Written on Your Skin

by Meredith Duran

  The train was passing through a wooded area, and the dappled light danced over her throat, the shadows of leaves slipping suggestively downward toward her décolletage. “Ah, let me guess,” she said, as his eyes followed the shadows, whose indecorous progress he fully envied. “The unique feature of your railroad is boredom. I see no harm in conversation with our fellow passengers. Do you really not converse on trains here? I expect it’s because you sit in these stuffy little compartments. In America, the carriages are open, and everyone—”

  “In America, gold rains from the sky, no doubt.” She seemed damned determined to convince herself of English failures; he wondered what that was about. “But you’re in England now, and not for a pleasure tour.”

  She hesitated. “You worry that Collins’s men are after us.”

  In fact, it wasn’t Collins’s men he worried about so much as Ridland’s. But it made no difference. “A talkative American will be remembered.” He paused. “Don’t you think?”

  His solicitation of her opinion appeared to gratify her. “Perhaps,” she allowed, making a regal nod. A brief pause opened, and he became aware suddenly that the steady thump of the wheels over the ties in the line registered in her flesh. Thump went the wheels, and her body gave a perceptible jolt. Her flesh quaked at regular intervals. It had never occurred to him that the smaller and lighter a body, the more tiring life must be.

  She was studying him, a little frown on her face. She’d been frowning at him a great deal in the last day; clearly, she was more comfortable with antagonism. Or maybe nature endowed small creatures with special instincts for self-preservation, alerting them to suspect intentions even when their larger counterparts had yet to show their hand. His weight lent him a balance that made the train’s passage unremarkable, but she clutched the wall for a reason, to hold herself on her feet. He planned on knocking her off them at the next opportunity. It had been a long time coming, four years and five months, to be exact. His cheerful anticipation was difficult to hide. “You have an objection?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Only, if there are men after us, we wouldn’t be able to spot them at sight, would we? Drawing a man out is a good way to take his measure.”

  “Dear God.” He swallowed a laugh. “Never say you’re claiming that Godey’s Lady’s Book is part of your strategy to safeguard us?”

  As she smiled, it struck him that there was no need to hide his humor from her; even when wary, she seemed willing to encourage good fun. “You won’t believe me if I do,” she said. “And that is precisely why it’s such an effective tactic. No one ever suspects it!”

  His hypothesis intrigued him. One more crack in her mask, perhaps. He decided to test it. “Oh, certainly,” he said. “Because conversations about fashion magazines so often segue into confessions of villainous intent.”

  Sure enough, she overlooked his sarcasm and laughed back. “You must admit, it’s a much subtler method than pulling out a gun.”

  What a bizarre and charming tic. She encouraged his amusement, even if it came at her own expense. “Perhaps you should just skip right to the heart of the matter, then. Leave the magazines and bring along a dress. Whip it out and canvass for opinions.”

  Her face lit like a chandelier; the effect was so pronounced that he actually felt his heart skip. “Yes,” she said. “The uglier the better. Something puce, or…magenta and orange.”

  Over her head, he noticed the guard lurking a few meters away. Wonderful; he told her not to draw attention, and then he lingered in the corridor with her to trade jests. He could not feel optimistic about how effortlessly she addled his wits; it had tripped him up in Hong Kong, and it could well do so now. The stakes were no lower for either of them. “All right, enough fun. My request is very simple. Go back inside, sit down, and keep silent. I, and the rest of the compartment, I daresay, will thank you.”

  He felt a stir of regret as her face went blank. “Of course you will,” she muttered.

  He pulled open the door to the compartment. The ginger-haired man who’d been sitting opposite Miss Masters now stood at the entrance, rooting through a bag placed on the luggage rack overhead. Coincidentally, this position put his ear very near the door. The matron, who did not strike Phin as amenable by nature, had taken the man’s former seat by the window. Phin eyed the fellow as he stepped aside to permit Miss Masters’s passage. The man’s jacket pulled beneath the arms; the bearer of a first-class ticket should be able to afford better tailoring. The shoes were a fine make, but they were worn thin at the soles.

  Sloppy not to have noticed these things before. Phin would have blamed his distraction on the lure of flirtatious elbows, but the prospect was so absurd that he felt his self-regard slip several notches merely in the contemplation of it.

  Miss Masters had also remarked the possible significance of the man’s actions. As she resumed her seat, she gave Phin a charged look, then glanced onward to the man. No, Phin urged her silently. Don’t look, don’t remark—

  “Oh,” she said brightly to the matron, “did you decide to sit across from me? What fun. Did you want to see my magazine?”

  “No,” the woman said curtly. “It was not my idea to switch seats.”

  All right, that was cleverly done. Alas, Miss Masters felt the urge to advertise her triumph, humming a pointed bar of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” as she settled back with her fashion magazine.

  Phin took his satchel and newspaper from the rack and sat down, snapping the paper back open with a pointedness that he hoped Miss Masters noticed. Their valises were in the luggage compartment and would have to be sacrificed, but that was all right; his gun was in the satchel.

  “Such a fine day out,” Miss Masters said. “Isn’t it a shame we’re cooped up inside?”

  She simply couldn’t let him take the lead. No doubt her successes in New York gave her cause to trust her own initiative. He remembered her mother, who had seemed to limp so obediently in Collins’s shadow, and wondered whether she was even aware that between these two extremes, other options existed, such as, perhaps, cooperation. “Travel can be tedious,” he said mildly, and scanned the columns for likely words. When he had found what he needed, he said, “Are you bored? Allow me to amuse you; have a look at this.”

  She craned over as he pointed slowly to various words:…depart…without…announcement…

  “Oh, that is very interesting,” she agreed. “When do you think it will happen?”

  “Very soon, if the prime minister has his way.” The train began to shudder; they were braking in preparation for the next station. “At any moment, really.”

  She smiled. “Well, I can’t claim to acknowledge a foreign power. But in this case, I wouldn’t argue with him. His judgment seems sound.”

  She was bloody clever. He wanted to pinch her cheek, an urge that startled him. “Glad to hear it,” he said, and started to fold up the paper. But she caught his wrist.

  “This story looks very interesting.” Her gloved finger landed on how. “Have you heard anything about it?”

  “It’s one of those classic criminal scams,” he improvised. “Very basic, really. The one man created the diversion, while the others ran off with the jewels. I expect the police will never find them.”

  The matron gave a loud sniff to communicate her distaste at such discussion.

  “But how did the man who created the diversion escape? Or is he in custody?”

  “No,” he said. “I expect he’s rather good at what he does.”

  “I see.” As he folded the newspaper, she set her magazine on the floor, her hands folding very primly in her lap. But her lips fought a smile. “I had no idea, sir, that you had such intimate knowledge of criminal schemes. I find myself quite concerned by you.”

  He grinned openly now. There was something peculiarly delightful in this private conspiracy. “I am not the one who desires a dress striped in magenta and orange.”

  The train shrieked as the brakes fully met the wheels. Steam billo
wed up past the windows, casting the compartment in a dim light. She looked out the window, then back to him; as the smile fighting for her lips spread like sunrise, he felt something leap inside him. He should not be enjoying himself. Her, he could enjoy. But he had never enjoyed this sort of business. He would worry about that later.

  “Shrivenham,” called the porter. “All out for Shrivenham.”

  “A moment,” he said to her, and came to his feet, as if to step into the corridor.

  The man visibly started. He made to rise, then glanced at Miss Masters’s still-seated form and subsided. It was all Phin needed to see. Turning back, he faked a stumble into the man’s lap—his elbow angled to deliver a nicely aimed punch.

  The man wheezed and curled over. Skirts brushed past Phin’s trousers, trailing the scent of lavender; a quick sidelong glance confirmed that Miss Masters was disappearing down the corridor.

  “Heavens above,” the matron murmured.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” Phin said. “My goodness, are you all right?”

  The man was wheezing. “I’m—to hell with you.”

  The matron gasped. But she was in for a worse shock—if the fellow could talk, the job wasn’t done. Phin clapped a hand to the man’s shoulder as though to apologize, squeezing hard. He had not rehearsed in some months; he felt a muscle pull in his arm as he clamped down, and for a brief second, to his own shock, he feared he wouldn’t manage it.

  The man flushed an angry purple and flopped forward from the waist.

  “Dear God,” Phin said, and sprang backward. “He’s out cold. Let me call for the guard.”

  In a bad piece of luck, the guard had already heard the ruckus. He came rushing into the compartment; Phin sidestepped him, picked up his satchel, and walked quickly down the corridor, stepping off the train to Miss Masters’s applause.

  “Oh, lovely!” she cried. “I saw it all through the window.”

  He took her arm and led her at a quick pace off the platform and past the stationmaster’s narrow strip of garden, alive in the breeze with bobbing blossoms of red and white. The sunny scene looked impossibly vivid, as though painted in primary colors by an artist who hadn’t yet learned how to shade; it should trouble him, it really should, that he felt so goddamned alive. Was he never going to learn subtler pleasures?

  Miss Masters seemed to feel it, too. She wrested free of his hold, skipping ahead a little, then spinning back to face him. Her eyes were as blue as the sky behind her, her hair as bright as the sun; she was not a subtle pleasure herself. “You must teach me that trick,” she said. “Pinching him until he passed out!”

  Her enthusiasm acted like an antidote; he felt his elation contracting. She would admire a circus freak show, too, if the contortions were strange enough. “Do it wrong and you will kill someone.” He had learned that firsthand. He still remembered the small noise the man had made as he died. Not a victim to be mourned righteously; the man had traded primarily in flesh. But someone had wept for him, no doubt. Almost always, someone did.

  I wept for him. His tears had baffled him at the time. For his own sake, knowing such mistakes were likely to happen again, he’d not been able to admit that he’d also been weeping for himself.

  Beyond the booking office, the country lane lay deserted, dappled with light beneath the limbs of overhanging oaks. The air smelled of wild roses, honeysuckle, and hay, and a nightingale sang sweetly from some branch nearby. Miss Masters, undeterred by the possibility of murder, said, “Perhaps I would like to know how to kill someone.”

  Had she not spoken so calmly, he might have said something cutting. But her manner made him look before he spoke, and he saw in her expression some shadow that made him study her more closely. “Whom would you want to kill?”

  The scream of the train whistle startled a cloud of birds from the trees. “No one in particular,” she said. “A category generally. And perhaps I wouldn’t actually do it, but to advertise my capability would be useful. Are we going somewhere? Why not wait for the next train?”

  He consulted the map in his head. They could hire a vehicle in the village and cut to the Bristol-bound line. He took her wrist and started down the road. “That pinch can be unpredictable. If he hops off at the next station and backtracks, we don’t want to be waiting. No, we’ll go by road for a bit and bypass Swindon entirely. What do you mean, a category?”

  She sighed. “I knew I shouldn’t have worn a corset. And a category, yes—men, mostly. Not all of them, of course. But men like Collins.” She made a sound of amusement. “Men who lock me in rooms.”

  He cut her a sidelong glance. If she was slotting him into the same category as Collins, he had his work cut out for him. “How fortunate that I let you out, then.”

  “You didn’t let me out,” she said. “I slipped out, and then I gave you information that made you decide to let me stay out. It’s the letting that I object to, you see.”

  “And I apologize for it,” he said. “Again.”

  She gave him a smile. “Apologies come cheap, Ashmore. And we both have a great deal of money.”

  Yes, he thought with a sigh. The next opportunity to knock her off her feet might not be as close as he’d hoped.

  Chapter Eleven

  In Shrivenham, the only postchaise available for hire had windows that would not shut and springs that had long since come unsprung. Mina did not think highly of its prospects, but it managed to rattle along for five miles before the axle broke, leaving them stranded “jest around the corner from the Twin Elms,” the glum driver assured them, “and if there bean’t a cab there, I’ll eat my hat.”

  The Twin Elms turned out to be aptly named, a white stucco structure flanked by two massive elms whose knotty roots bunched up from the earth like scrabbling fingers. In the whitewashed parlor off the entry hall, a half dozen gentlemen and a young lady were gathered around a three-legged table at the fireplace, eating beefsteak and tapping tankards.

  The talk paused at their entrance, the gentlemen gawking at Mina. Then the young woman rose, wiping her hands on her apron as she came over. She turned out to be the innkeeper’s daughter, a pretty, wide-faced girl whose rosy complexion made a pleasing contrast to her night-black hair. Mina liked her at once, simply for the fact that she sat among men, drinking and conversing so casually. It seemed Mama had something to learn about modern English girls.

  Alas, the girl could not meet her eyes. After one wide-eyed survey of Mina’s face and gown, she swallowed and addressed herself solely to Ashmore.

  “Lawks,” she said, after listening to Ashmore’s cursory summary of their troubles. “Well, tomorrow’s a different matter. But today, there’s only one coach, and it be out at the Holladay wedding. I expect they’re be making a parade of the pair through the neighboring parts at present. But”—she glanced briefly at Mina, and began to stammer—“b-b-bean’t need to vex yourself. They’ll be coming for their supper; we’re cooking a terrible grand feast for them. And John Marsh, what’s the driver, goes back by Swindon way afterward.” As her eyes darted briefly back to Mina, she shifted uncomfortably and tucked a stray curl back behind her ear.

  Your hair looks lovely, Mina wanted to tell her. We are not in competition. But experience suggested that such reassurances more often embarrassed their recipients than comforted them.

  “Ain’t much, to be sure,” the girl muttered. “But it will see you where you’re going.”

  “It sounds perfect,” Mina said.

  “Well.” She looked now at the floor. “If you bide an hour, I’ll have a nice plate for you.”

  Mina might have liked to relax by the bow window with a glass of wine; she felt she deserved it, after walking so far in the sun. But a washstand and a cold cloth across her brow also sounded appealing. Why not combine them? At her request, the girl blushed and scrambled off into the kitchen to fetch the wine, then showed them upstairs to the only chamber remaining. The wedding, she informed them, had drawn people all the way from Wiltshire.


  “How far is that?” Mina asked, when they had stepped into the room and shut the door.

  “All of five miles,” Ashmore said with a small smile.

  The room was spacious, scented by sprigs of rosemary tacked along the wall and kept fresh by the mild breeze flowing through the open casement windows. Grateful for the respite of a soft carpet beneath her road-wearied feet, Mina fell into a wide-elbowed chair while Ashmore prowled the perimeter. He looked into the garden with an expression generally reserved for the sight of invading armies. Perhaps he was disturbed by how wildly the apple and damson trees grew, not a straight line to be seen in the lot. “This is unfortunate,” he said.

  He put her in mind of Benedict né Washington, tail lashing and hair bristling. She wondered idly how Sally was getting on with the beast, God save her.

  Her eyes drifted shut. The rosemary was an honest scent, conjuring comfort and health rather than luxury. How unjust that such lovely herbs would favor this dreary climate. Beside the inn door, she’d spied a hedge of lavender growing as bushy and wild as a weed; her contract with Whyllson’s was no longer looking as advantageous as she’d fancied. If she were only willing to spend a few months here a year, she could set up a lavender plantation and save the company a great deal of money. “Three hours,” she said. “It’s not so long to wait.”

  Springs creaked; opening one eye, she saw that he’d sat on the bed. It was too low for him; he had to straighten his legs entirely, lest his knees fall agape. “You misunderstand,” he said. “Swindon is where he’ll expect us to go. Until we find a vehicle that can take us farther, we stay put.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes. For the night, at least.”

  “The night?” She sat up. The room seemed smaller, of a sudden. A bracing sip of wine did not change her view. That bed was far too small for the both of them, unless they planned to share more than the pillows. Her body stirred at the thought, and she found herself staring at his cravat. Take it off, she almost said. She wanted to see the damage she’d wrought.