“You have an insolent tongue, young man.”
“An honest tongue, actually. It is one of my greatest faults.”
“You will answer only the questions I ask you.”
“Mr. Smart,” Mr. Bridges said. “Tell them everything you know.”
She told them. But she knew it would not matter. If her guess were correct that Chedham had illegally procured the cadavers for their mentor’s surgery, they would all protect him before believing her. She had been here before, after all. Chedham was from a wealthy family, the sort where sons molested servants in stairwells and no one listened when a little girl reported it. She was no one, despite her accomplishments, still the odd one out, still the one who said the wrong things—always the wrong things.
Of course this was happening now. Of course.
“I discovered today, before Dr. Jones’s lecture, that the first woman I recognized, Bethany, had recently taken up with a gentleman of means,” she finished.
“Taken up with?”
“She had become his mistress. My friend, the one who knew both Bethany and Dallis, said that the man had just let a house for Bethany nearby. Unfortunately my friend does not know his name.”
“Are we to trust the word of a female of the trade, now, gentlemen?” one of the old men said.
“You should if it exposes a criminal,” Libby said.
“Then that will be all,” the Lord Provost said. “Dr. Jones will inform you of our decision.”
“What decision?”
“You have gravely insulted the honor and integrity of the Royal Infirmary, the college, and this university, which have all long considered Mr. Bridges an esteemed colleague.”
“But I haven’t accused him of doing wrong, or even of knowing about it.”
“A surgeon,” Mr. Bridges said soberly, “should know from where his subjects come, Mr. Smart.”
“Mr. Bridges and Dr. Jones have requested that we not bar you from further study at this university or the Royal Infirmary. But you may not return this session, and you will not be permitted to apprentice at the infirmary until further notice.”
She choked. “But—”
“You are dismissed.”
Dismissed.
She was ruined. Above reproach for his entire career, her father would never allow her to continue her ruse after this.
Numbly she followed Dr. Jones from the room. Archie, Pincushion, and George stood in the corridor, hair askew and faces flushed.
“Gentlemen,” Dr. Jones said, “if you have come intending to plead a case for your friend, Mr. Bridges has already done so, without success.”
“We’ve come just in time!” Pincushion exclaimed.
“We’ve brought this, Doctor.” Upon Archie’s palm was a small gold ring. “’Twas a gift from a gentleman, Mr. John Sheets, to a lass named Bethany.”
“A real looker she was, sir,” Pincushion interjected.
“She’d a fondness for laudanum, so she gave the ring as payment to the bloke who got the laudanum for her. That bloke gave it to a fellow called Reeve, in payment for havin’ made him known to the lass.”
“I am not following this narrative, Mr. Armstrong. Make yourself clear at once.”
“’Tis Plath, sir!”
“Plath?” Libby exclaimed.
“Mr. Robert Plath,” George said in clean, crisp, lawyerly syllables. “Plath hires a low fellow Reeve to introduce him to girls of the trade who’ve already got a liking for poppy seed syrup. Then Plath befriends the girls, sells laudanum to them on the cheap till he needs a cadaver, then while they’re in a stupor does away with them.”
“Robert Plath?” The physician said in an astonished hush. “My assistant?”
“Aye, sir,” Archie said grimly. “Murders them, then sells them to surgical schools.”
“And not only Mr. Bridges’s,” Pincushion inserted.
“Plath is making a fortune,” George said.
Dr. Jones’s face was pale as a cadaver. “What proof beyond that ring do you have?”
“Peter here spoke with the lad who carts the cadavers to the schools,” Archie said.
“Wait here, all of you.” Dr. Jones went inside the room.
“How do you know this?” Libby whispered, wrapping her arms around herself to hold in the shaking that was rising from her feet into her stomach.
“Kent found us at the pub,” Archie said. “He was lookin’ for you, but when we told him Jones marched you away, he told us how he’d tracked down the goldsmith who made the ring, then Sheets himself. Pincushion ran off to find the cadaver carrier. Then we threaded it all together till we’d a whole cloth. Here’s the ring Kent took from Reeve,” he said, putting it in Libby’s hand. “’Tis a shame about your friend, lad.”
“What’re you thinking to make friends with girls like that, Joe?” George said.
“She was ill,” Libby said. “She asked for my help.”
The door opened and both Dr. Jones and Mr. Bridges came into the corridor.
“Gentlemen,” Dr. Jones said, “do you know where to find Mr. Reeve and Mr. Sheets?”
“We will, sir,” Libby said. “Immediately.”
“No. Mr. Smart, you will remain here. Before lecture I told Mr. Plath of your accusation, which Mr. Bridges had shared with me in a message. I could not fathom that you would speak rashly and I admit that I was in need of reassurance. I realize now that was unwise. If what you and your friends believe is true, you could now be in danger from Plath. The Lord Provost is writing letters to both Mr. Sheets and Mr. Reeve, requesting an immediate interview. When the police arrive you gentlemen”—he looked at her friends—“must assist them in finding both men.”
“Aye, sir,” Archie said. “Lads?”
Pincushion and George nodded.
Libby wanted to throw her arms about them all. Instead, when Mr. Bridges motioned her back into the room with the men who held her fate in their hands, she followed.
Chapter 28
The Ravishment
She burst onto the darkening street. For hours Ziyaeddin had watched for her. Praying. Now he crossed to her.
“You saved me again,” she said below the sounds of a passing carriage. There was deep color in her cheeks beneath the whiskers, and her eyes were thick with exhaustion. “You and my friends.” A smile flitted over her lips.
“What happened?”
“Did Mr. Sheets tell you that he is married?” she continued quickly as she started off along the footpath. “With three children. The bounder. He did not wish anyone to discover his attachment to Bethany. Speaking to the Lord Provost just now, though, he seemed truly devastated over her death. How clever you were to have found him and Mr. Reeve and wrested the truth from them. But of course you are excellent at seeing into people’s souls.”
“I would have preferred you to not have met either of them.”
“I am exonerated.” She was staring at the dark opening of an alley ahead. “The police went to Plath’s home and found him packing for a journey. Dr. Jones and Mr. Bridges asked me to wait with them until we got word that they had taken him to jail. I think they were the longest hours of my life.”
His, as well.
Abruptly grabbing his coat sleeve, she pulled him around a corner and then several yards along a dark alleyway.
“What are you—”
She grasped his waistcoat. “Kiss me. Kiss me without delay.”
Wrapping his hands around her shoulders, he took her mouth beneath his. She met him with her lips parted and her hands twisted in his shirt.
He laughed.
“Kiss me.” Her eyes opened wide. “Why do you laugh?”
“I have never before kissed a person with whiskers.” He stroked a finger along her throat. “It is a new experience for me.”
“It repels you. Does it repel you?”
“Nothing about you could ever repel me.”
She planted her lips on his, the whiskers tickled his skin, and he kissed her. He
r lips trembled and he curved his hands around her back, and beneath the texture of a man’s coat he found her entire body shaking.
She broke away. “We must go home.” She slipped out from between him and the wall and ran out of the alley.
By the time he reached the street, the darkness and traffic had swallowed her.
He found his front door unlocked. Setting down his hat and walking stick, he listened for her.
Nothing. No sound. But she was in the house. He knew it as well as he knew the bows of her upper lip and the arc of the lower.
Not in the parlor. Nor the kitchen. Nor his studio. Nor—wishful fool that he was—in his bed.
He climbed the stairs and found her draped across the bottom of her bed, dropped off in the process of removing her stockings, and the whiskers so hastily removed that a patch still clung to her chin.
Setting down the lamp, he pulled off his coat and found the vial of oil on her dressing table. Then, sitting beside her on the bed, he unstuck the final hairs from her chin. She did not wake.
There was plenty to be done and he proceeded slowly so as not to disturb her sleep. He untied the crushed cravat and discarded it, then unfastened the single button at her throat and parted the shirt. Scissors did swift work of the binding about her breasts. Still she did not rouse. Peeling the stockings from her feet and tossing them away, he followed them with the trousers.
He left the drawers and the shirt.
Lifting her legs onto the bed, he noticed a lopsided lump in her undergarment. Quite swiftly he convinced himself that an artist must always satisfy a burning curiosity. Untying the drawers, he discovered yet another ribbon attached to the waist. He tugged, and out popped a cluster of three small pillows.
Setting them on the bedside table, he swallowed over the rise of feeling in his throat and leaned his head back against the bedpost.
“Why do you weep?” From half-lidded eyes she was watching him.
“I am not weeping, of course,” he said, bending to fold up his trouser leg and unfasten the straps from around his knee.
“There is a tear on your cheek.”
“You are dreaming.” He set the false limb aside and stretched out on the mattress beside her.
Her eyelids drifted shut again. “I don’t . . . know why you should weep. We . . . won.”
He stoked the hair back from her brow, loosening the oiled locks and using the ruined cravat to wipe away the remnants of her uniform. When he was certain she slept again, he closed his eyes too.
In darkness she roused him. When she climbed atop him and he lifted his hands to her, he found only her skin, warm in the spring night, her sweet body: bony hips, soft thighs, curving waist that gave way to the ripple of ribs and then her breasts.
Tugging at the tail of his shirt, she worked the linen free and he pulled it over his head. Then her fingers were opening the fasteners of his trousers and she was pulling the garments down and away.
She slid atop him, bringing her body along his, stroking his skin with her hands and breasts and supple arms and stretching herself out on him. Her mouth came over his, open and hungry, seeking, her tongue a live, wonderful thing, sweeping over his lips and touching his tongue, his teeth. Her fingers speared between his and her palms pressed hard atop his, holding his arms to either side as she undulated against him, kissing him as though she wanted to consume him—his mouth, his throat and neck and chest.
When her lips closed around his nipple he groaned, feeling her hunger in his hardening cock. He shifted to free his hands. But she held him even tighter to the bed, and he allowed it and drew in the scent of her: salty sweat and earthy oil and her skin, damp now and emanating her fragrance of sexual heat. Teeth grazing him, she pressed her nose to the meeting of his ribs and moaned.
Releasing his hands abruptly, she swept hers down his sides, wrapped them both around the base of his cock, and took the full length of him into her mouth.
As in all things, she was astonishingly clever. It was over far too quickly.
She kissed a path back up his abdomen and chest and finally put her mouth on his and he tasted his own seed on her tongue. She laughed, a chesty, broken cascade of sheer delight and, stroking him with one hand from lips to bollocks, made him constrict and groan anew. Then she climbed onto him once more, spread her thighs, and pleasured herself on him.
When she collapsed onto his chest, her face buried in the crook of his neck, he wrapped his arms around her and held her as close as her jagged breathing would allow.
“The next time, Prince Virility,” she whispered in his ear, and the feathers of the words made him catch his breath, “I want you inside me. Can we do that?”
“I am,” he said, stroking his fingers up her willowy back, “as always, at your command.”
The laughter came again—laughter of pleasure and relief and simple happiness.
They slept. The next time he awoke, a candle burned on the bedside table and he found her sitting beside him with a book open on the blanket that covered her lap but not her breasts and delicate squared shoulders. The wavering candlelight made her eyes glittering mysteries.
“You discovered Joseph’s genitals,” she said, gesturing to the three little pillows. She closed the volume. “What do you think?”
“That you sew remarkably well.”
“Mrs. Coutts sewed them. And of course I sew well. I am a sur—” Her eyes flared. “You said that to tease.”
“Possibly.”
Her mouth broke into a toothy smile. Tossing the book aside, she leaned down to him and, still smiling, kissed him on the lips. Then again. Then she was wrapping her arms around him and he was pulling her tightly against him and running his hands over her arms and sides and hips and the sweet plane of her back.
“There is an hour yet until dawn,” she said, sliding her leg around his hip and pressing to him. “Two until I must be at hospital.”
“What do you wish to do with those hours, I wonder,” he said, taking her earlobe between his teeth and loving how her body shuddered in response.
“I wish to use my lover shamelessly,” she whispered against his throat. “Then go off to my studies and leave him in this bed thinking of me and longing for my return.” She brought her lips to his. “How does that suit you, Your Highness?”
He found that he could not speak. So he kissed her. And she did precisely what she wished.
He did not allow her to leave him in her bed. While she dressed, he went to the kitchen and made coffee and breakfast. Flavored with sugar, the coffee was strong and delicious.
“Like my prince,” she said, and he leaned forward and kissed her, which she had intended. She scraped her fingertips over the night’s whisker growth across his jaw. “These abrade my skin.”
“I will instruct Gibbs to shave me more closely.”
“How do my whiskers feel?”
“Soft. Silky.” He leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “Like your hair, which in fact they are, transferred artificially to your face.”
“You are reminding me of this unnecessarily, I think, to emphasize that you would not kiss just anybody with whiskers.”
“I have no desire to kiss anyone else, whiskers or not. And I am simply answering your question.”
“So he says.” She stood and threw her satchel over her shoulder. “What will you paint today?”
He shrugged. “I am at my leisure.”
“How magnificent you are,” she murmured. “Perhaps you should go back up into my bed and long for me all day, after all.”
“Perhaps I shall.”
Walking to the infirmary as the city awoke to the day around her, it seemed her feet hardly touched the cobblestones.
As they did their rounds of the wards, Chedham was as stony as usual, Mr. Bridges was his regular measured self, and their patients offered their typical litanies of complaints and gratitude. It was as though nothing horrible had happened the previous day. Even the memory of Dallis’s and Bethany’
s pale, still faces could not dull Libby’s contentment.
The newspapers would undoubtedly drag Mr. Bridges, the college, and the university through the mud for being unaware of the viper in their midst. But Mr. Bridges’s excellent reputation would allow him to weather the scandal. Perhaps it would even inspire the college to finally regulate the acquisition of cadavers for use in its fellows’ surgeries.
At lunchtime she called on Coira and delivered the news. Her friend accepted it with the practical fatalism of a Scotswoman and the thoughtfulness of one who had known the weaknesses of her friends and loved them anyway. Libby promised she would report on Mr. Plath’s fate, although it would certainly be in the broadsheets. A scandal of this sort could not remain hidden within the medical community.
Finishing her lunch with Coira, she went to the library where Archie and Pincushion already occupied their usual table. She greeted them in a whisper. Pincushion didn’t even look up. Archie glanced down the length of the reading room, then back at her. Libby unloaded her texts.
A while later, Pincushion returned from a trip to the water closet with his cheeks red as beets and his neck cloth askew.
“Time to go, lads,” he said tightly.
Archie frowned. Then he gathered up his books, and gestured for her to follow.
Moving out onto the street and turning in the direction of the pub, Pincushion flexed his shoulder and winced.
“What is it, Peter?” she said. “Are you having trouble with your shoulder again? I can help with that.”
Without looking at her he said, “I know you can, Smart. Clever as a cat with joints.” He pushed open the door of the pub with his other hand and headed straight for the bar.
“Is it dislocated again?” Libby said to Archie.
“Aye.” Archie’s gaze slewed about the pub. It was early still, and the place was only half filled.
Pincushion carried over two pints and set them on the table, but his face was strained.
“You must allow me to treat it,” she said. “I have been practicing external rota—”
The Prince Page 30