Written on Your Skin

by Meredith Duran

  “Aberdeen,” Monroe muttered.

  She smiled reluctantly. It figured that an associate of her stepfather’s would mutter of the dockyards in his delirium.

  “Midnight,” he whispered. “Take the schedule.”

  How odd. He was a Chicagoan born and raised, but he pronounced the word schedule like an Englishman.

  “Go quickly,” he mumbled. “Tide…the tide is low.”

  She leaned toward him. When he repeated the phrase, her eyes followed his lips.

  A chill brushed over her. She was not imagining it. He was speaking the Queen’s English, his intonation as crisp as her mother’s.

  Chapter Three

  “Pilgrim’s Paradise,” Monroe said, and sighed.

  Mina came to her feet, her hands fisting at her waist. That was the name of one of her stepfather’s ships, but not one that he publicly claimed to own. And why would he? He used it to transport guns bound for Irish revolutionaries; he had no wish to get himself hanged. Even Mama did not know of that ship. Mina had learned of it quite accidentally—and at great risk to herself, she suspected. Had Monroe somehow found the documents she’d squirreled away?

  He pulled against the ropes, a sharp yank as his muttering grew louder. “At midnight,” he said clearly. “Go then.”

  The maid was watching him as well, a frown on her brow. She did not seem to understand English, but one never knew for sure. Collins kept a network of spies, and the household would not be exempt from it. “You may go now,” Mina said to her.

  The girl tilted her head in puzzlement. Not for the first time, Mina bitterly wished she had some Cantonese. She had thought to learn it once, during one of their longer visits to Hong Kong, but Collins had forbidden it. Ostensibly, he did not want her to “go native, like those damned missionaries” but later that season, he’d made a remark far more telling. A monopoly on knowledge is tantamount to a monopoly on everything else of value, he’d told one of his cohorts. And when he’d caught Mina staring at him, he had winked at her and smiled.

  Mina pointed toward the door. “Out,” she said, and added a smile for good measure. Her pulse might be racing, but her demeanor would not betray her. She had learned better than that. She could smile and blink more vacuously than a cow.

  The girl’s face cleared. She bowed and slipped from the room. Mina crossed to turn the key behind the maid, then leaned back against the door. “So,” she said. Her voice hitched on the syllable, and she paused to compose herself. Nerves were useless, and in her experience, they bred on oxygen; give them voice and they flourished. She cleared her throat and spoke very coolly to the man on the bed. “Interested in breaking monopolies, are you?”

  He did not reply, of course. The door latch dug into her back like a prodding finger. She drew a long breath. The air smelled bitter from the quinine Jane had administered.

  Monroe might be in league with her stepfather. That would explain his knowledge. But why then would he pretend to be American?

  The energy coursing through her demanded an outlet. She walked a tight circle between the washstand and the window, wrapping her arms around her waist to make sure she did not indulge the urge to tremble.

  “To Bantry,” Monroe mumbled. “Three ships.”

  He was correct. Her stepfather had three ships in the harbor, only two of them legitimate. The other was bound for Bantry.

  She sat down on the edge of the mattress, watching him. It seemed he was not so typical after all; suddenly, he looked even more fascinating than he had in her dreams. Was Mr. Monroe even a businessman? The profession of collecting secrets through deception was generally called spying.

  If he was a British spy, then he was here to stop her stepfather. He was here because of the guns Collins supplied to the Fenians.

  She realized she was chewing on her knuckle. It was an old and very bad habit, which her governesses had tried to break with admonitions and whacks from a ruler. The hands declare the lady. She bit down harder. If he was here for the guns, Collins would kill him. Collins detested liars and brooked no interference in his plans. Once, in Manhattan, a new maid had gone into his study to clean. Only Collins’s personal attendant was allowed into that room unsupervised. The maid had disappeared shortly afterward, and the gossip among the staff was that she’d been found dead in Five Points.

  Holy God. Mina lowered her hand. What had her mother said tonight? Gerard ran into someone from Chicago who claimed not to know Mr. Monroe.

  She sprang off the bed. She had to get out of here. If Collins thought she knew about Mr. Monroe and had failed to inform him, it would go very badly for her. Oh, he claimed to love her, but then, he claimed to love Mama, too. He liked the familial image that they helped to create; in public, he was a very Christian man indeed.

  Two steps from the door, she realized she was running like a rabbit, and all for concern over Collins. She came to a stop, staring at the doorknob. Mr. Monroe was muttering on the bed, helpless as a child, his tongue spelling his own undoing.

  She would not let that brute make her run.

  She turned back to Mr. Monroe, rubbing a hand over her chest to soothe herself. Her heart was drumming so strongly that she feared it might break from her rib cage. The man was beautiful, even unconscious. Her instincts had not been wrong about him in the largest sense. He was not Collins’s ilk at all. He was Collins’s enemy. Not a financier, but a spy.

  Actually, it was not so difficult to believe. Earlier, immaculate and sneering in his expensively tailored jacket, he had seemed the embodiment of a self-important businessman. She easily could have imagined him dispatching some thug to finish off his competitors. But now, in his rolled-up shirtsleeves, with the corded muscles of his forearms exposed, he looked like a man accustomed to heavier burdens than bank drafts. He looked fit to play the thug himself.

  She took a deep breath and walked back to the bed. She had never met a man whom she considered a match for her stepfather, but this could be her opportunity to revisit the question. She would not even have to risk going to the consul.

  His hair was sticking to his brow. She leaned forward to brush it back, then indulged herself by rubbing a strand between her fingers. As soft and thick as she’d suspected, a pure, true brown, like ebony wood. It matched his eyes and complemented his skin—which was too tanned, she saw now, to belong to a man who did business indoors. “You grow more interesting by the moment,” she murmured. But that tanned skin was horribly mottled, and his breathing sounded weak. “Oh, Mr. Monroe…I think boring would serve you better.”

  He made a small noise. It put her in mind of a whimper from a puppy. But that was a ridiculous comparison. He was almost too tall for the bed, and in his delirium he had tossed one of the manservants across the room. By nature, a spy was dangerous. And she was a small woman.

  She must remember that. She might be the one in danger when he recovered. She knew his secret, after all.

  A bitter taste came into her mouth. It might have been nausea, but it felt curiously like anger. Couldn’t he have trusted her? She put on a good act of loving her stepfather; Collins required no less. But if only Monroe could have seen the truth of it—if only she had spoken to him! She would have told him everything, given him all her information. She would put a gun in his hand this second and point the way to her stepfather’s quarters, applauding—if only he could walk. Really, how sloppy of him to fall ill. And what poor timing. If Collins already suspected him of bad business, he would be dead by morning. It seemed a miracle that he hadn’t died an hour after Collins returned from the club.

  Her breath caught.

  It reminds me of nothing so much as belladonna.

  She lunged toward the medicine chest.

  Someone was muttering secrets. Here they were, the facts that Phin guarded more closely than his life, being recited like a children’s rhyme. He knew what it meant. Someone was going to die tonight.

  Light rolled over him. It shot through his bones, boiling them to liquid. Bones,
sweat, tears spilled from his eyes, rolling down his temples. He would not blink until he managed to focus, to see into this luminescence—

  It flared out. Ashes and darkness. Someone was coughing. It was the cough of an old man, a dying man, his father had coughed up blood at the end. His skin had yellowed by the time Phin found him, the same shade as the peeling wallpaper, dried out, God, that hellhole, if he never had to return to Calais he would thank God for it. The smell of the deathbed all around him—blood and shit and the mold creeping up the baseboards. The old man grew angry. Phin emptied his pockets: I am not lying. I have no coin to give you. Coughing seized Pater again, great wrenching gasps, but he continued to shake his head; this fever had rotted his brain long before his illness, cards and liquor his only concerns. When he regained enough breath, he said, Goddamn you, Phineas. You are lying. His curses flew, flecked with blood, and when Phin turned away he found he had to wipe his face clean.

  “Wake up!”

  Eyes. Blue like cold things, deep seas and winter skies. He fastened onto them. They made his mind go still. He knew them from somewhere. “Hush,” came a voice, and he saw the lips beneath those eyes, parted around tiny white teeth like threats unveiled. “Quiet. Swallow this. Now!”

  The bitter taste of the liquid recalled him to the existence of his mouth. His tongue was so dry. God above. It was he who’d been speaking. He who’d been telling secrets.

  He would die tonight.

  “No,” the voice whispered. Something wet and blissfully cold moved down his cheek. He thought of snow tigers with tongues of ice, blue and crackling, lapping his skin. Their tongues dripped in the heat. They began to crack, to splinter. Chunks of melting tongue rained across his face.

  “Shh.”

  Hands pressed at his shoulders, holding him down. He had held Tanner down. He had used ropes to do it, taking the easy way, Tanner had sneered, but he was wrong, there was no scope for cleverness in killing a man, talent was not required; I knew you were a natural, but Ridland was wrong to say that, there was no art to murder, you simply pulled the trigger. You gave them forewarning, but not because you wished to be honorable. Take some pride in your goddamned work, Granville, but there was no honor in killing. You told them they were about to die because you wanted to scare them, once they pissed their trousers then they would talk, they babbled like children and then you killed them, you killed them once you could start to see the infant they’d once been, the little boy who was afraid to tell a lie. Tanner had taken a long time to break in that hot, airless room. He had laughed, at the beginning. I’m to die, you say? Do you see the future, then? But, no, it was an easy prediction. It was easy to predict death when one held a gun in one’s hand. The blood sprayed. I am a killer, he thought, the man was not even attacking me, I am a killer, but it was difficult to grasp, when he felt no different in his bones. His hands still felt breakable, even with a gun in them.

  “You must keep quiet.” The voice caught his attention. It floated to him through layers of darkness, pulling him from—memories, they were memories, they were not happening to him now, he was—in a bed. The darkness was beginning to fracture, bits splitting away, revealing a ceiling, blond hair, a woman’s eyes. Her lips, parted like petals, flowers, the smell of roses. No. Focus. She was speaking to him. “We are alone in this room,” she said. “I have covered the spyholes. But I cannot say who listens at the door.”

  Her statement implied something. His instincts recognized a cause for alarm, but his wits could not work out the reason for it.

  “You need more morphine.” She turned away, and her figure, the room around her, receded.

  His eyes opened. He was looking at a girl. He had done this before. She was speaking to him, but he could not hear her. His bones felt as if they were trying to break out of his skin. His tendons, his sinews, were stretching and vibrating with the effort to hold them in. Every cell in him sang with a sensation so extreme that he could not say whether it was agony or bliss.

  She slapped him across the face. He was staring now at a wall, wallpaper, patterned with flowers. This pain in his jaw was clearer, simpler; he focused on it, and her voice emerged over the babble in his brain. “Breathe,” she said, and something pressed against his nose, cold and metallic. A spoon. It felt vaguely familiar, as if she had done this before. He tried to avert his head. She covered his mouth with her palm, and when he moved to knock it away, he realized he was tied down. “Breathe,” she said, and he breathed.

  Fire raged up his nostril. Bitterness flowed down the back of his throat.

  “It may kill you,” she said. “I don’t know how it interacts with morphine, much less the nightshade.” Her laughter sounded ragged. “Well, at least you’ll feel very cheerful as you die. Collins’s way would not be so pleasant.”

  Collins.

  The word acted like a catalyst. He felt his thoughts reordering, forming straight lines. Collins. Right. He was in Collins’s house. Christ, this girl was Collins’s stepdaughter. The intemperate little flirt who conspired with his body to turn his brain to mud.

  He tried to speak, but his lips and tongue felt like cotton, too thick to shape the words. He throbbed. Everywhere. Looking at her, it was not an entirely unpleasant sensation. He watched through a dreamy haze as she leaned across him. The rope of ebony pearls at her neck fell over his chin, cool and smooth. They felt no smoother than her skin. Her shoulders were white and slim as a child’s, her breasts like the snow-covered slopes of mountains, a dark, scented valley between them. Think. He remembered that dress she was wearing. It matched her eyes, but did her no favors.

  She straightened, a cup in her hand. He could not feel it against his mouth, but liquid splashed onto his chin. The sharpness of alcohol stabbed his nostrils.

  “Swallow,” she said.

  The flirt looked very pale. Her hair was escaping her chignon, white-gold locks framing her face like parentheses. She moved to cover his nose, to force him to swallow, but he twisted away. What the hell was she about? His wrist was bound to the bedpost. That knot looked goddamned professional.

  “It’s only Vin Mariani,” she said. “They call it the French tonic sometimes.”

  He knew the wine. He’d told Collins he wanted to create a brand of it for American distribution. Its main ingredient was not alcohol, but syrup of—“coca.” The word was his, the voice unrecognizable. Hoarse, as though he’d been screaming.

  “Yes.” Laughter escaped her, a low string of it, obscenely musical. She had tied him to the bloody bed, and she was laughing. “And the powder you inhaled—also from coca.” Her lips quirked into a strange smile that made her appear much older. “Mr. Monroe, you will be so full of coca by the time you leave, you won’t even feel a bullet.”

  He felt as if he’d woken into a play whose script no one had shared with him. At least he now recognized the feeling coursing through his body, the cause for his mounting strength and the numbness in his mouth. It was the drug she was feeding him. He knew something of it; they sometimes used it in the field. The effects wouldn’t last for long. He cleared his throat, focused on schooling his vowels. “You have me trussed up like a roast pig.” Passably American, there.

  “You were thrashing,” she said. “But now you must go.”

  She was making no sense. “Where is your stepfather?”

  Her brows arched. “I recommend you avoid him. Unless, of course, you wish to explain why you are so interested in the Pilgrim’s Paradise, and speak in your sleep like the Queen.” She spoke so lightly that he wondered if he were still dreaming. “Oh, also—why nobody in Chicago has ever heard your name.”

  He blinked. He was not asleep. “Christ.”

  “Really, Mr. Monroe! And I thought you were a gentleman.”

  Why was he not dead already? He looked past her, expecting to see Collins holding a gun.

  “He’s not here,” she said. “I didn’t tell him about it. About—whatever you mean to do. What is that, if I may ask?”

 
He looked back to her. She gave him another pretty smile. Was this her technique of interrogation? If so, she needed to work on it. Her dancing eyes promised things far too sweet to frighten him.

  The thought echoed in his brain, sounding more ludicrous and unfamiliar with every repetition. His brain was well wrecked, all right.

  She sat back, her smile dimming. “Of course. You must have some sort of code that forbids you to tell me such things. Simply say yes or no, then. Yes, if you plan to do it soon, and no for—for maybe soon. I can’t bear to have my hopes wholly dashed, you see.”

  “Soon.” Good God. Had that just come out of his mouth? He could not blame the poison; the girl was a toxin all her own.

  “Oh, good.” She rose, going to the washstand; when she turned, she had a long, wicked blade in her hand. “Don’t move,” she said, and went to work on the rope at his ankle. “I’m fine with fever, but blood doesn’t agree with me.” As she sawed at the rope, she rambled on. “Now, you must go quickly, because he will be coming to see if you’re dead yet. And I say this because I believe you are not ill so much as poisoned. Otherwise, the morphine would not have worked so well.”

  He considered her as she moved to his other foot. He had no idea what she was about. She considered herself to be aiding a man she thought to be her stepfather’s enemy. It was not the act of a brainless coquette, but he could not imagine another role for her. She’s a fast piece, Bonham had said to him earlier tonight, with ribald good humor. The man who catches her will have to cage her.

  As she freed his left wrist, he muttered, “You’re even faster than he realizes.”

  “Stop that. There will be no more delirium for you, sir.” She cut the final binding, then grasped his forearms and pulled. He sat up slowly, feeling his limbs warm to his command. But when he swung his legs off the bed, his head swam, and scarlet blotches swarmed his vision.

  A hand threaded through his hair, pressing his head down to his knees. The girl’s voice came from above, damnably cheerful. “Take this, please.”