to avoid skimming the milk of her fingers with his calloused bruise, work-dirtied ones. Still, here he stares at the neatly folded, estranged handkerchief as if seeing it for the first time, response a hushed suit.
“A compliment is never safe fer a lady from a man of the rookery,” says he, still a downpour stare, thumb and index thrilling the material, and he notes to feel no emotion. “I, the worm in the dirt, scavenging corpses, you the flower growin’ up from underneath. I’m invisible until I speak to you, to them, a garish speck, a vermin gypsy. It is my advantage being so unseen, methinks. No one judges the forgotten.”
And finally, the prison eyes veer up, one flick to look her dead in the eye, he grins like the wolf in grandma’s bed, yet it’s not implying a coarse thought. She’s pretty and small, and has taken great care in bringing this back to him. She's not like those harlots in the slums, who let his sister expire.
"Do you not find the confines of so many rules tedious?" he inquires, and the curiosity is genuine and deficient of mocking.