Written on Your Skin

by Meredith Duran

  Something was pressed into his hand. A little vial; more of the coca, he assumed. He slowly straightened, wondering what new surprise she might offer him. She was waiting, face composed, although the foot tapping beneath her skirts and the quick glance she threw to the door suggested she was not so calm as she liked to appear. “The doctor will be coming,” she said. “He sent a note a half hour ago. You will want to be gone before he arrives.” Her mouth curved, wry. “He is Collins’s particular friend.”

  He found himself staring at her. He should be on his feet. This lack of urgency did not bode well. Sicker than he’d realized, with the dizziness coming in waves; cocaine did not combine well with morphine, no. How many grains had she given him? How far apart? The white curtains were glowing with the blue light of dawn. His heart felt as though it were battling through quicksand. In another quarter hour, he would be flat on his back again. Dead or very near it. All her efforts in vain.

  She was looking back at him steadily. She was startlingly beautiful. He had not allowed himself to acknowledge the full extent of her beauty until now; her effect on him had been his greater concern. But she was small. He did not like how small she was. Collins could break her with his fist.

  She cleared her throat. “You’re gawking, sir. It’s unoriginal.”

  “Forgive me. I am…not at my best, half dead.” He realized that he no longer knew how to speak to her, for he had no bloody idea what she was about. “You shouldn’t be doing this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Collins won’t like it.”

  She retrieved the knife from the ground. “Probably not. Try to stand.”

  Yes, he should be on his feet. He felt curiously remote from his own concerns. “What say you? Will I be dead in an hour?”

  She put a hand to her mouth, considering him clinically. “Do you know, Mr. Monroe—I have absolutely no idea.”

  “Well,” he said, for want of any other reply; and this time, when she began to laugh, he surprised himself by laughing with her—a slow, rusty noise that hurt his chest and left him slightly breathless.

  She cupped his elbow and helped him to his feet. Slowly they walked toward the window. He could not make his mind grasp it: he was nearly dead, and his savior was a half-wit with a vice for giggling. But clearly, she was something more than that. He had not been the only one pretending here. How well she had fooled him.

  The answer came to him with sudden clarity. She would not risk herself so flagrantly for a stranger. She must be part of the game. That knife sat in her hand as though she were accustomed to wielding one.

  As she unlocked the bottom shutters, using the blade to break off the latches, he touched her shoulder. “Whose are you?”

  She looked up. “My own, of course.” Straightening, she looked deeply into his eyes, and then startled the hell out of him by pressing a kiss to his mouth. When she drew back, her lips held an odd smile and his own had awakened; they felt full and sensitive from the lingering sensation of hers. “Remember that,” she said. “Remember whom you owe.”

  He forced himself to look away, to the tree outside. It was not an impossible escape route, although most of the branches looked unlikely to hold his weight. But the doctor was coming, Collins’s special friend. If she was telling the truth, if she had no experience in this business, then he couldn’t leave her here undefended.

  “And what else would you do, Mr. Monroe? You’re trembling on your feet.”

  Sloppy. To have spoken that aloud—he was very bad off. “You’ll be alone.”

  “Is there any choice?” She sounded genuinely curious.

  There was never a choice. But the repercussions of his helplessness had rarely tasted so bitter. Running with his tail tucked between his legs might count as a far milder offense than murder, but he had never been so slapdash that someone else was left to face the consequences of his mess. Much less a slip of a girl. “I’m indebted to you,” he said roughly. Such empty words. God help her if she thought it would serve her to have the favor of a man who was not even allowed to make his own decisions.

  “Yes, you are,” she said. She gently urged him onto the windowsill. He paused there to locate his balance; his legs shook, and the dizziness was gaining on him again. She touched his arm as though to aid him—her skin was softer than silk, and he had shoved her away earlier, thinking her useless, a nuisance, an inconvenience he did not need—and then, as if recognizing the futility, she let her hand fall. It occurred to him to wonder what she had meant when she asked if there was a choice. Perhaps she had not been speaking of his choices. You’ll be alone. That was the remark she’d been responding to.

  “You cannot go with me,” he said.

  She laughed, as if he’d said something very foolish. Perhaps he had. He felt off balance, wanting—something, he was not sure what. He set his foot on the nearest tree limb and cleared his throat. “Today.” He could give her this. “By sunset, I think.”

  She understood at once. Her whole face lit. “So soon? I should kiss you again.”

  The doorknob rattled. “Mina,” came Collins’s voice from the hallway, and her smile stiffened. “Are you in there? Why is the door locked? The doctor is here.”

  She did not look at the door. “Just a moment,” she called. Her voice sounded strong and calm. “Go,” she whispered to him.

  The door shuddered beneath a blow. Collins was not waiting. He was going to break in.

  The disgust climbing Phin’s throat made him feel sicker. He released the tree and stepped back into the room. “Give me the knife.” The floor was swaying beneath him; he had to put a hand to the window frame for support.

  “Don’t be a fool.” Finally she remembered fear; it drew lines around her eyes and made her voice shake. “I’m safe. He won’t hurt me.”

  Another voice sounded from the hallway—deeper, unfamiliar to him.

  “They will have guns,” she said more sharply. “Blast you, I want him arrested!”

  To hell with this. He reached for the blade, intending to wrest it from her—he could manage that, at least—but she tossed it away and shoved him, two solid palms straight into his chest.

  Ordinarily, it would not have budged him. But in the split second that followed, as she fell into him and continued to push, he counted on reflexes, strength, a sense of balance that the poison had burned away. His fingers scraped past the window frame—his head smashed into tree branches—branches crashing up around him, limbs thumping his back like mallets, leaves scraping his cheeks, lashing at his eyes as he fell—

  His hand closed over a tree limb. He hung there for a moment, a few feet off the ground, dazed by his fortune.

  An explosion came from above—the shattering of a lock, the splintering of wood. He looked up and saw her silhouetted in the light. She was watching him, her bright hair lit like a corona, the most unlikely angel of salvation he could imagine. If in her terror she abruptly regretted her decision, if she realized she was risking her life for a man who did not deserve it, then her wisdom came too late; he could do nothing to help her but return her regard, and search her face for some reason not to remember her.

  An arm came around her and yanked her from sight. Another head popped out, male; he peered toward the ground and, as his eyes met Phin’s, lifted a pistol.

  Phin’s fingers opened. The ground thudded into his feet. Time seemed to slow, the moment stretching interminably: the cool night breeze swept over him, scented with roses, and the lawn stretched before him, another gauntlet among too many to remember, and his thoughts piled one on top of another. He did not want to run. He was tired in his bones. Sinking into the earth would be so easy. He would die smiling, here, for it would spite Ridland beyond any imaginable thing.

  But his body had never heeded his brain. Its dumb cunning knew no other choice than survival. The first shot rang out, but as his mind lingered on the room above, on the girl and her laughter and everything about her that made no sense, his feet were already moving.


  Chapter Four

  LONDON, 1884

  It was lovely, so far as prisons went. Mina’s hotel suite at Claridge’s had not been so resplendent. The three rooms were spacious, furnished in Chippendale and Axminster, with Boucher tapestries on the walls and gas jets fringed with crystal. They might have been junk-bottle glass, for all it mattered. So long as the windows would not open and the door locked from the outside, she could not breathe easily.

  Mr. Ridland was apologetic. He did not like to inconvenience her. The first night, he reminded her that the British authorities were making every effort to find her mother. The second night, he assured her that the American ambassador had been made aware of her detainment, and considered it an unfortunate, temporary necessity. “And lest you have forgotten,” he reminded her on the third, “I am not a stranger to you. We met in Hong Kong once, four or five years ago.”

  He spoke as though that should reassure her. But for the first time since Mama had disappeared, panic threatened to break her composure. If Ridland had been in Hong Kong, she couldn’t trust him to shine her shoes, much less find her mother. The effort to charm him suddenly seemed futile.

  After he left, she realized she’d been clutching the locket at her throat. Mama’s locket. Mama had taken it off on the morning of her disappearance; it had clashed, she’d announced, with her new pewter gown.

  Irritated to be so transparent, Mina stalked over to the window, snapping apart the curtains. On the eave opposite, a gray cat lay across the gutter. She tapped at the glass, but he showed no interest in her. After a minute, he bounded out of sight.

  She stared out at the huddled rooftops. The clouds pressed so close atop the buildings that it seemed even the air lacked room to wander. Only a week ago, dancing through mirrored ballrooms and flirting with handsome men, she’d professed herself enamored of London, and Mama had laughed in happy astonishment. Why, Mina! I never thought I would see the day when you had a kind word for anything English.

  In fact, it was her mother’s joy that made Mina feel so generous toward the city. After Hong Kong, it had taken Mama two years to find the courage to reenter New York society. Months more to recover her old confidence. Thus to watch her move so boldly through her oldest Waterloo, as fearless and self-assured as though Collins had never existed, seemed like a miracle. You are completely healed now, Mina had thought. For the triumphant thrill that revelation had afforded her, she would have endured those last days in Hong Kong a hundred times—much less agreed to love London.

  Now, though, the sight of the city seemed to smother her. So many people in this dark sprawl, but only two who would care if she never emerged from these rooms. And if Mama was no longer in the city—well, then, that left only Tarbury. And Mina paid for his devotion; she would not delude herself.

  She sighed. Really, from one perspective, it didn’t matter where in the world she was—apart from Jane, Mama was all she had. Such were the consequences of her independence; they had never troubled her before.

  But then, she had never viewed them from this particular window.

  She shut the curtains and turned back to the writing desk. Ridland’s admission left her no choice. Her hopes now came down to trickery, and a very slim chance that a stranger remembered his debt to her. Whether he would be better than Ridland, she could not know. But it seemed likelier than not, and so her pen began to move.

  Dear Jane,

  I did receive your letter. Forgive the tardiness of my reply, and the shock I must deliver to you. I pray you, sit before continuing to read.

  I will not be returning to New York as planned. In short, Mama has gone missing, and it seems probable that the artist of her disappearance is Gerard Collins.

  I can only give you a brief account, for much remains unclear to me. Suffice it to say that on the eve of our planned return to New York, I came back from a meeting with the gentlemen at Whyllson’s to find our rooms in disarray, Mama gone without a trace. You can imagine my panic. The concierge summoned the police. Along with them arrived Mr. Joseph Ridland, a representative of one of Her Majesty’s darker arms of government. Forthwith I was packed off to his house on Park Lane, where I currently reside as his most unwilling guest.

  It was Mr. Ridland who revealed that my stepfather has escaped from English custody. He feels certain that Mama is with Collins, although he seems undecided on the question of whether or not she has gone willingly. He believes they are still in England, though, and hopes that my continued presence here may serve to lure them from hiding. What a charming role for me!

  Of course, my main concern is for Mama. Today, a very peculiar note arrived at the hotel for me, which Mr. Ridland was generous enough to share. It is Mama’s writing, but how oddly it reads! She says nothing of where she is or with whom she travels. She only sends her love, and reassures me that she leaves her welfare to Providence—and urges me, for her sake, to do the same, at the end.

  I have puzzled in vain over this request. When I read it this morning, it seemed to me the sort of statement a captive might make to her loved one, when she finds herself in the custody of a man whom she knows to be capable of any manner of depravity. I read it and thought, “She is afraid that I will try to find her, and that he will hurt me for it.” But when I read it again tonight, it seemed to me, against my will, to be the advice of a moralist, lecturing me for my great betrayal, and chiding me to look to my soul and reform myself.

  Is it terribly wrong that I am desperate to believe the former interpretation? Yes, it is, isn’t it? For that would mean that she is fearful in his presence, and that she suffers at every moment from thoughts of what he may do to her, or to me. Perhaps, then, I wish that Mama has gone with him willingly. But if this is the case, then all the hope and life that we worked to return to her during the last four years—and the courage she unearthed during those dreadful days in Hong Kong, and the admiration I came to feel for her in their aftermath—all must be counted for naught.

  I cannot accept that. In fact, I will be very honest with you: I cannot accept it, for I know it to be false.

  I wish above anything that I could share with you the source of my conviction. But you have a husband to care for, and a child to mother, and it seems to me that some knowledge is too dangerous for a woman entrusted with so much love. I promise you, though, that if you knew what I know, you would share my conviction that Collins holds her by force. And you would understand why I must take the course of action that I have designed.

  I am signingpower of attorney over to you. The company is yours. Run it as you see fit, and it will flourish. Before Her Majesty’s lapdogs began to yip at me, I managed to secure the contract for the lavender. It has been sent along to New York. Have Cavanaugh draw up some advertisements that extol the vaunted superiority of English perfumery. Do try not to laugh too much in the process.

  I apologize if this letter leaves you shaken. I would prefer not to have to write it, and I eagerly anticipate our happy reunion. In the meantime, I remain

  Your ever-loving sister in spirit,

  Mina

  The next morning, when the maid brought breakfast, she handed over the letter. It did not take long for Ridland to appear.

  On his previous visits, he had made the most of his gray hair and wrinkled cheeks, hobbling and gesturing with the aid of a cane. Today he strode in boldly, her crumpled note clutched in his upraised fist. “What interesting letters you write.”

  He meant to scare her, of course. She jumped to her feet compliantly. “Sir, what a surprise! Did the maid mis-deliver my note? And I see you’ve forgotten your cane! Please do sit; you mustn’t overtax yourself.”

  A vein along his temple throbbed into prominence. “We do not detain you for our own amusement, girl. Toy with me, and you will regret it.”

  He had assured her, on the drive from Claridge’s, that she put him in mind of his granddaughters, and that he would not wish harm to a single hair on her head. But his solicitude had not been nearly as convinc
ing as this tyrannical turn. “I cannot imagine why you’re so angry, sir.” She sank into her chair as if faint. “Won’t you take a seat? I promise I don’t mean to distress you.”

  As he stared at her, she had the impression that he was rethinking his strategy. “I have explained to you,” he said more calmly, “how very critical it is that Gerard Collins be recovered. The Fenians have bombed Scotland Yard; do you doubt that your stepfather had a hand in it? He attempted to fund a war against this country, and every moment he remains free, we must anticipate a new disaster. If you still doubt it—”

  “Oh, no, certainly not.” Men always claimed to have very good reasons for caging a woman in a cell. Routinely, all across the world, they convinced themselves of the necessity. “I have a clear view of Mr. Collins, I assure you.” He was a rabid mutt who wanted his bone back. Mama was nothing but a thing to him; her very independence challenged his manly authority, and therefore could not be tolerated. “But when I come to my own role in these events, my vision grows murkier.” She paused to bat her lashes. “Dr. Morris tells me I could benefit from spectacles, but I feel certain they would detract from the general effect of my eyes. What think you?”

  He came forward to toss the balled-up letter into the butter dish. “I think you are funning me.”

  He should not sound so smug. It had taken him four days to figure this out. “Do tell,” Mina said, feigning astonishment.

  He spoke through his teeth. “Yes, Miss Masters, I will do. Despite your best efforts to act the flibbertigibbet, I think you could not run a company with so much success if your head were as empty as you pretend it to be.”

  “How kind,” she said softly. Of course, he had it wrong; her feebleminded act had won over businessmen who never would have lent money to a woman who dared address them as equals. “I must admit, I have a great deal of help with my company.” Social climbers in particular had been glad to patronize a society beauty’s little project. “And it is a very small business, you know. Only hair tonics. And the occasional cream. Oh, also a few lotions—we are expanding our offerings this season—”