Off Kilter

by Laura Strickland

  At first it looked as if the big bed lay empty. He blinked and made out Miss Delaney’s head on one of the pillows. She lay there alone, her body barely making a mound beneath the duvet.

  He breathed a sudden gasp that might have contained relief. Alone and safe, for now.

  And he’d best remove himself from the doorway before she awakened and saw him standing there like something from a bad dream.

  He moved hastily and, as if in answer to his thoughts, promptly encountered the mirror that hung over the fireplace on the sitting room wall. Like a man in a trance, he approached the shining silver expanse and regarded himself.

  Usually he avoided mirrors. And usually dim light such as this proved kind to him. Not so much now. This mirror contained a dose of honesty and, as if he’d never seen it before, he eyed his image.

  Ugly, they called him on the street, and yes, it was true. When with Tate, he sometimes forgot the factual evidence of his appearance, but he faced it now. Children had been known to cry at the sight of him. Ladies turned their eyes away, but he would not. He needed to look in full.

  A big man, he stood a strapping two inches over six feet, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. Nothing wrong with his body, then, save the mottled skin that spilled down his right side, as if a bucket of scars had upturned over him. His face had taken the worst of it when the valve failed and the boiler exploded at him that day. He’d barely had time to turn his head so that only one side took the steam and boiling water rather than both. It had geysered out at him when the metal fitting blew, coated him like liquid fire, and trickled down from the top of his head, burning through layers of skin all the way to the bone.

  A miracle he hadn’t lost his right eye, said the old doctor who eventually came to tend him. What a monster he would have been then. As it was…well, he had few illusions about himself.

  His employer at the time of the accident hadn’t liked spending money on his workers, most of whom were children. He had refused to take James to a doctor and had left him lying in agony on a cot, freezing and burning at the same time in the unheated dormitory up under the eaves, where the man called Gorman let his workers sleep. The pain had almost stolen his senses. By the time one of his fellow workers brought the doctor, who would come for a penny, little could be done for him, and he was fit only for the charity hospital on Franklin Street. He’d lain there for weeks, alone and unvisited, before being thrown out onto the streets, a horror of scabs and healing scars.

  The hair had never grown back on the right side of his head. He couldn’t grow beard on that side either, so later, when beard grew in on the other side, patchy, he’d formed the habit of shaving scrupulously.

  Not that it helped.

  He stared now into his own eyes, dark blue pools in the dim light.

  Gargoyle, he taunted himself. Monster. Better say it before the bonny wee lass sleeping in that bedroom did.

  As if he had conjured it, a shadow stirred behind him. A white blur appeared in the mirror at his shoulder, and his heart sank in dismay. The last thing he wanted was to be caught mooning at himself like some mesmerized outcast from the circus.

  “So you’ve returned.” The words made barely a whisper that floated in the dark. James bent his head, avoiding her image in the glass. What if a steam explosion hadn’t been his fate? Would he be able to turn to her now, a man to a woman, as he wished?

  Wished with all his being.

  “I heard you”—her voice caught—“and I feared you were someone else.”

  He spun to face her. She stood on her bare feet, clad in a nightgown of purest white. He knew he should turn his eyes from her, look anywhere else, but to save his life he couldn’t.

  “Sorry if I startled you.”

  “No, I’m glad you’re back.”

  “Are you all right?” He inspected her as best he could in the gloom.

  She didn’t appear harmed, but, as he knew, not all wounds showed.

  “Yes. No. I don’t know.” She shivered. “I don’t want to be alone.” Her gaze reached for his, beseeching. “I understand it’s not part of your job, Mr. Kilter, but might we sit together a while? I do not think I can bear to go back in there by myself.”

  James fought a war, swift and fierce, inside his heart. It was not his place to sit with her. But he could no sooner send her back into her solitary confinement as order an abused dog back into the hell from which it had come.

  He drew a great breath and expelled it again before he said, “Come and sit then, but leave the lamp unlit, if you please.”

  Chapter Eight

  Cat knew very well why Kilter wanted to leave the lamps unlit. But what had he been about, staring into the mirror when she came up behind him? Surely he must have been forced long ago to accept the way he looked.

  She tried again to imagine how it might feel to go through life with such a countenance, one that looked half melted away. Her heart clenched in sympathy.

  Yet here in the soft gloom of the sitting room, he didn’t look so different from other men. The faint light from the windows threw half his face into shadow—only the lopsided haircut looked terribly strange.

  She wondered why he didn’t shave the left side of his head. Some act of defiance, perhaps. He had very nice hair, thick and glossy.

  “Talk to me,” she begged, not caring for the unfairness of the request. She had no right to ask him to amuse her. But desperation made her reach out to him in helpless appeal. “Tell me about yourself. How did you come to this position, guarding other men’s prisoners?”

  “Are you his prisoner, then?”

  “Please, I don’t want to talk about me. I need a distraction.” Because if her mind kept chasing itself like a rat in a maze, she feared she would self-destruct.

  “So that’s what I am. A distraction.” Irony colored his voice.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be patronizing.”

  “You’re not. I guess it’s easy to be curious about someone like me.”

  “Do you mind?” A foolish question, but it was out before she could catch it back. Of course he minded. Who wouldn’t?

  He took a moment before replying. The dim light trickled over him when he tipped his head. “No point in minding, is there? Where would it get me?”

  The same might be said about Cat’s position here in Boyd’s hands. What good would it do to rail and weep? She would still have to obey him, and answer his sexual demands when the moment came.

  She said softly, “I admire your ability to be so philosophical about it.”

  “It didn’t come easy. Sometimes there are no choices.”

  “You’re right,” she agreed. Who would have thought they could be so much alike, this man from the streets of a strange city and she, cast out into the world?

  “You’ll be wondering how I got like this. It’s the first thing anyone wants to know.”

  “Is it?”

  “Some people just come right out and ask. Some don’t, but you can see the question in their eyes. Some scream it, taunt me with it.”

  “How many look past it to the man within?”

  He gave a sudden laugh as if startled. “Very few.”

  Yet as Cat could sense sitting there with him in the dark, much lay within this man: strength, intelligence, and kindness. Pain too, and perhaps sensitivity he sought to hide. She didn’t know how or why she could tell so much about him; she just could.

  “Do you mind talking about what happened to you, how you…”

  “Got like this?” Again he hesitated, so long this time she didn’t believe him when he at last said, “No, I don’t mind. It was an accident. After my mother died”—his voice faltered once more—“I went to work. That’s not to say I didn’t work at various jobs before that. What child in this city doesn’t work? But Ma was earning up till then, so I didn’t have to support myself alone. After, I learned what it is to work, to labor till you can’t put one foot in front of the other and you ache to the bone.”

&n
bsp; “What sort of work did you do?”

  “I got a place installing boiler units for a man called Gorman. I was skinny enough back then to fit into small places, which was an advantage to him. We are not talking grand jobs, here. Gorman was small time, did work in the homes of people who could barely afford heat. Everything was low grade and low dollar, including the fitting that blew out at me when we were running a test on a new install one day in January. Not an uncommon story; it happens every day. But since I was crammed in a closet with the unit at the time, checking the seams, I had no place much to go when it blew. No time, either. When one of those things goes at full boil, it’s instantaneous.”

  “I see.”

  “Gorman didn’t get me out of the space right away, either. He had a big belly on him and couldn’t squeeze in to fetch me. I wound up crawling out myself, but I don’t remember that, or a whole lot that came right after.”

  “You must have been taken to hospital.”

  “Not then. Children who work for the likes of Gorman heal on their own or not at all. He dragged me back to the dorm where he kept those of us without proper homes, and I lay for days till another of the boys, Benny, brought a doc. By then it was too late to do much for me. Likely not much could have been done anyway.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  Nearly the same age she, Cat, had been when Everett Kraus came into her life.

  “What happened after you healed?”

  He laughed again, a harsh sound. “After? Well, Gorman didn’t have any more use for me, and he tossed me out on what remained of my ear as soon as I could stand. I hung around the waterfront, freezing and hoping for handouts or odd jobs, but handouts were few. I finally got taken on by a man named Cox, to look after his dogs.”

  Kilter faltered for the first time, and Cat sensed darkness arising in him. At last he took up the tale once more. “He kept his dogs shut away, see, and me with them, so it didn’t matter how ugly I was. I found out real quick the dogs never saw daylight unless they went into the pit.”

  “Pit?”

  “Fighting.” Kilter drew a breath that expanded his chest. “Of all the terrible things I’d seen by then, I’d never imagined anything as awful as that. I was meant to feed them, clean up after them, and doctor their wounds. I knew how it felt to carry such ugly wounds. And they were vicious creatures, but they accepted me as one of them.”

  He paused again and resumed on a seemingly different subject. “Do you know they’re talking of banning dog fighting in this city? Wealthy men are building steam-powered metal dogs they put up against one another for vast amounts of money, so I’ve heard. But it still happens in back alleys, just what Cox did.”

  “It seems a lot of creatures and people are still slaves.”

  “You said that before.”

  “It’s how I feel,” Cat admitted.

  “Then why stay with him?”

  “I have reasons. There are always reasons. How long did you stay with Cox?”

  “Too long. At first I had nowhere else to go. Then it became so I didn’t want to leave unless I could take at least some of the dogs with me. The first time I tried, Cox caught me and beat me within an inch of my life. I realized then I couldn’t do it on my own but needed help. But who’ll help a kid who’s nothing but a monster?”

  Not a monster at all, Cat thought. She sensed a bedrock of beauty and decency inside this man. And sitting with him in the dim light she truly could almost forget his appearance.

  “So what did you do?”

  “Well, a short time after that, I met Tate Murphy.”

  “Your boss?”

  “The same. He and some of his pals came across me cornered by a crowd of thugs one evening down on the waterfront. It happened a lot back then, before I got big enough to defend myself properly. My life turned that night, right enough. He chased the thugs away, gave me his hand and a meal, the first proper meal I’d had in weeks. I told him about Cox and what he was doing, putting his dogs in the pit. He told me he’d look into it. I didn’t believe it, of course. How could a boy not so much older than me take on somebody like Cox? But only a week or so later Cox’s place got raided by the police, the dogs were seized, and I was out of a job.”

  “Just as well,” Cat murmured. “The man was a brute, and that was no place for you.”

  “Still, a belly with some food in it beats starvation. For you see, though the dogs got taken into care, I didn’t.”

  Cat clutched at the arms of her chair. Her heart went out to the mutilated lad with nowhere to turn. “What did you do?”

  “I slept in doorways for a few nights and got hungry, and thought about the choice I’d just made. But, Miss Delaney, there was a lesson to be learned in it: sometimes a person has to weigh in on the side of right even if it costs everything. You might want to keep that in mind.”

  Cat’s heart leaped in her breast. Had he told that whole terrible story only to her benefit? Slowly, she said, “Point taken, Mr. Kilter. But what if the cost of making such a choice for right falls not upon you but on someone you love? What if you knew the man’s dogs would be killed as a result of your defiance?”

  “Well, I suppose that would be a different kettle of fish. But I’ve also learned things like that tend to work out if you just keep on believing.”

  “Believing is very hard, in darkness.” How strange it felt to be sitting here at the tail end of the night discussing such things with a virtual stranger.

  “That it is. But the actual act of believing brings good things.”

  He could say that with his ruined face and bleak past? “That hasn’t been my experience.”

  “Nor mine, much of the time. But you have to keep your heart high anyway, despite the taunts and the anger and the urge to strike out and treat people as they deserve. Sometimes,” his tone became rueful, “you do strike out, nonetheless.”

  “So, Mr. Kilter,” she challenged softly, “what good came to you out of your selfless act on the behalf of those dogs?”

  “Tate found me, came looking for me, no less, got me a place to live, and offered me work when I was able.”

  “What sort of work?”

  “At first, just tasks about his place. Then, when I thought I could face people, I ran errands. Later I took up the job I have now.”

  It must be difficult for him to face people, even now. Gently she said, “And you grew?”

  He answered with a rueful laugh in his deep voice, “Grew and grew. I do not think Tate expected that, but he never left off feeding me, for all that. It is something you will do well to remember, Miss Delaney: there are folks in this world who won’t fail you, no matter what.”

  Chapter Nine

  The door of Miss Delaney’s suite, at James’ back, opened and roused him from the fringes of a light sleep. Long ago he had learned to doze on his feet; he always came out of it in an instant, with all senses alert.

  Now he turned his head and saw Sebastian Boyd enter the room. Early as it was, the man was clad to the nines in a white silk shirt and black trousers, with diamond studs at wrists and collar. Behind him came a maid, her arms laden with finery of all colors piled so high James could barely see her face.

  Boyd walked past James as if he didn’t exist, and without invitation went straight into the bedroom where Miss Delaney still lay abed. The maid, with one horrified glance at James, followed.

  Alarm moved up James’ spine like a kiss of lightning. Talking to Miss Delaney last night in the semi-dark, he had woven for himself the illusion that he could protect her. He didn’t know quite why the instinct to do so felt so strong, but now Boyd’s arrival put it to the test. For the man walked in as if he owned the world and everything in it.

  “Good morning, my dear.” The words might be inoffensive, but the tone made an insult of them.

  Smarmy bastard, James thought. He could only imagine Miss Delaney waking—had she been asleep?—to such intrusion.

  “Your cloth
ing has arrived, and we are to attend an important event today. Get up and try these things on so I might select what you’re to wear.”

  A murmur of response, indistinguishable by James, came from Miss Delaney. From where he stood he could see into the bedroom and behold Boyd’s well-clad back with the little maid at his elbow. He couldn’t see Miss Delaney at all.

  Surely Boyd didn’t intend her to get up and strip off before his eyes? James thought again how she’d looked when she sat speaking to him last night, her hair all tumbled down onto her shoulders, clad in that white nightgown that spewed lace at wrists and bosom: a fragile thing deserving careful handling. Yet now this cretin walked in as if he owned her.

  She insisted he did.

  Hot rage gathered in the region of James’ stomach and moved upward to his head.

  “Up, I tell you.” Boyd’s voice, indifferent to the point of insult, struck like an adder. “Or do I have to remind you what you and your father promised me?”

  “Stepfather.” The word possessed a modicum of defiance. James heard Miss Delaney move from the bed, though from where he stood he still couldn’t see her. “Mr. Boyd, I will try those things on if you wish. But please allow me to do so in private.”

  Boyd gave a harsh laugh. “Do you think you have anything beneath that gown I haven’t seen on other women?”

  “You have not seen what I have beneath this gown, sir. You cannot expect me to—”

  “I can and do. You will walk out on my arm this day as a valuable asset. You will wear what I say, smile when I bid, and go where I tell you. Now try on these dresses, the lavender first.”

  Silence fell in the bedroom. It was broken when Boyd reached out, swift as a snake, as if he seized Miss Delaney by her arm. “Must I strip you down myself?”

  James started forward, made it three full steps before he thought of the ramifications should he intervene. The bastard wanted to humiliate her, true, but he could not actually hurt her if he meant to show her off. But oh, James’ heart went out to the girl as he heard a hiccoughing sob.