Frovtunes’ Kiss

by Lisa Manuel

  But she did hope he wouldn’t misconstrue her last comment as mere flattery designed to persuade him to do the favor she was about to ask. She would never stoop so low. Really.

  She cleared her throat. “Mr. Paddington, I wonder if you would be so kind as to accompany me on an errand?”

  He was still grinning, obviously lost in agreeable thoughts of Letty. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Miss Hughes.”

  That only increased her guilt, for once he learned the nature of this errand, he might very well regret his generosity.

  “Did you find him inside? Is he inebriated? Oh, is it quite a den of iniquity?”

  Graham winced at the enthusiasm, and the damned naïveté, of Letty’s questions. Her eyes sparking with scandal, her gaze darted beyond his shoulder to continue her first-ever inspection of an establishment of ill repute. Or at least of its facade, for he had ordered her to wait in the coach while he went inside to search for their brother.

  But that was about to change.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to find out for yourself, Letty.” He gritted his teeth and signaled to the footman posted at the rear of the coach.

  What the devil had possessed him to bring Letty instead of Shaun? Shaun wouldn’t have blinked an eye at their task, wouldn’t have spoken a word beyond what was necessary to convey Freddy to the coach. They’d have gone in, collected the heap of arms and legs that was his brother, and made their escape wholly without incident. With Letty, however…

  Even as he bemoaned his rotten judgment, he understood exactly what had gotten him into this predicament. Moira. Ah, Moira, Moira, of the dark, dazzling eyes and the velvet lips that transformed the most preposterous notion into wisdom worthy of the oracle of Amon. With a whisper the woman could undo the most vehement resolution, with a touch crumble the most ironclad oath.

  He held out a hand to help Letty down. “I’ll need your help coaxing Freddy outside.”

  He might have spoken Arabic, given her blank stare. Then her brows shot up. “Monteith, I cannot walk into a gentlemen’s club. What would people think?”

  “Gentlemen’s club? Are you serious? Come along, Letty, we have no choice. Our brother is little more than semiconscious, and what few wits he does possess are only proving a hindrance. He refuses to budge.”

  More than that. To Graham’s chagrin and vexation both, Freddy had spat at him when he suggested they make their exit. Spat! Luckily Freddy’s current condition precluded taking aim with any accuracy.

  “Besides,” Graham added, “I seriously doubt you’ll meet anyone you know, and if you do, it’s highly unlikely they’ll remember.”

  In truth, he deplored bringing her through that door, loathed having her see the depths to which her twin had plummeted. He’d seen places like this aplenty in Cairo, and knew what sort of men frequented them. Usually those with little to lose, less still to hope for. They were typically men who’d lost everything from lovers to limbs, whose lives essentially entailed waiting to die.

  Why should his brother be among them?

  The simple act of descending the steps to the subterranean entrance was like sinking into a netherworld quite distinct from the one they inhabited. At street level the building, its bricks soot-stained but intact, appeared no more menacing than the Royalty Theater a few doors away.

  With each downward step, however, the salty breezes from the nearby London Docks waned beneath a cloying perfume that seeped from the door’s warped edges, an odor that reached out to claw the senses and drag the unsuspecting visitor into a languid but lethal embrace. As he opened the door, a waft hit them full in their faces. Letty emitted a choking cough. He felt his airways constrict. Even the footman quietly cleared his throat as he followed close behind.

  They stepped into a dim interior relieved only by the glow of several stinking tallow candles and a gap in the smoke-browned curtains. Of illicit activities he saw no sign, just that heavy, hypnotic sweetness that permeated every cranny, every breath. The smoking apparatus had apparently been stowed away during daylight hours, not to be unveiled again until nightfall a couple of hours hence.

  A single window peeked out onto the foot pavement like a toddler able to glean only knee-high glimpses of the adult world. Beneath it, three men sat at a round café table drinking tiny cups of acrid-smelling coffee. Eyes drooping from sleeplessness slid toward him and Letty with no more than lethargic curiosity, exactly as they’d regarded him the first time he’d entered their lair.

  At the time, he had feared having to fight his way in and ransack the place for Freddy. He had even come armed for the likelihood, but a handful of coins had proved effective enough. The obliging proprietors, or patrons, had pointed the way to his brother at the end of a damp, narrow corridor.

  He stepped now between the men’s inquisitive gazes and Letty as together they proceeded around a scattering of tables littered with ashes and cups of foul-smelling dregs.

  Fumbling to open her reticule, Letty pulled out a handkerchief and held it to her nose. From beneath it she whispered, “What on earth is this place?”

  He hadn’t explained much during the ride except to say the place emulated pastimes popular in other parts of the world. Her imagination had filled in the details, he knew, but even high-strung Letty hadn’t imagined this. Not for Freddy.

  He cupped a hand to her elbow and guided her toward the deepening gloom of the corridor. The footman followed, a silent but reassuring presence as they skirted a man sprawled facedown on a moth-eaten carpet. Another lay slumped across a bench, a glistening string of drool wending its way down his cheek.

  Within her handkerchief, Letty stifled a snort of disgust. Graham slipped his arm across her shoulders. “Let’s just get him out of here.”

  A smoking sconce lit the corridor. They passed several doorways, each draped in fabric that displayed more filth than design. He felt Letty draw closer with each step, heard her breathing become labored, faltering. Once she stumbled to a halt and made a croaking squeak, pointing as some insect disappeared into a crack in the wall.

  “Come, he’s in here.” He lifted a curtain aside and ushered her into a chamber no larger or more appealing than a prison cell. A grating at eye level permitted light enough to reveal a pallet of rugs that filled one entire wall. Lying on his back, an arm thrown across his eyes, their brother uttered a fitful moan.

  “Freddy!” Letty swept into the room. Her cry of dismay echoed Graham’s own sentiments upon finding Freddy here earlier. The first time he had looked into this chamber, he almost hadn’t recognized his brother, had very nearly moved along to continue searching. But a thatch of tawny hair had caught the candlelight from the corridor.

  Freddy looked as though he’d been in a fight and dragged senseless through the streets. His trousers were muddied, his coat and waistcoat askew, his shirt stained and torn, and his neck cloth hung limp from an open collar.

  Heedless of the packed-dirt floor, Letty gathered her skirts and knelt at her twin’s bedside. “Freddy, are you ill?” Her gloved hand nudged his shoulder. “What’s wrong with you? Why do you look like that?”

  Freddy’s arm slid away from his face. He managed a weak smile, quickly eclipsed by a groan that hinted at impending illness. He swallowed audibly, blinked, and turned bleary eyes on Graham. “Wha’s he doing here?” The words were slurred but nonetheless barbed. “Thought I sent ‘im packing. Make him go ‘way, Letty.”

  “He’s rescuing you, you nincompoop. So am I. What were you thinking, coming to a wretched place like this?”

  “W-wha’ were you thinking? Shouldn’t be here.”

  “Idiot.” Despite her scolding, she pressed a palm to his brow and smoothed damp hairs away. Graham watched, astounded and more than a little touched to witness such tenderness in Letty. Or, at least, in the Letty he’d known since returning home.

  “Can you walk, do you think?” she asked her twin in the gentlest of tones.

  Freddy shrugged, coughed, moaned again. “Don�
�t know.”

  “Well, never mind, you can lean on us.”

  “Wha’ if I don’t wanna go?” His gaze narrowed on Graham. Despite the haze in his eyes, Freddy’s rancor burned clear. He rolled onto his side, his back to the room. “Think I’ll just stay here. I like it here.”

  “Oh, Freddy, do shut up. Look at this place. The walls are dripping, the floor is crawling with the most revolting creatures, and, good gracious, the stench. Why would anyone of sound mind not wish to leave?” She sounded more like the familiar Letty then, which oddly brought a smile to both Freddy’s and Graham’s faces.

  Peering over his shoulder, Freddy reached back to grasp her hand. “All right, Letty. To put a stopper in your bellyaching, I’ll come ‘long like a good boy.”

  With considerable effort and coordination, they wrestled Freddy from the filthy pallet and onto his feet. He wobbled precariously, supported on either side by Graham and a clearly shaken Letty. The footman moved to lend his assistance, but, remembering Moira’s advice, Graham waved him away.

  Freddy’s head sagged between his shoulders while a chorus of groans slid from his throat, increasing in volume with each step. Graham counted it a small miracle that the contents of his brother’s stomach remained where they were.

  With little mishap they maneuvered to the main room and headed for the street door, their shuffling feet sending bits of the previous night’s debris skittering along the floor. They’d nearly achieved the exit when Freddy’s knees buckled. Letty let out an oomph as he fell against her side. She lost her grip, and Freddy toppled over backward.

  Graham’s quick grasp saved Letty from falling, as well. A nearby table bore the brunt of their brother’s weight and tumbled over with him, along with several porcelain cups and a spindle-backed chair. Freddy and the furniture hit the floor with a crash and the screech of shattering china.

  Letty stood with a hand pressed to her mouth as she gaped at the wreckage. Graham and the footman scrambled to disengage Freddy from the table’s splintered legs, hauling him to his feet and brushing shards of porcelain from the back of his coat. The sour stench of fermented spirits wafted from the fabric.

  From behind him, a barrage assaulted Graham’s ears, a string of epithets in a language he didn’t comprehend. One of the coffee drinkers, heretofore inert and disinterested, now bolted from his chair and bore down on them with a face gone crimson. Once again, Graham foraged into his coat pocket and extracted a palm full of coins whose value he didn’t bother verifying before pouring them into the foreigner’s hand.

  As quickly as Freddy’s dragging feet allowed, they made their way outside and into the carriage. Sprawling across the seat, Freddy sneered once at Graham and promptly passed out. Letty climbed in after him and gently lifted his head into her lap. Graham settled into the seat facing them and rapped on the ceiling for the driver to move on.

  “What was that awful place?” His sister raised a face sapped of color. “What was Freddy doing there?”

  “It’s an opium den, Letty.” Graham pinched the bridge of his nose, weary unto exhaustion.

  “Opium? Isn’t that what laudanum’s made of?”

  He gave a nod.

  “So it’s like medicine, then?”

  God. Why had he brought her? Why the devil had Moira suggested it? He should have known better, should have realized what seeing such a place would do to Letty’s naïve assumptions about the world.

  “Such a den is where men go to escape,” he explained in a voice gone flat. “Where they go to forget who they are when drink alone is no longer equal to the task.”

  Absorbing this information in silence, she stared down at her twin’s prone form. Her fingertip traced his chin, identical to her own. “I’d no idea. I knew he was drinking, but all men his age do that, don’t they? I never thought—”

  “You’re not to blame, Letty.” No. He tipped his head back against the seat. I am.

  Yes, he was to blame for leaving, for not staying and contesting the charges against him at university, for not returning when their father died, for… Christ, the list went on. A dull pain knifed his chest as he regarded his brother’s gray features, then Letty’s pinched ones.

  In that instant he realized exactly where his mischievous but engaging little sister had gone. Nowhere. She was simply hiding, keeping safe. The affectations, the attitudes, the ridiculous ringlets were all merely part of the shield Letty had erected around herself when Father died and left them nearly penniless. He could only imagine a young girl’s horror to see both her family and her future—her very security—dissipate like sand sculptures on the tide.

  “Is it very deadly? The opium, I mean.” Her forehead puckered. Her eyes pleaded for reassurance.

  Graham hesitated before replying. It could be damned deadly, depending on how much and how often a man imbibed. Not information he planned on sharing with her. He was determined not to see her hurt again; was resolved to be patient and heedful and everything an elder brother should be.

  With a colossal effort he summoned a benign smile. “He’ll be just fine as long as we keep him away from that place and others like it. But he’s not of a mind to heed me, Letty. Will he listen to you, do you think?”

  Her chin pressed forward, suddenly bearing little resemblance to the slack curve of her twin’s relaxed jaw. Her voice, when it came, held none of the childish complaint or girlish simper that had become so familiar of late, but bore a decidedly adult and, God help him, eerily Moira-like conviction. “I’ll make him listen. I’ll box his ears if I have to, but he’ll listen.”

  And Graham knew Moira had been right about bringing Letty.

  CHAPTER

  18

  We’re looking for Mr. Oliphant. Is he…is he in?”

  Moira’s heart tapped an anxious rhythm as she waited for the woman in the doorway to reply. Perhaps now she would have her answers, finally understand why her stepfather had bequeathed a small fortune to a virtual stranger.

  Mr. Paddington stood on the step directly below her, so close at her back she could hear his breathing, made all the heavier by his disapproval. He’d vehemently protested coming here, particularly when they hadn’t been able to locate Miles Parker at the Bow Street Office. When she had insisted on continuing with or without Mr. Paddington’s assistance, he had relented, however reluctantly.

  Using the directions she and Graham had acquired from Mr. Bentley at the Bank of England, they had proceeded south on Bow Street to the Strand. Passing palatial homes along the way, her ire had steadily risen with imagined notions of Michael Oliphant’s home, which in her mind had burgeoned to a lavish town house purchased with the funds from her stepfather’s estate.

  After circling St. Clement’s Church and turning onto Essex Court in the heart of Butcher’s Row, however, her half-mumbled indignation had lodged in her throat. Now, standing on this crumbling stoop from where she could see, beyond the woman’s shoulder, walls blackened with mold and the vapors of second-rate coal, Moira saw no sign of the opulence she had been so ready to resent.

  The woman leaned against the peeling doorjamb and boosted the baby in her arms higher on her hip. His pink little fist bunched the fabric of her bodice, thin and faded from countless washings.

  “He ain’t in.”

  Moira’s stomach dropped several notches. The baby, a few months old, made blubbery-blub sounds through his lips. Despite her disappointment, she smiled at him and was rewarded with a dribbly grin. Reaching out, she smoothed her fingers through his feathery blond wisps. The child snatched her forefinger and gripped it tight.

  “Perhaps you’d be good enough to tell me when you expect Mr. Oliphant,” she said to the mother, a young woman close in age to her but as different in circumstance as could be. Then again, perhaps not so different, for Moira’s boardinghouse in Southwark had certainly boasted no greater distinction than this centuries-old tenement.

  The woman shook her head, a nervous, twitchy motion that sent strands of lank brown hai
r drifting in her face. “I ain’t seen him in weeks.”

  “Does he not live here? Oh, but…” She stopped just short of revealing how Mr. Bentley had broken bank rules by divulging Michael Oliphant’s direction.

  Flashing a dimpled grin that reminded her oddly of Graham, the baby chose that moment to attempt to insert her forefinger into his mouth.

  His mother’s lips formed a thin line in a face that should have been pretty, fine-boned and elfin as it was. Years of harsh living, too few comforts, and far too many worries had robbed those features of youth and allure. “Wot did ye say yer name was?”

  “Hughes. Moira Hughes.” She allowed her finger to reach the baby’s lips before pulling it back and wiggling it against his nose. Delighted laughs filled the doorway while Moira’s spirits plummeted. “Would Mr. Oliphant happen to be your husband?”

  “Brother. But like I said, I ain’t seen him in a good while. Comes and he goes. Wot d’ye want him for?”

  “It’s a business matter. Concerning a mutual acquaintance.”

  “ ‘E owe ye money?”

  Indeed. But Moira waved the notion away. “Nothing like that. Does he live nearby? Perhaps you might direct us, Mrs. ah…”

  “It’s Miss. Miss Oliphant. My brother’s a drifter. Don’t know where ‘e might be stayin’ just now.”

  “Oh…I see.” She reclaimed her hand from the baby’s grasp. “Would you know if your brother was acquainted with the late Baron Monteith, also called Everett Foster?”

  The woman shifted the baby to the other hip and blew strands of hair from her cheek. “Never heard of ‘im, ma’am.”

  “No, of course not.” Disappointment sapped Moira’s strength; her shoulders sagged beneath the burden of another dead end. “Thank you for your time.”

  Miss Oliphant began backing away, closing the door. Moira wanted to stick out her foot to prevent the door from shutting in her face, but there was nothing else to say or to ask. Nothing to do but return home empty-handed.

  The baby smiled then and held up his hand, opening and closing tiny fingers in an approximation of a farewell wave. Something in his sweet, cheerful countenance called directly to Moira’s heart.