My throat was parched from all my panting, and I flattened a hand over my chest to wave at him in wordless greeting.
As a man used to the nooks and crannies of the pleasure garden he maintained, he reached into shadow and a door latch unhinged. The hedges behind him were shrouded in deliberate dark, as though a perfect corner for a tryst, but I didn’t realize what they hid.
His eyes, bleak and weary to the bone, met mine. “How’s Maddie Ruth?” he asked me, voice strained near to breaking.
He did not let me pause to answer, but seized my uninjured shoulder in a shaking grasp and propelled me into the hidden portico while I struggled to shape the words. “She’s well,” I managed, a dry croak. “She’s healthy and safe.”
His smile did much to alleviate the careworn lines furrowed into his aged features. Relief and no dim shade of gratitude shaped his expression. He cared deeply enough to risk his all, then. Maddie Ruth was much admired.
He squeezed my shoulder, said quietly, “Pass on our love, aye?”
My heart went out to him. “I will.”
The gratitude he wore deepened, and what I thought might be apology. “Don’t turn back, now.” He forced the door closed before I could answer.
I heard his footsteps thump away from the panel. “Come an’ get this, y’bleedin’ mongrels!” A faint shout, but an angry one.
The tremors he had been unable to hide filled me as I realized just what sacrifice Nye had made. The growling fury of the monsters I’d whipped into a hunting frenzy spilled out from the courtyard behind the heavy door.
Behind me, louder than I ever recalled it, the wailing dirge of a violin painted a haunting accompaniment to Nye’s subsequent screams.
I wept openly, but I could no more forge back into that courtyard than I could force an alchemical victory from my limited toolset. Nye, knowing full well what awaited him, had ensured I could escape.
The phial tucked into my corset demanded I do so.
Fury welled up from wounds both real and emotional, scars I resolved that I would never forget.
I could not linger. Much as it plucked at my conscience, screamed for redemption, Nye’s sacrifice could not end here.
I hurried down the corridor comprised of wood paneling and the odd lamplight until it opened into a round chamber studded by similar halls.
A man stood in the center of a ring carved into the wooden floor, a single stand with a small tea set upon it. His hair was long—a curly mass of burnished bronze as it swayed over his shoulders with every dip of his bow. The violin he held to his chin gleamed like an instrument well cared for, and while he wore the formal shirt and jacket of fashionable demand, it was a kilt in blue, green, yellow and red that sat upon his waist.
He was sharp-featured and kind-eyed, and though the notes he drew from the instrument did not so much as waver, his gaze slid from where I stood to a plain, unmarked door set between two arches with similar corridors beyond. He raised his eyebrows in silence.
I opened my mouth; he pursed his lips and looked up to indicate the ceiling. A warning. I followed the line of his gaze.
The Menagerie had been designed rather cleverly indeed.
Vents had been arrayed into the ceiling, an unusual architectural creation that forced sound out over the Menagerie proper. As if the whole was an amphitheater and he stood at the center. Every time I had heard this violinist play, he had been here.
I blotted at my eyes and mouthed a grateful word.
He did not nod so much as bend in reply, and the melody soared out from his clever hands and steady bow. For all the years I had visited this garden, through trial and mutiny, this man whose age I could not quite determine had played. Haunting, beautiful, lyrical and powerful; each note drew an answering chord from within me.
I let myself out through the door, and hoped that he would never fall to silence.
The corridor beyond that unmarked door led outside the walls. It offended me on some level that I had never known of it.
After a too-long path, I found the air turning rapidly sour—until it was all I could to breathe in the stink of sewage and manufactured run-off. It reeked, the pong sharp enough to sear the fine hairs within my nose.
When I finally reached the surface, it was to find myself ankle-deep in the Thames’s putrid run-off.
A pat at my chest reassured me that the phial I held had not been lost.
Pain had become a drumming refrain within me, but it was the anger I clung to as I forced my limbs to carry me up the river bank and to the nearest street. Fury became the flame that fueled my energies.
For Hawke, who remained unable to trust me with his well-being, and for myself, who had certainly not trusted him—even as I’d gloried in his taking. Fury for the Ferrymen, twisted beyond human by whatever concoctions the Veil had given them, and for the Bakers who suffered for it.
I mourned Nye, for all I had not wholly known him, and in some way, I mourned the loss of the Menagerie I’d known. I missed the simplicity with which it operated, the wink and nod given to such risqué people what worked it—and them what attended it.
In truth, I missed all that had come before September last. Nothing would ever be the same. In part because of my determined, if weakening, grasp upon sobriety.
In part because I was not the only one to have changed.
Were I less stubborn, I might have left London as Hawke demanded.
Yet my body ached in places that had been too long denied, and this, too, became a sort of banner I held—a standard to mark my vow.
I had precious little patience for Hawke’s attempt at martyrdom.
And less for them what got in my way.
The tunnel that had led me from the Menagerie put me rather closer to Ratcliff than I liked, yet it also provided me with an opportunity. Keeping as close to the smaller lanes as I could, I somehow managed to avoid undue attention as I made my way to Miss Turner’s home.
The back door was lit, as expected of a proper domicile, but I stood at the far end of the light while rapping upon the panel.
It took more than a few attempts, and I wondered if Miss Turner had gone out. I was prepared to give up on polite and dub the lock when the latch released and an arm clad in shirtsleeves pushed the door wide.
Lord Piers took one look at me—flattened as I was against the brick face, clad in the torn and filthy remains of what could easily be taken as a doxy’s attired temptation and like as not reeking of the water I’d slogged through—and the damned earl’s lips twitched into sharp amusement. “Are you lost, molly?”
I scowled. Though I was aware that my skin was a sight darker than he was accustomed, I also knew that my hair had bled indigo down my face and neck, and stained the back of my corset in watery streaks. He couldn’t be that dull. “Rather more than I appear,” I admitted wearily.
My voice earned a widening of pale green eyes. “Is that—”
“Sh,” I hissed before he could say my name. I had managed to escape any pursuers—though I wondered at the lack—and dared not risk that his voice carry. “Just let me in.”
Amusement shifted to unholy glee, and he stepped aside to let me past. The remains of the Byzantine coins I wore clinked in tinny relief. “I suppose I owe you at least one,” he told me.
“No,” I said as the door closed behind him. “But you may wish to stay out of the Menagerie for a long while.”
“I intend to,” he assured me, touching his lips with an ungloved finger as though it presented a sort of vow.
“Have we a guest?” called Adelaide from the parlor, where a fire cast golden fingers along the hall.
I blinked. An ungloved earl lacking in coat and waistcoat, though he cut a fine figure in his ivory shirtsleeves. His feet were stockinged, but no sign of his shoes.
A mistress in the parlor.
I’d interrupted an evening in.
I cleared my throat, embarrassed despite my need for sanctuary. “Remarkably patient, your lady,” I murmured.
Piers plucked a woolen cloak where it hung on a peg beside the kitchen door and draped it over my shoulders. “Don’t tell me a single thing about your night,” he ordered, ignoring what I thought was a fair compliment. “Whatever the truth is, it will never match what I am thinking, and I will thoroughly enjoy this moment for the rest of my life.”
That his sister-in-law arrived at the door of his mistress covered in muck from the Thames and dressed like a wayward dollymop? I’d just wager he would.
Garnering what little dignity remained, I sailed through the hall and up the stairs. I knew it was not my home, that I was an unwanted guest, yet I could not help myself.
The cold crept into my flesh; a shuddering cue that my reserves had emptied, and the hollowness it created within me threatened to overwhelm the last of my strength.
I was afraid.
Afraid of what face I might show the earl whose loyalties were not mine, afraid that I would succumb again to the lush bliss of the laudanum I’d wanted for nearly all of my life.
I feared damning my pride and begging for a dram when I knew the terror of quitting the stuff.
The earl surely apprised his mistress of the quandary I presented, for a sweetly rumpled Adelaide took charge of my bathing. I did not ask what it was I’d blundered into, and she did not explain.
At least her hands were gentle as she helped me scrub the stain from my skin—and she did not pry when I burst into tears in the midst.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ashmore arrived sometime during the night. I’d drifted in and out of sleep, pushed beyond exhaustion and ensconced in Miss Turner’s bedroom for safekeeping.
I had no reason to trust that Piers would not betray me again, save that Miss Turner’s presence like as not softened his sense of risk. Still, I had been rumored to hide here once, and the Veil might remember that.
Truth be told, there were many reasons I should have been more cautious, but I couldn’t summon the care. Even Ashmore’s voice, a muted rumble below, did not engender in me anything more than a convoluted miasma of shame, anger and fear.
And a clinging, desperate need for gentleness.
Words were exchanged, and the front door opened and closed once more. Footsteps upon the stair heralded my tutor’s arrival.
He allowed me to adhere to his chest as he sat on the edge of my borrowed bed. Folding me in a sturdy embrace, he said sternly, “Come, then, tell me everything.”
There was kindness in his tolerance.
I told him all that transpired. I left nothing out, not even the cruelty of the exchange between Hawke and I, and I did not look at his face to know if he grew more severe for it—or resigned.
“Are you all right?” he asked me, all too gently. I’d wanted it, but the reality of his concern was nearly my undoing.
I nodded. My breath caught in a jerked hitch.
He sighed, folded me once more into his embrace, and rested his cheek upon my damp—and slightly darker of hue—hair. “I am so sorry,” he said quietly. A murmured rumble. “Would that I were a stronger man.”
This was all it took. Once more, I lapsed into tears, torn between salving his pride and nursing my own. I shook my head against his shoulder. “You are,” I said when I could muster it, “and always shall be the dearest of friends. You have done nothing wrong.”
“Is that so?” A wry murmur, one he punctuated by cradling the back of my head in a gentle hand. “Tell me truthfully, Cherry. Did that bastard hurt you?”
Oh, in so many ways. But I had invited them all.
I shook my head. “Only my arm, and I know why he did that.”
“Because his are the tools of a brute,” Ashmore said, a lash creeping into his voice. He rubbed my back, stroked my hair, until the tears I struggled with eased. “I cannot give you anything for the pain.”
I’d thought as much. Though my shoulder throbbed, it was not the worst of my wounds, and it would pass. Those hurts I carried inside me might never.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to sit upright. “Best you don’t,” I said briskly, or at least a facsimile of. “I blundered into a bit of the Veil’s smoke, and I’m afraid of taking it again.”
He searched my eyes, my face, drawing a thumb down my cheek with tender care. Whatever he saw, or resolved, he did not share. “What, then, do you intend now?”
That he did not ask me to leave again, to travel the world with him, was a boon to us both.
Sniffing back the remains of my sorrows, and my self-pity, I gestured to the nightstand beside Adelaide’s bed. “That is the phial left with me.”
The mattress dipped in tandem with his lean, and glass clinked faintly. “There are ways to ascertain the compounds,” he assured me. “Unfortunately, they will take time. Longer than the days allotted. You need to be somewhere much safer until we know for certain what it is the Ferrymen are about.”
I had no particular disagreement with the observation.
Even I, drawn thin as I was, was no longer quite so foolish to believe I could handle the horrific state of the Veil’s affairs alone.
We had two days left of Ishmael’s four, but I wondered at my ability to save my friend from his course. Or Hawke from his.
“Is there any place so free of the Veil’s reach?” I asked wearily.
His smile was not so rusty as his laugh, and the hands that helped me to my feet were gentle and kind. “There are some,” he allowed. “And I’ve a closed carriage waiting, so let us go there while all seems quiet enough to risk it.”
Neither Lord Piers nor his lady were in evidence as Ashmore helped me to take the stairs. It was not entirely that I was weak, for I didn’t feel as though the strength of my limbs had failed. I allowed Ashmore to bustle me into the carriage and took the ride in silence, dozing fitfully against his shoulder.
I awoke fully as the conveyance slowed.
When Ashmore alighted, I saw beyond the dim pool of light given by the carriage lanterns a wash of yellow smoke and fog that dimmed the façade of a red brick home with white trim.
A terraced home, similar to the rowhouses we had occupied but for the inclusion of a veranda. Nicer, certainly, than them found in Whitechapel or Ratcliff.
A single lamp burned in the window, as though a symbol of safe harbor.
As I descended from the carriage step, Ashmore’s hand firm around mine and my borrowed woolen skirt gathered in the other lest I trip, I squinted into the dreary drift and could not place where we were. Exhaustion slowed my thoughts.
We’d left East End, I was sure.
Ashmore, a striking figure despite his monotonous browns, treated me as though I were any other lady given escort to a finer estate. I could not wholly muffle a chuckle, and he shot me an inquiring glance from eyes gone dark as pitch in the muted gaslight flickering at the end of the lane.
“No, ’tis nothing,” I said softly.
He squeezed my fingers and handed me up the small stoop.
I was prepared to knock, or to touch the brass button affixed to the brick frame, but I was allowed neither. As Ashmore came to stand beside me, the latch lifted, and the pretty blue painted door swung wide.
“Do come in,” came the soft, deeply polite refrains of a man who, the lateness of the hour notwithstanding, wore the tailored black coat and trousers of the serving elite. He was tall, broad still despite the age that turned his corona of hair and impressive chops white as snow. His bend proclaimed courtesy.
His eyes, a gentle gray, brimmed with something I dared to think of as relief.
Mindful of the grace mitigated by the ornate brass prosthetic fixed to his knee, I forsook all sense of courtesy and threw myself into the arms of my erstwhile butler. “Booth!”
Ready arms folded around me, wild whiskers still ever so piratical in nature tickled my temple and ear as he squeezed me in firm, and yet blusteringly awkward, acceptance. “There, now, little miss,” he rumbled. “Welcome home, then.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Was the opium I’d been given the cause of my ceaseless tears or was it the lack?
Once I’d have thought it the latter, but I was afraid of my own responses after I’d succumbed to the smoke once more, and so I had no answers to give. Only apologies as I sobbed before the fire stoked high in a small but elegantly appointed parlor, dabbing at my reddened and tear-streaked face with a handkerchief Booth had pressed into my hand.
Mrs. Booth, rousted from her bed before Ashmore had come to fetch me, had already prepared a light repast of toast—with strawberry jam that I dutifully ate, bless her—and cold sausage, crisped potatoes and tea. The fragrance of bergamot wafted from the steaming cozy.
She’d batted a tear or two away herself as she foisted the meal upon me, complaining that I’d lost too much flesh and swearing to right the wrong.
To laugh and to cry all at once was a thing I’d never managed before, and yet I did just that as Booth and his efficient wife fussed over me as though I were still their lady.
Ashmore, given as much attention as I, sat across from me in a brown-and-cream-striped arm chair and cradled his given brandy, indulgent of the fuss until I’d eaten and refreshed my palate with the tea.
Mrs. Booth raised her eyebrows when I denied sugar for it, but as she passed her man, I heard her murmur, “Our lady’s done and grown,” in watery tones, and blanched for it.
Lady was a new moniker among them what had been my staff, and I didn’t much like it, but Mrs. Booth had always been the bustling proper type—the ideal housekeeper, as far as I was concerned. That Booth still called me miss was like as not a mark of affection instead of proper care.
I wouldn’t correct him for as long as I lived.
All that I missed was Fanny and the house-boy Booth had apprenticed. I learned that Levi was sound asleep, as though he were fit to be buried, and he’d gained height in the months past.
Fanny was also abed, as she had not been feeling well of late, but that she would be made very happy indeed to see me come the morrow.
Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles Page 25