Wicked Little Secrets

by Ives, Susanna

  He tore past Fontaine and grabbed John by his neat cravat. “You have the best lady in London, and you disgrace her by coming here,” he hissed through his teeth.

  “What?” John clawed at Dashiell’s wrists. “Get your hands off me.”

  “As you wish.” Dashiell clamped his fingers around the back of John’s neck and then slammed him head first into the shoulder of an angel. John’s nose crunched against the hard stone, rivers of blood pouring from his nostrils. The statue rocked on its pedestal, then fell to the floor, cutting a deep gash in the parquet. The stone angel’s head broke off and spun on the floor.

  “Are you going to pay for that?” Fontaine screeched.

  John glared at Dashiell, cupping his hemorrhaging nose. Raw hatred burned like a blue flame in his pale eyes.

  “I’m just making you all pretty for your wedding,” Dashiell told him.

  John’s lips tightened around his teeth. He flew at Dashiell with his bloody fist cocked, ready to strike. Dashiell didn’t budge, letting John slam the hard bone of his jaw, feeling, almost savoring, the reverberating waves of pain bouncing off the back of his skull.

  He heard his own laugh as if it were from someone else’s mouth, a growling and predatory sound. His senses slowed. Fontaine’s stream of profanity, the shrill gasps of the girls, the trilling piano all became a roaring drone in his ears.

  John’s fist was flying toward Dashiell’s face again. Dashiell felt calm, as if time had elongated. He ducked the blow then sprang up, his knuckles connecting to the ridge of John’s cheekbone. The force sent John tumbling backward.

  “Goddammit!” Fontaine shouted. “Stop it or I’ll have you both removed!”

  John, ignoring her order, rushed like a charging ram, crashing into Dashiell’s chest. Dashiell felt the banister railing cut into his backbone. The crack of splintering wood echoed in the balconies, and the gilded plaster leaves on the ceiling appeared to be blowing away. He and John were falling through the air, still locked in a combative embrace. The back of his head hit hot metal, and a yellow flame flashed before his face. Glass shattered and a woman’s screams pierced the air as he felt his bones smack down on the floor. A bright sun of hurt burst around him, then everything turned black.

  “Viv,” he murmured.

  A few seconds or hours later, the sounds of pounding feet and the shrieks of women roused him. Throbbing pain radiated from his spinal column. He felt sewn to the floor. He opened his eyes to see two pale blue orbs shining though a haze of gray motion. John. A fist broke through the blur. Dashiell couldn’t do anything but take it on the jaw. This was getting old.

  He drove his knee deep into the scoundrel’s gut. John doubled over, grabbed his belly, and let out a low, aching howl. Dashiell balled his fists and swung, hoping to finish off the tenacious cove, but a fat hand caught his fist just before it connected with John’s head. Then there were more hands, the square rough kind belonging to men. They were shoved under his armpits, lifting him up. He was hurled at a wall. His cheek smashed against the cold glass of a picture frame. The wall plaster crumbled, and the picture slid down, coming to balance on the toe of his shoe. Dashiell blinked. Behind the cracked glass was a cartoon of a very familiar tubby fop clad in a pastel yellow coat. He was squatting on the ground, using his grotesquely long nose to hike up the hem of a buxom lady’s pink gown and ogle the contents underneath.

  Dashiell leaned over, picked up the picture, and held it close to his eyes. He focused hard on the pink gown and yellow coat.

  “Blow me,” he whispered as an idea germinated in his head.

  He turned and examined the scene before him, feeling disengaged, as if it too were just a sketched caricature. The flashman and two of the fleshy country bumpkins, previously stationed under the tightrope walker, now had him boxed in, their thick legs spread, fists clasped over their balls. The third bumpkin held the weeping, nude acrobat safe in his fat arms. On the opposite wall, John crouched, blood still dripping from his nose.

  Dashiell’s gaze drifted up to where Fontaine stood in the splintering gape of the broken banister. Her fingers were wrapped around the handle of a dainty silver muff pistol. She held the gun steady and aimed at his head. The end of the barrel, blackened and scratched, peered at him like a disembodied eye from an Egyptian hieroglyphic. He knew Fontaine wouldn’t kill a man in her carefully constructed celestial paradise. She did heaven’s dirty business in private.

  On the balcony above her, his waiting harem, adorned in Egyptian wigs, peered over the railing with gaping mouths.

  His grip tightened around the picture frame. What the hell was he doing here?

  “This has been a most memorable evening,” he said, turning on his heel and nearly falling. “But I have to go.” He steadied himself against the wall and then stumbled toward the door.

  ***

  Walking back in the cold night, remorse gripped Dashiell. His head hurt too much to think about the situation, or maybe he just didn’t want to. He limped along. His back ached, his jaw and cheekbone throbbed, and his muscles were stiffening in the cold air.

  At home, he flung open his chamber door and chucked the picture he had taken from Fontaine’s onto his bed. He pulled a stone Egyptian frieze of Isis from the wall, turned it over, and slid his fingers into a crack in the stone, fishing out a key.

  He unlocked his desk and slid out the pictures Vivienne and he had discovered last evening from under a heavy volume detailing Napoleon’s discoveries in Egypt. He took the illustrations over to his bed and laid them out. Two of the sketches were not the caricatures, but realistic studies. A lady lay upon a bed, her head tilted over the mattress’s edge, letting her thick, dark curls spill over. A smile curved on her lips as she gazed at the artist from upside down, her breasts rising in peaks from her chest. In her eyes was a tender glow wholly missing from Fontaine’s portrait. Dashiell studied the pen strokes. The heavy lines contoured the model’s body, but the sheets, the bedpost, were light wisps of parallel lines, all slanting left as they had in Fontaine’s portrait. His gaze moved on to the cartoons. A heavy black pen outlined the man’s protruding nose and equally protruding appendage. Yet his coat was a series of yellow strokes slanting to the left.

  He picked up the inked dark-eyed beauty nestled in her sheets, walked across the room, and held her up to the Italian Vivienne.

  “What the hell?” he murmured, as a cold shiver ran over his skin. He snatched the bed cover off his mattress and tossed it over the painting. But that didn’t stop the repulsion wiggling like a worm in his gut.

  He had an ugly, sinking suspicion that he truly hoped was wrong.

  He needed to speak to Vivienne. Unfortunately, she was holed up next door, refusing to acknowledge him. He combed his hand through his hair. He could pry loose the wall panel, crawl through, and sneak up to her room, but if Gertrude caught him, she would drop dead from apoplexy. Or he could stand below her window tossing stones like a pathetic, lovesick adolescent. Neither of these options was practical, and he wasn’t going to spend another day loitering around in the park, getting defecated on by pigeons and exchanging polite conversation with snooping neighbors.

  Then the realization rose up in his brain like the rising steam from water poured on the burning fires of hell. The next day was Sunday. He knew exactly where Vivienne would be.

  Eleven

  Her aunt rose from the hard wooden pew on the sixth row in Wesley Congregational Chapel. “I still think it’s exceedingly odd that Mr. Vandergrift didn’t come.”

  “Perhaps he is ill,” Vivienne replied, as the first notes of “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” wheezed from the old pipe organ in the balcony above. The song leader stood by his place on the front row and raised his hand. The congregation launched into a joyful noise unto the Lord that resembled a chorus of screeching, lovesick alley cats and cows giving birth.

  Vivienne duly mumbled the words to the hymn, but her mind was on John. In truth, she was glad he didn’t come to take them to ch
urch. She couldn’t face him, not yet. Everything was too raw, too close to the surface, like a tiny volcano that could erupt at the wrong word or look and spew forth the burning, destructive truth. And the truth would ruin everything.

  She studied the stained glass windows filling the back church wall. Pious biblical men in flowing robes, humbled on their knees, crowded about their Savior’s feet. Jesus, clad in white, stood with one hand on his heart, the other with two fingers raised, as if imparting one of his wise parables. The morning light made the window glow with luminous tones of gold and red.

  She felt safe here, away from Dashiell. If only she could inhabit this hard wooden pew until her wedding day, eat and sleep and pray like a chaste nun under the watchful blue eyes of Jesus.

  Blue eyes. That was peculiar. Jesus must have been easy to spot in Jerusalem. Judas didn’t have to kiss Jesus; he could have just said, “Arrest the blue-eyed one.”

  What are you thinking? Your very soul is in danger and you’re worried about artistic representations of Jesus. You really don’t have any sense!

  The organ pumped and heaved its way through the hymn as the congregation stumbled along at least a measure behind the song leader.

  Even before the last flat note died away, the minister, Mr. Charles, all decked out in austere black, rushed up the curving steps of the pulpit, rising like a miniature Mount Sinai.

  He opened his massive Bible with a booming thud, silencing the congregation—except for Mrs. Lacey, who sat beside Aunt Gertrude. Happily unaware, she continued chirping out another hymn verse until Aunt Gertrude gave her a sharp elbow in the ribs and issued a loud “Shhh!”

  The gaslight dangling on a chain strung from the ceiling reflected on Mr. Charles’s bare, round forehead. He took a deep breath, filling himself with the power of the Lord. His jaw started to tremble, causing his flabby jowls to swing back and forth. Slowly, he swept his sharp gaze over the congregation, searching for any signs of new sins committed since the prior Sunday. His eyes halted on Vivienne, and his bushy brows slanted down on his forehead like gray lightning bolts.

  Oh God. He knew. He could see past the deceptive armor of her modest, buttoned-up-to-the-collar gown and tight corset and straight into her heart, where her sins were written in bright red blood: she hath lied unto her aunt, she hath willfully disobeyed her betrothed, and doth covet her neighbor. She hath nearly lain with coveted neighbor, and she harboreth sinful thoughts, recalling each wicked detail of the nearly-hath-lain incident.

  “Brothers and sisters, we have a visitor amongst the Lord’s flock,” the minister boomed.

  Visitor? But everyone in the congregation knew her. She had been visiting the chapel since she was a little girl. She had had many dinners with Mr. Charles and his wife at their home adjacent to the chapel.

  “Good heavens!” her aunt cried.

  “What a handsome Methodist,” Mrs. Lacey exclaimed. “Now that’s how you spread God’s love.”

  What? Vivienne realized that no one was paying attention to her sinful soul, but staring, jaws gaping, at the pew behind her. She turned and let out a shrill squeak.

  Dashiell was frozen in an awkward, half-bent position, caught red-handed trying to sneak into church late. He wore a neat dark gray coat with a white rosebud stuck in the lapel. And his hair? All his wild curls were brushed into shiny, neat waves, in the manner of a respectable gentleman.

  That wasn’t all that was new. He sported a new purple gash on his cheekbone since she had last seen him up close… if seen was the right word for pressing her breasts against him as she fondled his most private parts, begging him to take her to the heights of that exquisite pleasure he spoke of. Her skin heated at the memory.

  “What are you doing?” she squealed.

  “Come, my brother, don’t be afraid,” the minister said. “Pray, tell us your name.”

  Dashiell slowly stood and wiped his hands on his trousers. His forehead glistened with tiny drops of perspiration. He looked like a wounded, pathetic animal hoping the hunter would take another shot and end its misery.

  “I’m… I’m…” He pursed his lips together and then nodded his head, resigned. “I’m Lord Dashiell.”

  The congregation gasped, then grew very, very quiet, as if afraid some seal from Revelations had broken and fiery Armageddon was about to commence.

  Vivienne shriveled down in her pew and lowered the edge of her bonnet.

  Finally, the minister spoke in a deep, awestruck voice. “The Lord works in mysterious ways. For our brother, Lord Dashiell, surely the most vile sinner in the Babylon of London—”

  “Now, wait a minute,” the vile sinner protested.

  “—has at last found the light of the Savior. Brother, are you casting your sins at the feet of your Lord and begging for His mercy and forgiveness?”

  “Well…” Dashiell eyed Vivienne. His neck reddened under his bronze skin. He tugged at his cravat with his finger. “I, um, yes.”

  “This is a glorious day, is it not, brothers and sisters?” The minister pressed his palms together and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Let us pray, for the wayward sheep has been found. For the most evil of men hath turned from the devil to follow the ways of the righteous.”

  “But I just came for a visit,” Dashiell cried. “You can’t expect me to turn Methodist just because—”

  “I said, let us pray!” Mr. Charles thundered from his mountaintop pulpit.

  Dashiell sat, and the congregation bowed their heads with military precision.

  “Dear Lord, today we have witnessed the power of Your saving grace,” Mr. Charles began. “You hath seen the dimmest flicker of goodness in Lord Dashiell, a man whose soul many believe was lost to the devil. You in Your mysterious and great ways have brought the lost lamb back to Your fold, just as the girls’ orphanage needs a new roof. May he follow the path of goodness for the rest of his days.”

  As Mr. Charles prayed on, Vivienne couldn’t resist the temptation to open her eyes. She peered over the edge of her shoulder. To her surprise, Dashiell had his head bowed and his eyes shut tight, looking quite lost in earnest prayer. Not the notorious heartless rake, but more like a little boy, kneeling before his bed in a nighttime prayer. Her heart swelled. Did he really come with a truly repentant heart? Did he feel the same heavy guilt in his soul as she did? Then he opened his chocolate eyes and stared back at her.

  “I need to talk to you,” he mouthed.

  He dug a folded letter from the inside of his coat. She watched, mortified, as he reached out and placed it on her shoulder, giving her chin a fast, light caress with his thumb. His touch sent little sparks crackling through her body. She wasn’t supposed to feel this way at church. This was very, very bad.

  The letter slipped down her bodice and landed in her lap. She peeked at her aunt, who sat stone still, eyes clamped shut, praying with all her might. High on the pulpit, Mr. Charles was in the thick of his fiery entreaty to God. Vivienne lifted the edge of the letter to take a quick peek. Dashiell had written three terse sentences:

  L. James made the pictures. When did your aunt marry J? The wall.

  Lawrence James made the pictures. That was odd. The man should have no bearing on anything, yet his name seemed to weave through the whole affair.

  She glanced over her shoulder again. Dashiell had sunk back into prayer.

  She fingered the edge of the letter. She shouldn’t see him because she couldn’t trust herself. But she wasn’t going to get any answers to the blackmail mystery unless she confronted her aunt, although even then she doubted Gertrude would own up to anything.

  And she had only two days left.

  She closed her eyes. Lord, what should I do?

  “The prodigal son returned from the land of harlots and sin,” Mr. Charles bellowed. “The father saw his son, hungry and ashamed. The Bible says he was filled with compassion and fell on his neck and kissed him.”

  I’m supposed to kiss Dashiell? That can’t be right.

  “So say
eth the word of God. Amen,” the minister concluded.

  ***

  Aunt Gertrude’s ancient landau lurched out of the church’s brick churchyard and onto the street. Vivienne gazed out the back window at the congregation crowded about the church steps. The minister kept a heavy hand clamped on Dashiell’s shoulder, lest his prodigal son attempt to make a break for the land of sin and harlots again. Dashiell’s lips were spread in a tight, forced smile as Mrs. Lacey and the other ladies from her aunt’s Tuesday Bible group swarmed around him like nectar-crazed bees.

  “He is quite a handsome man, is he not?” her aunt said slowly, her words dripping with suspicion.

  Vivienne whipped her head around. In the opposite seat, her aunt sat ramrod straight in her cascade of black ruffles. Sunlight fell from the window and across her pale face, contracting her pupils to sharp points.

  “To some,” Vivienne said, trying very hard to sound disinterested.

  Her aunt leaned closer, her corset creaking. “I find it exceedingly odd that he attended church, don’t you?”

  “M-maybe it’s as Mr. Charles said—Lord Dashiell has seen the light of the Lord.”

  “Oh, he has most certainly seen the light of something.” She probed Vivienne’s face. “Or someone.”

  A telltale blush rose up Vivienne’s neck and over her cheeks.

  “Has Lord Dashiell been talking to you?” her aunt asked. “Asking you to do things?”

  “Things?”

  Aunt Gertrude gripped the round head of her cane. “Has he asked you to show him your neat little ankles?”

  “My ankles… No!”

  “What about your… your lady parts?”

  “Of course not.” I voluntarily tried to show them to him.

  “Listen to me! Lord Dashiell is a serpent slithering about the tree of knowledge, dangling his fruity bits before you to eat.”