What Darkness Brings sscm-8

by C. S. Harris

  She found Yates standing beside his cell’s small, barred window overlooking the Press Yard. There was an uncharacteristic tension in the way he held himself, and she went to slide her arms around his waist and press her cheek against his taut back in a quiet gesture of friendship and comfort. They were two outcasts who’d made common cause together against both their enemies and the disapproving world. In many ways, he was like the brother she had never had. And she found she had to squeeze her eyes shut against a sudden upsurge of unexpected emotion at the thought of losing him.

  “This is a pleasant surprise,” he said, closing his hands over hers and tilting back his head until it rested against hers. “I didn’t expect to see you again today. Shouldn’t you be getting ready for the theater?”

  “I’ve time yet.”

  Beneath her encircling arms, she felt his torso expand with his breath. He said, “Your dashing viscount came to see me this morning.”

  “Devlin isn’t my viscount anymore.”

  “True. But then, he’s not exactly your brother either, is he?” When she remained silent, he said, “I’m sorry. That was totally uncalled for.”

  “It’s all right,” she said softly.

  He nodded toward the window, where the ancient masonry that formed the prison’s gatehouse was just visible. “Do you know what that chamber is over there, right above the entrance gate? They call it ‘Jack Ketch’s kitchen.’ I’m told that’s where they used to preserve the quartered bodies of those executed for treason, before putting them on display around the metropolis. They’d boil them in vast cauldrons full of pitch, tar, and oil. Must have smelled. . ghastly. The heads were treated to a different process, of course; those were parboiled with bay, salt, and cumin. I suppose I should be thankful that in our own more enlightened era, I can look forward to merely dancing the hempen jig for the amusement of the populace, before being given over to the surgeons for the edification of their students.”

  “You’re not going to hang.”

  A faint smile touched his lips. “The verdict of the coroner’s inquest is in. My trial has been scheduled for Saturday; did you know?”

  “Oh, God. So soon?” She was aware of a pressing sense of urgency that came close to panic. And she understood, then, why he had been standing here watching the last of the light fade from his prison’s walls.

  She said, “Is there anything you know about Eisler that you haven’t told Devlin?”

  “I don’t think so.” He turned to face her. “Do you think I want to hang?”

  She studied his dark, handsome face, the gold pirate’s hoop in his ear winking in the fading light. She said, “To be honest, I don’t understand why you’re still in prison. Jarvis could have had all charges against you dropped days ago, only he hasn’t done it. He knows you have the power to destroy him; all you need do is release the evidence you have against him. Yet he’s not afraid. Why not?”

  He remained silent. But she read the answer in his face.

  “It’s because of me, isn’t it?” she whispered. “That’s what he told you when he came to see you the night of your arrest. He warned you that the documents you hold can protect you, or they can protect me, but they can’t protect us both.”

  Yates held himself very still.

  She said, “I’m right, aren’t I? He told you that if you made any move against him, he’d have me killed.”

  Yates turned to where a bottle of his best brandy stood beside a glass. “Unfortunately, I’ve only the one glass. May I offer you something to drink?”

  She shook her head.

  “You don’t mind if I do?” He poured himself a large measure. “So you see,” he said, setting the bottle aside, “I have even more incentive to cooperate with your viscount than you previously thought.”

  He took a long, slow swallow of his brandy and looked over at her. “You came for a reason; what was it?”

  “Devlin wanted me to ask you about Matt Tyson.”

  Yates frowned. “I already told him I know the man only slightly. What more is there?”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “In a molly house on Pall Mall. Why?”

  Kat sucked in a quick breath. “So he’s a molly?”

  “Of course he is. So is Beresford.”

  The last of the light was leaching rapidly from the sky.

  Kat knew she should be at the theater, preparing for that evening’s performance. Instead, she went for a stroll through the flower stalls of Covent Garden Market.

  Already, the square lay in deep shadow, the few remaining vegetable and fruit sellers scrambling to hawk their fading produce, cheap, before closing for the night. Only the florists, nurserymen, and bouquet girls were still doing a brisk trade, selling flowers to the theater, music hall, and restaurant managers and to earnest beaux looking for posies to present to their lovers. The air was full of laughter and shouting and a sweet, familiar medley of floral scents that always took her back to another time, another place.

  When she was a little girl growing up in a small white house overlooking the misty emerald swath of a Dublin green, Kat’s mother and stepfather used to take her to the market that set up every Wednesday afternoon in the cobbled medieval square of their parish church. She could remember running excitedly from one stall to the next, exclaiming over the displays of satin hair ribbons and lace collars and carved wooden tops. But her mother’s favorite stalls were always those selling bunches of yellow daffodils and rainbow-hued tulips, or pots of rue and pennyroyal, hollyhock seedlings and briar rose cuttings. She’d take them home and plant them in the narrow strip of garden beside their cottage’s front stoop. Even now, all these years later, if Kat closed her eyes and breathed deeply, she could still see her mother’s strong hands sinking into the rich dark earth, a faint faraway smile on her lips that told of a deep and rare contentment.

  In some indefinable way, Kat knew that the child she’d once been had resented the joy and peace her mother found in her garden. But she’d never been able to decide if her selfishness came from the wish that her mother would find that deep, unalloyed joy in her daughter alone, or if she’d simply envied the tranquility she glimpsed in her mother’s face. And it shamed Kat now to remember that she had begrudged her mother those brief interludes of peace and happiness.

  There had been so little of either in Arabella Noland’s short life.

  Now, as she breathed in the heady scents from the banks of Michaelmas daisies, ferns, and chrysanthemums, Kat found herself wondering if it was her mother’s spirit that had guided her here, to the peace of this place. Or was this love of growing things a trait passed down from mother to daughter, like dark hair and a talent for acting? A tendency that had always been there, nestled hidden within her, only waiting to be discovered.

  She smiled at the thought. Then the smile faded as she became aware of a sudden charge of tension in the atmosphere, the rush of heavy feet. A trader’s high-pitched voice whined, “’Ey! Wot the ’ell ye doin’?”

  Kat’s eyes flew open.

  Rough hands seized her from behind. She lunged against the unseen man’s fierce grip, tried to scream. A calloused palm slapped down across her mouth, grinding her lips against her teeth and flattening her nose so that she had to fight to draw air. She smelled dirt and onions and fetid breath as he pressed his beard-roughened cheek against hers and whispered, “Come wit’ me quiet-like, an’ I’ll see ye don’t get hurt.”

  Chapter 39

  Kat heaved against the man’s hold and felt his arms tighten around her in a fierce hug. He dragged her backward, toward the shadowy, narrow lane that ran along the old, soot-stained nave of the church. She tried to bite the thick, dirty fingers smothering her, but the pressure was so brutal she could get no purchase.

  “I say, there,” bleated one of the florists, stepping from behind his stall. “You can’t do that!”

  A second man-a wiry, black-haired brute with a pock-scarred face and small, sharp nose-turned to thrust a blunderbu
ss pistol into the trader’s face. “Mind your own business or lose your head.” His English diction was careful and precise, but Kat caught the faint, unmistakable traces of French inflection and knew a new leap of terror.

  The florist backed off, hands splayed out at his sides, face slack.

  Her heart was pounding, her mouth achingly dry, the shouts of the scattered costermongers and stall keepers echoing oddly in her head, as if she were at the base of a well. The market square spun around her in a blur of startled, frightened faces, wet paving, spilled chrysanthemums. A flock of pigeons whirled up from the church portico, pale outstretched wings beating the cool damp air. She tried to twist her body sideways, but her captor’s fingers dug into her cruelly, his breath hot against her ear. “Ye want to live, don’t give me trouble. Ye hear, girl? Because wot I do wit’ ye afterward is up t’ me. Ye got that?”

  She made herself go utterly limp, as if fainting from fear, her hands dangling slack at her sides. She heard him give a grunt of satisfaction. “Have yer friend bring the bloody cart up, quick,” he told his pockmarked companion. “Let’s get out o’ ’ere.”

  They were passing the last stall in the row, a rough shed given over to the sale of earthen crockery, the stall’s seller cowering wide-eyed against the rickety frame, as if he could somehow make himself disappear into the weathered post behind him. Kat’s captor was half dragging, half carrying her now, a drooping deadweight that sagged in his arms, so that his effort was more focused on keeping her upright than on restraining her.

  Flinging out one hand, she grasped the lip of a stout pitcher from the edge of the stall’s counter and swung it up and back to smash it against the side of her captor’s head. He let out a rumbling roar, his grip on her slackening with surprise and pain.

  She twisted sideways, ignoring the wrenching pain that shot from her wrist as he tried, too late, to tighten his hold on her. “You bloody son of a bitch!” she screamed, grabbing a platter off the stall and breaking it against his face. “I ought to cut out your bloody liver and feed it to the crows!”

  He howled, blood spurting from his cut face, his arms flinging up to protect his head as she snatched up a bowl and hurled it at him.

  “Oy, wot ye doin’ to me crockery?” bleated the stall owner.

  “Your bloody crockery?” shouted Kat, whirling to heave a plate at him. “You worthless, stinking coward! You would have just stood there and watched him kill me!”

  “You fool,” screamed the pockmarked man to his companion as a shouting, angry crowd of stall keepers and costermongers, bouquet girls and nurserymen bore down on them. “Don’t just stand there. Grab her!”

  “’Tain’t no way to treat a lady!” hollered a big, black-haired porter.

  “You mind your own business,” growled the pockmarked man, flourishing his pistol.

  A rotten tomato flew through the air to break in a red splat against his face.

  The air filled with the day’s unsold produce, spoiling turnips and overripe melons, moldy pears and putrid apples. For one moment, the two men held their ground. Then the plucked, gutted carcass of a chicken whacked against the side of the bigger ruffian’s head. He turned and ran, feet slipping and sliding on a sea of rotten vegetables, splattered fruit, and smashed crockery. His companion hesitated a moment, then followed, swerving around the church steps to duck down the side street.

  “Lay a hand on me again, and I’ll kill you! You hear?” yelled Kat, hurling a last earthenware bowl after them as they pelted down the lane to their waiting cart. She was no longer Kat Boleyn, the toast of London’s stage; she was Kat Noland, the scrappy, angry young orphan who’d struggled to survive in the fetid back alleys of a vast, unfriendly city. “I’ll cut off your pathetic yards and feed them to the stray dogs in Moorefield. I’ll decorate London Bridge with your entrails. I’ll-”

  But the men were already piling into their waiting cart, its driver whipping up his horses into a mad gallop that took them careening around the corner and out of sight.

  Kat let her hand fall back to her side, her fingers clenched tight around the lip of the rough mug she still held, her heart thundering in her chest.

  “Do you know the story of the mice and the cat?” asked Emma Wilkinson, looking up at Sebastian with her father’s big gray eyes.

  They were seated before the feeble fire in Annie Wilkinson’s tiny Kensington parlor. He had come here, as promised, to tell Emma a story before she went to bed. He’d expected the experience to be awkward, for he was a man with little exposure to children. But as Emma settled more comfortably against him and he felt her baby-soft curls brush his chin, he was surprised to find his thoughts drifting to the child that would be born to Hero in just a few short months.

  “It’s my favorite,” said Emma.

  “I might not tell it exactly the same as your papa.”

  “That’s all right,” said Emma. “Papa always tells it a little differently each time.”

  Sebastian glanced over to where Annie sat darning a sheet by the fading light of the rainy day. And he knew by the quick rise and fall of her chest that the child’s use of the present tense was not lost on her either.

  “Very well,” he said. “Once upon a time, a colony of mice lived a happy, peaceful existence within the walls of a small village shop. The mice were well fed and content. But the man who owned the shop wasn’t happy with all those mice stealing his grain and nibbling on his cheese. So he bought himself a cat, who patrolled his shop and quickly terrorized the poor mice to the point they were too afraid even to come out of their little holes in the wainscoting and eat.”

  “What color was the cat?” Emma asked.

  “A big black cat with a bushy tail.”

  “Papa always says, ‘a tabby.’”

  “Sorry.”

  Emma giggled.

  “Anyway,” said Sebastian, “the mice quickly realized that if they didn’t do something about the cat, they would either starve to death or get eaten themselves. So they all got together to try to come up with a solution. There was much arguing and shouting, but no one could think of anything that would work. Finally, a clever young mouse stood up and said, ‘The problem is that the cat is so quiet we can’t hear him when he’s sneaking up on us. All we need to do is tie a bell around his neck, and that way we’ll always know when he’s coming.’

  “Now, all the other mice thought this was a splendid idea. Everyone was cheering and clapping the young mouse on the shoulder and telling him how very clever he was and calling him a hero. All except for one old mouse, so aged his hair had turned as white as the frost. He cleared his throat and stood up to say”-Sebastian dropped his voice into a gravely Glaswegian rasp-“‘I’ll not be denying that tying a bell about the cat’s neck would surely warn us of his approach. There’s only one wee problem.’ The old man paused to let his gaze drift around the assembly of anxious mice and said-”

  “‘Who bells the cat?’” shouted Emma, jumping up to clap her hands before collapsing against him again in a fit of giggles.

  “You’ve heard this before,” said Sebastian in mock solemnity.

  “Only about a hundred times,” said Annie, setting aside her darning to come take the child into her arms. Her gaze met his over the little girl’s dark head. “Thank you.”

  “It was my pleasure. Truly.”

  A faint smile touched her lips. “You’ll make a wonderful father.”

  Afterward, he wondered whether it had been an idle remark, or if something of his own thoughts and emotions had shown on his face.

  Later that evening, Sebastian was looking over a history of the French Revolution while Hero sat reading Abigail McBean’s English translation of The Key of Solomon. The black cat lay curled up on the hearth beside them.

  “Listen to this,” she said, reading aloud. “‘I conjure you Spyritts by all the patryarchs, prophets, Apostles, evangelists, martyrs, confessors, vyrgyns, and wyddowes, and by Jerusalem, the holy cytty of godd, and by heaven and earth and
all that therein is, and by all other vyrtues, and by the Elements of the worlde, and by St. Peter, apostle of Rome, and by the croune of thorne that was worne on godd’s head.’” She looked up. “I thought this was supposed to have been written by Solomon.”

  “Details, details,” said Sebastian, looking up as a distant knock sounded at the front door.

  “Expecting anyone?” asked Hero.

  Sebastian shook his head.

  A moment later, Morey appeared in the doorway. “The Earl of Hendon to see you, my lord.”

  Sebastian was aware of Hero’s silent gaze upon him. In all the weeks of their marriage, Hendon had never yet paid a call on Brook Street, nor had Sebastian taken his bride to Hendon’s sprawling pile in Grosvenor Square. Yet she had never asked him that most obvious question: Why?

  Morey cleared his throat. “His lordship says it is a matter of the utmost importance. I’ve taken the liberty of showing him to the library.”

  Sebastian was aware of a deep sense of disquiet. After all that had been said between them, he could think of few developments that would motivate Hendon to come here.

  None of them were good.

  “Excuse me,” he said to Hero, and left the room.

  He found the Earl standing before the library’s empty hearth, his hands clasped behind his back, his heavily jowled features sagged with worry.

  “What is it?” asked Sebastian without preamble. “What has happened?”

  “Kat was attacked this evening in Covent Garden Market.”

  “Is she all right?” It came out sharper than he’d intended.

  Hendon nodded. “Yes. Fortunately, the costermongers and stall keepers rallied and helped her drive the assailants away. She suffered a slight injury to her arm, but that is all.”

  Wordlessly, Sebastian walked over to pour two brandies. He handed one to the Earl.

  Hendon took it without hesitation. “She says she doesn’t know who the men were or why they attacked her.”