Lady Helen and the Dark Days Pact

by Alison Goodman

  ‘Margaret, please go,’ Hammond said. He lifted the jug and poured another generous measure. Hand still shaking, Helen noted.

  ‘Do not order me about, Michael. If this is —’

  Mr Hammond slammed the jug down onto the silver tray in a ringing clang of glass against metal. ‘Devil’s sake, Margaret. Just do as I ask.’

  She flinched upright in her seat, back straight and face rigid. Hammond turned and walked back to the window. Helen watched him drain the glass again; two full glasses in a matter of five minutes.

  ‘Lady Margaret,’ Delia said softly, ‘it would be best, I think, if we go to the morning room.’

  With a fierce glance at her brother’s back, Lady Margaret stood and followed Delia from the room. Mr Hammond waited until the door closed behind them, then walked once again to the decanter. This time his gait was not so easy; a small limp, favouring his right side.

  ‘Are they gone?’ he asked, pouring another full glass.

  Helen listened to the two pairs of footsteps descending the staircase. No conversation between the two women, but she separated out Lady Margaret’s breathing: hard and quick.

  ‘They are entering the morning room,’ she said. ‘Your sister is quite agitated.’

  ‘My sister is furious and frightened.’ He took a large mouthful of wine, then turned to face Helen. ‘Stokes found me in Donaldson’s. It was all done very discreetly, of course. Then we got back to his lodgings.’

  He put down his glass and pulled back his right coat sleeve. Raw abrasions ringed his wrist.

  ‘He bound you?’

  ‘Manacles; he was most apologetic.’ He retrieved his glass, the next mouthful taking half its contents. ‘Then I was questioned. Pike was certain we had told Lord Carlston about the journal.’

  Helen frowned at his intonation. ‘Do you mean he had you beaten? By Stokes?’

  She could not believe that Stokes, a Reclaimer, would hit a normal, bound man. Surely he had more honour?

  An image of Carlston’s hands around Selburn’s throat flashed into her mind. He could have snapped the Duke’s neck in a second and yet he had not. Proof, perhaps, that he still held enough rationality to hold back from pure savagery. It was a glimmer of hope. Then again, perhaps the arc of power between them had somehow diminished his Reclaimer strength.

  ‘No, it was not Stokes.’ Hammond swirled the remainder of wine in the glass. ‘Two other ruffians. Pike sent Stokes away.’

  Of course, Helen reminded herself, Pike did not want any of the other Reclaimers to know about the journal.

  ‘Did they hurt you badly? Do you need a physician?’ She crossed over to him, sweeping an assessing glance over his body.

  ‘No.’ His smile of reassurance was too tight. ‘They knew how to deliver just enough but not too much.’

  ‘But why would Pike do that? You are one of his own people.’

  ‘His own people?’ He gave a light, rather ghastly laugh. ‘He knows my loyalty is to Lord Carlston not the Dark Days Club. He did this to remind me that he could, at any time, imprison me. To remind me that I am a coward.’

  Helen opened her mouth to reject his harsh assessment — he was no coward — but he raised his hand, refusing her protest.

  ‘More importantly, Lady Helen, he did this to show you that he is in control.’ He drained the glass.

  ‘He arrested you to show me?’

  Hammond gripped her shoulder. ‘Pike cannot control Lord Carlston. He has never been able to control him. But he knows he can control you. He said as much to me. A girl. A novice. A gentlewoman brought up to believe in God, country and duty.’ He drew back, wincing at the action. ‘He is right.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Before he let me go, he told me you offered to take Lowry as your Terrene in exchange for my release.’

  ‘Of course I did. I had no other —’ Helen stopped; she had just proved his point.

  ‘As long as you care about the people around you, as long as he is more ruthless than you, more willing to hurt them — and he is — he controls you.’ He stared down into his empty glass. ‘It will not stop here, with the journal. He has his claws in you. In us.’

  She had known that deep down, and yet his bald statement of it brought a new sense of despair. To always be Pike’s creature.

  ‘What do we do?’ she said. ‘Stop caring for people? Stop doing our duty?’

  She ground her palms together. It was impossible.

  ‘When Margaret and I were ten years old we were caught up in the Terror.’ He turned back to the jug. ‘French father, noble, and English mother. Both met Madame Guillotine. We were smuggled away in time by servants, but we ended up in the hands of a,’ he tilted his head, ‘connard.’ Helen had not heard the word before, but his tone made the meaning all too clear. ‘After many years under his control, we ran as far from him as possible and lived by our wits.’

  ‘Is that what you think we should do? Run?’

  ‘I think Lord Carlston is in grave danger.’

  More than he imagined, Helen thought. From Pike and from her unwilling drain upon his sanity.

  ‘He won’t run,’ she said.

  He would not leave her; she was certain of it. It was no longer just about duty. Something stronger connected them. They had both felt it in the kiss in the bawdy-house.

  Hammond bowed his head in agreement. ‘So neither will I or Margaret.’

  ‘Pike said he would consider offering the Comte d’Antraigues the information he seeks in return for Carlston’s cure.’

  Hammond gave a small pained laugh. ‘He will not.’

  ‘He kept his word and released you.’

  ‘To show you his power.’

  He lifted the claret jug; it was all but empty. He replaced it, and picked up the decanter of brandy instead and tilted it towards her, brows raised. She nodded. Perhaps brandy would deaden the despair and futile rage that burned at her innards.

  He hooked two glasses and slid them across the silver tray. ‘Pike will never allow the journal anywhere near Lord Carlston or a Deceiver.’

  He was right, even without the knowledge that the journal was also a Ligatus. Pike would never contemplate a deal with the Comte.

  Helen turned and walked to the window, hearing the liquor splash into a glass. Its rich fruity fumes reminded her of Vauxhall Gardens and the brandy Hammond had pressed upon her after Lord Carlston had shown her the Pavor Deceiver and told her she was a Reclaimer. A direct inheritor.

  She drew back her shoulders. There was only one path ahead that held any honour and any chance of success. It would not keep her safe from Pike, but it could keep Hammond and the others safe, and maybe — just maybe — stop his lordship’s deterioration.

  She had to leave this house, leave her friends, and most of all she had to leave Lord Carlston.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  MONDAY, 20 JULY 1812

  In contrast to the last time Helen had visited Union Street alone, the narrow lane was eerily quiet. No Quakers on the way to their Meeting House. No shrieking children hunkered down beside the butcher’s playing in the puddles. The door of the draper’s next door to Holt’s Coffee-house was closed fast, as were all the doors along the site of the battle. Boards covered the broken windows of the gin house and the hole in the front of the coffee-house. Only one person hurried past Helen: a man in the sober garb of a clerk, who dipped his head to the slim young gentleman standing outside the coffee shop. Helen nodded back. It seemed that the story of contaminated air had, for the moment, discouraged most people from using the thoroughfare.

  She waited until the clerk had turned into Ship Street, then edged her way along the side of Holt’s, the same way Sprat had led her less than a week ago. Then, she had been so elated by the novelty of walking alone through the streets. Now there was no elation, only a sense of loneliness and deep foreboding.

  She stepped over the coiled rope and peered around the corner of the building into the rear yard. Empty, alt
hough she could hear Mad Lester humming to himself and the clink of his chain. The bawdy-house was still occupied. Beyond the walls were the sounds of feet upon carpet, the low murmur of voices, a scrape of spoon against pot. It stood to reason; Kate Holt and her girls had nowhere else to go.

  Helen smoothed the packet in her hand. A message to Lowry. One of two notes she had written that morning: the first sent by footman to the Duke asking for the favour that would help Carlston; and this one to Lowry, offering to reinstate the deal. She truly was Pike’s creature. Helen twitched her shoulders under the weight of the thought.

  Her instincts told her that Lowry’s sister would still be in contact with him. On the other hand, if Kate Holt had no way of delivering a message to her brother … She pushed away the useless anxiety. Time to find out if her intuition was correct.

  Five long strides took her to the kitchen door. The greasy woman standing over the pots looked up, mouth forming into a gummy circle of surprise. Helen did not wait to hear any protest. She barged through to the corridor and headed past the staircase to the parlour where Kate Holt’s pleasant voice issued instructions to a deeper male bass. Her husband, or the bruiser in his gaudy waistcoat? It did not matter, Helen told herself. She would not allow anyone to stand in her way.

  The door stood ajar. Helen flung it back and stepped into the room, her blood thundering through her veins. Kate Holt and the bruiser turned almost as one, any surprise replaced by wary readiness. They’d clearly had practice dealing with sudden appearances.

  ‘You!’ the bawd spat. She gestured to the bruiser. ‘Henry, get him.’

  Helen caught a wild flash of what was to come — the clash of the present and the violent immediate future making her falter.

  Henry lunged for her, aiming a punch at her face. The room suddenly felt still, everything expanding but at the same time sharpening into close focus, detail crowding into her mind. The smell of suffocating perfume, the sound of breathing — hers, theirs — like bellows in her ears, the scratch of her linen shirt. Henry moved as if he were wading through water, heavy and ponderous. Like the on-lookers in the laneway.

  Ah, now she understood: she had shifted into Reclaimer speed. She had more than enough time to lift her hand and catch his fist as it inched closer. She twisted it sharply to one side. The snap of bone was slow too, the sound stretched out. The pain registered in his eyes, his lips drawing back in a sluggish grimace of pain as he slowly flinched backward. The encounter was unfair to say the least. Even so, she thrust him away by his damaged wrist, his arms and legs flailing in slow rotations as he lifted into the air and sailed past Kate. He finally landed against the opposite wall, the sound of the impact like a cannon shot in Helen’s ears.

  Carlston had explained that this window into the future, like their speed, was held in the rush of their blood and could be controlled with training. Another skill she had not yet mastered. She staggered back and took a deep breath, trying to steady the beat of her heart and bring the world back to its normal pace. It took three more deep inhalations before the overwhelming smells and sounds dropped back to their muted everyday levels.

  ‘’Pon my soul, you’re one of them,’ Kate Holt said, looking up from her fallen man. She stepped forward, both fists clenched, fear overtaken by something more primal. ‘You here for my Lester? I won’t let you kill him. He’s not doing no harm to no one.’

  ‘I am not here for Lester,’ Helen said. ‘I am not going to kill your son.’

  Kate Holt regarded her, stiff with tension. ‘You swear?’

  ‘I do not kill poor unfortunates. Lester is safe.’

  The bawd studied her for a moment more, still wary. Finally she nodded. ‘What then? My brother? He ain’t here. You and the other one saw to that.’

  ‘I want you to give him a message.’

  ‘You got a nerve.’ She peered more closely at Helen, recognition dawning in the dark small eyes that were so like Lowry’s. ‘Ah, now I see what’s for. You ain’t no man. You’re the girl he told me about. His way back to all that ungodly strength.’

  Helen stepped forward, raising her palms in truce as Kate Holt flinched back. ‘Do you know about the journal?’

  Kate frowned. ‘Journal?’ She snorted. ‘My brother don’t keep no journal. He never liked making his letters.’

  If she did know, she was a masterly liar.

  ‘Is he still in Brighton? Can you get a message to him?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Maybe.’

  Helen held out the packet. ‘I am offering him another chance at all that ungodly strength. The deal is the same. We’ll meet here. On the full moon, the twenty-fourth, like he wanted.’

  ‘He won’t trust you.’

  ‘Tell him I’ll be alone. My word on it.’

  Kate took the offered packet. ‘I’ll tell him.’ She studied Helen again. ‘And let me tell you something, girl, on account of your mercy to Lester. Get as far away from my brother as you can. He will eat you alive.’ She tapped her temple. ‘He gets in here and you won’t ever be the same. Nothing soft survives around him, and you got too much soft in you.’

  Helen backed away, feeling her skin crawl with the truth of the woman’s words. ‘Just give him the message,’ she said, and turned on her heel.

  Halfway down the corridor she heard an urgent hiss and stopped. A pair of watery blue eyes under a mess of brown tangled hair peered around the stairwell balustrade. Sprat. The girl sat crouched on the top step, skinny arms hugging her knees, the oversized dress slipping off one knobbled shoulder.

  ‘What you doin’ back?’ she demanded. ‘Mrs Holt is furious wiv you an’ the gent. No one’s comin’ in ’cause of what you did.’

  ‘Are you all right, Sprat?’

  She nodded. ‘All’s bob. Wiv Binny too.’ She uncurled herself and climbed the few steps, her eyes on the doorway into the parlour. ‘What about you? What was that thump?’

  ‘Henry, hitting the wall.’

  ‘Really?’ Sprat grinned, but it quickly faded. ‘Did Mrs Holt tell you Lizzie’s gone to Kingdom come?’

  Kingdom come. Lizzie was dead; God have mercy upon her soul. Helen drew a shaking breath. Perhaps if she had stopped and tended to Lizzie that night. Done something …

  ‘You couldn’t do nothin’,’ Sprat whispered, as if Helen’s heart had been laid bare. ‘Lizzie was dead soon as she took his fancy.’ She reached across and patted Helen’s arm: a grimy-fingered absolution. ‘It’s how it is.’

  She withdrew her hand and cleared her throat — too much emotion, it seemed — and hoisted the gaping neck of her dress over her shoulder.

  They both turned at a stream of loud cursing from the parlour.

  ‘Henry,’ Sprat said. ‘You best get goin’. Me too.’ She stood and with one last small smile ran down the steps into the cold gloom of the cellar.

  Helen made her way quickly out through the kitchen and around the side of the bawdy-house again to Union Street. She checked both ways before stepping out into the lane — still deserted — and started in the direction of Black Lion Street, her boots ringing eerily against the flags in the quiet. Now she had the task of explaining the cause of Lord Carlston’s madness to those waiting at German Place, and then the grim moment of leaving them all — the only people who understood this dangerous world and her place in it. The only people she could call her friends.

  She had just passed the butcher’s when she heard another set of boots upon the stone. Behind her and accelerating. She turned her head slightly, seeing a tall figure at the corner of her eye moving too fast for a normal man. Deceiver! She felt the pulse of her blood quicken.

  Gathering her Reclaimer speed, she ducked down, pulled the glass knife from her boot and whirled around, every sense focused upon the … Her hand stopped, forearm caught in an iron grip, her vision full of a tall, very thin, blond man.

  ‘Good try,’ the deep Cambridgeshire voice said. ‘But you went for your knife before you spun. It was like a town crier yelling your intention.
’

  ‘Mr Stokes!’ Helen dropped back onto her heels and fought down the race of blood and violence in her veins. ‘I could have stabbed you!’ She wrenched her forearm from his hand.

  ‘Not with that move, you couldn’t.’

  He stepped back, regarding the still raised knife. Helen lowered it. She could feel a tremor of unused energy in her hand.

  ‘What are you doing here? Did you follow me?’

  ‘I did.’ He smiled, although there was none of his usual bonhomie within it. ‘You are doing well with your masquerade. I did not immediately recognise you when you left German Place.’

  ‘You have been watching me?’

  ‘Watching for you.’ He tilted his head towards the end of the lane. ‘Come, keep walking.’

  Helen stooped, slid the knife back down into the scabbard in her boot, then skipped a few steps to catch up with his long pace. His normally warm hazel eyes were fixed upon the passing ground in a bleak stare, his lips pursed.

  ‘What is it, Mr Stokes?’ she prompted.

  He scanned the buildings around them, then said, ‘While this is not expressly against my orders, it is definitely not within the spirit of them.’ He stopped beside a dry-goods shop. ‘Can you hear anyone nearby?’

  Helen focused her hearing: a soft scritching in the cellar below them, probably rats; a creak of a roof in the wind; the low rumble of carriages and voices upon nearby Black Lion Street. ‘No one, as far as I can tell.’

  He gave a nod of agreement. ‘This must not be overheard. I have come to warn you that Pike has dispatched a letter to Lord Sidmouth requesting permission to proceed with the control of Lord Carlston.’

  Helen lifted her hand to her throat as if she could hold down the fear that leaped through her body. ‘Control means kill, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It does. Pike says Lord Carlston has made a deal with a French Deceiver, fought a former Terrene in the middle of a crowded street, and attacked the Duke of Selburn. He said you had to knock him senseless to stop him from killing the Duke. Is that true?’

  ‘Yes,’ Helen said, her reluctance drawing the word out. ‘But it is not his fault. It is mine.’ She tapped her chest. ‘I am causing his madness.’