by Daria Vernon
The fear was confronted sooner than expected.
One of the carriers offered a hand to help her from the seat and she stepped out of the front of the box. The sedan men quickly hurried off to find their next fare.
Allison stared up the brick facade of 8 Dryden Street. She could feel how her dress drew the gaze of the passersby. She must’ve stuck out like a gilt flower, decorated as she was for the ball. Conscious of herself, she lowered her head and knocked on the door.
A full minute seemed to pass before it cracked.
“Who want?” The words uttered by the meek feminine voice made little sense at first and Allison stammered.
“I—I am here to see—I wonder where Mr. Plymouth might reside, please.”
Dull, tired eyes examined her from the shadows inside. Flicking up and down, they approved enough of what they saw that the door was suddenly flung full open. A frail woman with a few gray hairs falling into her face pointed up a tightly wound stairwell.
“U’stairs,” she said, “but I don’t want no trouble.” The woman slammed the front door behind Allison and ducked into the nearest rooms, slamming that door too.
Her initial rough encounter aside, the building seemed well kept and quiet. Allison looked upward. She’d suddenly lost the ability to swallow. Harry had once written about the view. U’stairs must’ve meant the topmost floor.
Each step upward increased the shaking in Allison’s fingertips. She’d never fainted in her life, yet felt suddenly laid bare to the possibility. Her thoughts were layered and chaotic. What if—? What if—?
There was only one door at the top.
She raised a fist to knock, but her eye caught the glitter of the garnets on her bracelet. This was absurd. She was dressed to draw the eyes of the ton’s finest bachelors. Yet, here she was in a tidy tenant house, seeking a Bow Street Runner who might’ve already discarded her.
The memory of Harry’s smile flitted through her thoughts. His smiles started in his lips, but ended in his deep blue eyes, which became so lit by his spirit that they dazzled like fireworks. She could not fathom such eyes being insincere. If she were to be a victim to her own naiveté, then so be it.
With that one fleeting image of a smile, the garden of her hopes was watered. Her nerves settled and her bile retreated.
She knocked.
A little gasp puffed from her. The door had moved away from her knuckles at the first gentle rap. It opened with a well-oiled whisper and stopped when it was a few finger-widths ajar.
Allison glanced over her shoulder, towards the staircase, as though someone might present themselves to offer reassurance.
She rapped again, this time against the doorjamb.
There was no sound within.
“Mr. Plymouth?” Allison lowered her voice. “Harry?”
No answer.
She flattened a palm against the door and gently eased it open, only for it to be stopped by something on the other side. The sensation made her jump back. Something wasn’t right.
Somewhere downstairs, a door opened and closed noisily. She wished to be anywhere but in the hallway where she felt so out of place.
She pushed the door slowly until she again met the resistance. There was almost enough space to push her head through the crack and have a peek, but the idea of putting any part of herself through the portal before she knew what lay on the other side was wholly unsettling. She put a shoulder to the door and shoved.
The resistance was giving, but as she pushed there was a small cascade of disturbance. The tinks of broken glass. The scuffing of heavy things against the plank floor. Her progress struck another, more solid resistance and the door would open no farther. No matter. There was room enough to slide through.
Her next tentative greeting was swallowed up by the sight that confronted her.
It was difficult to absorb it all at once. This carnage. The golden twilight cut through the dormer windows, flattening each layer of destruction into its own shadowy, twisted shape.
It had been a toppled bookcase that had blocked her entry, with its documents and tomes scattered far into the room’s center. Pages had been ruthlessly torn out and were thick on the ground, disturbed by her skirts as she entered.
A carpet was scrunched against the wall. Chairs, splintered to bits were haphazardly shoved into the fireplace. A flipped table. The bed’s mattress was in the opposite corner of the bed itself. Fibers and down erupted from its insides in a gory fashion.
Allison wandered far enough into the room to find one of the strips of waning sunlight and she stood in it as though it might comfort her.
The words that the lady downstairs had uttered suddenly clanged like an alarm bell in Allison’s skull—
I don’t want no trouble.
What happened here? Was Harry safe? Was she?
She wandered toward the next window, to where a writing desk lay on its broken face. She crouched to sweep some papers from beneath it. Mostly blank, but then a letter, or the start of one at least, with Dear Primrose, sitting lonely at the top. She brushed the words with a soft touch of her thumb only to watch them disappear beneath a black smudge.
A swift examination of her hand revealed several fingertips doused with India ink. Daubing them against the blank part of the page did little to clean her up. She stood and found the puddle where the bottle had shattered. None was on her skirts, but her toe had been in it the whole time. She wiped her sole uselessly against the papers.
So absorbed she was in her little mess, she almost didn’t catch the click of the pistol.
“Don’t move.” The male voice was gentle, but authoritative. “I don’t know who you are, but you’re going to tell me everything, including who sent you.”
Allison heard the door close. Footsteps.
Her heart clenched as she awaited further instructions, as she hoped that she might be asked to turn around before this stranger was upon her.
“I only came for Harry.”
The footsteps that crunched through the broken glass halted. They didn’t move, it seemed, for a very long time. The absence of sound was hard to bear.
“Why?”
“Because he—he promised me something.”
Harry Plymouth had been nights without sleep. It was enough to worry him that he might at any moment be in a dream.
One golden curl tumbled down her neck from where her coiffure had lost hold of it. That seemed right. As did the rich and sunny concoction that enveloped her. Her petite stature. That too. Her voice—he didn’t quite remember her voice, but he knew he liked it. He thought he might like this voice too. Though he hated to hear now how it trembled.
Yes. From the back, she was every bit like his Lady Allison—his distant Primrose. Yet he expected every moment that she might turn and reveal some villain’s face instead. Such were his nightmares. Such was his life now.
“Promised you what?” he asked, lowering his pistol.
She turned then.
And it wasn’t some wicked face that greeted him. It was hers. It was her green eyes—bright and gentle—that shimmered in the sun’s last rays. They danced in small ways as she assessed him. Then they flared, widening at the very moment recognition struck.
He flinched as she moved toward him. No. She can’t be here. It isn’t safe.
But his arms betrayed him, folding around her as she collapsed into them. For a moment, he was lost. Blessedly, lost. Then his senses awoke to the crinkling of silk beneath his fingers. He gently extracted her.
“Allison. You shouldn’t be here.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
Not remotely. But now was not the time.
The urgency of the situation wrapped around his neck like a tightening noose and now here was his lovely Allison standing dangerously close to the same gallows.
Her fingers
threaded through his, bringing with them a veil of peace, rescuing him from hell, for just another moment.
“Harry. What is all of this? What’s happened?”
Her face was the shape of a heart and her lip trembled over her small and pointed chin.
“You look very lovely,” he said, as though all sense had fled him. There was an echoing emptiness to his thoughts—a mind full of cobwebs.
For one second, her eyes lit up in the way that he hoped they might, but then her expression collapsed into one of pity as though he were a senile man who needed to be led to his dinner plate.
Another thought—useless in the moment—escaped the cobwebs—
“I’m very sorry.”
He wandered away from her and picked up a book of no consequence. He placed it in a deliberate position on the mantel, as though that one gesture might render the whole room back in order.
“Harry, you’re frightening me.”
He turned on her.
“Am I?” Things like action and decisions, they all felt so distant amid the deprivation of sleep. “It’s no wonder. I’m rather frightened too.”
Allison approached and he could see the need for answers swimming in her eyes. She opened her mouth to speak—
Something downstairs, though—
Harry placed a hand to her lips. They were warm and trembling. He lent his ear toward the door. Someone was downstairs. A man. Having words with the landlady.
Allison’s lips flinched beneath his fingers and he responded with a whole hand across her mouth. He hoped that the desperation in his eyes conveyed the rest before he whispered—
“Someone is coming. It’s very dangerous. Do you trust me?”
The sight of her wide and glassy eyes above his firm grip would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his days. If anything should happen to her, this fear would be the last expression he would ever know to grace her face.
He couldn’t let that be.
She nodded beneath his hand and he removed it. Taking her wrist in the hand that didn’t hold his pistol, he walked them as quietly as possible to the dormer where the desk was toppled. He unlatched the window, slid it upward and passed Allison up to it, using the desk as a step. For a moment he panicked that she might not fit through it, with her enormous skirts crowding the way. But her frock collapsed almost miraculously, the way a cat seemingly loses its bones when creeping beneath a gate.
He joined her on the roof outside and closed the window until just a sliver was open at the base.
Allison had already plastered herself to the slope of the roof with her heels braced against a decorative balustrade that thankfully made any falls unlikely.
They weren’t on the street side of the building, but he still hoped that the sun had dwindled enough to make them less conspicuous. Allison was wearing something meant to catch every eye in the city, even at a distance.
He stretched an arm around her, in a way that he hoped might be feebly reassuring.
“We need to move away from the window,” he whispered.
She nodded and crept away with Harry close at her heel—too close apparently, because he stepped on her dress and disturbed her balance. Before her surprised squeak could become a scream, his hand was across her mouth again. There was no time to linger on the anguish it caused him to handle her in such a manner, but rather than having to force away the thought himself, it was eased when she settled against him.
There was a thud as someone inside tried to open the door farther only to be met with the heavy bookcase.
Harry raised his half-cocked pistol and waited for the sound of a footstep to conceal the click as he pulled back the flintlock’s hammer. He slid his hand from Allison’s mouth and stroked her cheek instead, while keeping an ear to what was happening inside.
He expected to feel the girl shake apart in his arms, like a clockwork toy being rattled by an over-tight spring. But no. She was completely still, as though she didn’t even breathe.
Two sets of steps entered the room. One set, heavier, like boots. The other steps were only detectable by their carelessness as they shuffled through broken glass on the floor.
“I don’t think he’s been back,” said a man.
“No, I don’t suppose so.” This voice was deeper. It was near to the window. It was the voice with the boots.
“Should we leave a note?”
“A note?” The deep voice was laced with casual disdain.
“You know, like a threat?”
“Yes Gideon, we’ll be leaving a threat, but it won’t be on paper.”
The heavier steps crossed to the back of the room, near Harry’s devastated bed, then crossed the whole room again, toward the mantel. There was the sound of papers crumpling.
For a moment, the sound was just another innocuous detail, but then Harry realized exactly what sort of threat was intended. His heart twisted in his chest. More papers were crumpled. There were little knocks as the chair legs in the fireplace were disturbed. Harry wondered if Allison understood the outcome too.
The men inside worked rapidly and exchanged no further pleasantries. The sounds of footsteps either died down or were deadened by new sounds. A whiff of smoke reached the window. It was too dangerous to wait any longer, even if the men were still about.
Harry rolled away from Allison’s side and threw the window open, leading with his pistol hand.
As he dropped into the room, his eyes softened with relief even as they burned against the smoke—
The men were gone. They’d not waited long for the fire to take hold.
Harry scooped up a discarded counterpane and dashed to where the pile of burning rubbish trailed from the fireplace. He beat at the encroaching flames until they retreated and he smothered the rest of the pile with a rug.
Coughing and panting, he braced his hands on his knees, exhausted over the remains of the emergency. He turned to retrieve Allison and was stopped short by what he saw.
A leg.
Just a leg. Bare to the thigh. A pointed, slippered toe searching for the desk they’d used as a step. Her frothy dress had been caught up in the window frame, even as she now used one hand to try to force her pocket hoop through the opening. One leg. One strong leg, with treble clef curves. One ribboned garter below the knee, coming undone.
“Harry?”
His thoughts snapped back from paradise and he ran to assist her.
He extracted her in as chaste a manner as possible, which wasn’t saying much. When she finally had both heels on the floor and faced him, it was to display the sort of blush that put roses to shame.
Her embarrassment was his fault—dash the embarrassment—the threat to her very life was his fault.
She began to smooth her skirts, distractedly. The silk had a great many snags in it. Without thinking, Harry reached out to brush the dust of dried bird excrement from her side. She paused her own ministrations to observe his.
Her sides expanded as she took a deep breath. She lifted her chin to reveal an unexpected and unnerving smile.
“Well. This has been interesting. I don’t suppose my courage has earned me any actual answers?”
He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want her any more involved than she was. He stood there. Struck dumb.
“No?” she asked. “I supposed not.”
She straightened her skirt once more and moved past him, but he cut off her path at the door.
“Where are you headed?” he asked.
“To a very large party, where I hope to make guano and ruined silk the latest fashion.”
Harry didn’t mean to, but he laughed.
The smallest thread of a smile came to Allison’s lips too.
“Let me see you there.”
“For my safety?” she asked.
For my sanity.
THAN
K YOU
for reading this preview of
The Rogue’s Last Letter
Book Two of The Rewards of Ruin
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