by Darcy Burke
“How did Morgan get involved with Finn?” Daniel asked.
“I’m not sure how he managed to uncover what we were doing. I learned early on to never question how Finn got information, only to trust in its veracity. But what did I care, when it meant thrice my normal income?” Bartleby took a long sip of wine. “Finn needed a better place to store his cadavers before transport, and what better place than Emporia’s warehouses? If they were found, his hands would be clean.”
She’d finally caught him in a lie. “I knew those warehouses better than my own house. If there were dead bodies stored in them, I would have known about it.”
“Do you remember the long boxes that Morgan claimed were full of fresh fish for the butcher?”
Her mouth fell open, but she couldn’t think enough to shut it. “You can’t possibly mean—”
“What better storage for a Subject? Filled to the brim with ice to slow the decomposition, the body could sit while Finn found a wanting surgeon. Sped things up dramatically, for he could take more corpses without having a prior buyer. I could be living in Mayfair now, if Finn hadn’t cut me out.” Bartleby’s drawn, unhealthy face darkened. “But I’ll have my revenge, if the look on your lover’s face is any indication.”
Kate glanced over at Daniel. He was stoic, lips pursed and shoulders back. No reaction anywhere but his cold eyes. It was if something had been turned off in him, leaving him void.
“Why me?” He asked the simplest question.
When she had so many questions that she couldn’t sort through them all to find the truth.
Bartleby blinked at him. “Why you, what?”
Like a dam breaking, emotion spilled into Daniel. His pale Irish skin flushed, his voice broke with rage. He stood directly in front of Bartleby’s chair, his knees smashed against the elderly man’s. Grabbing for Bartleby’s cravat, he pulled the accountant up until Bartleby met his gaze.
“If Morgan wasn’t going to involve me, why was I drugged and left in a goddamn alley? Why was I framed for Tommy Dalton’s murder? What did you gain from ruining my life, you self-serving prick?”
His hand wrapped in the cravat, twisting. Bartleby let out a strangled gasp. Kate held her breath. Everything was happening too fast for her to stop it.
But then Daniel released Bartleby and backed away. He exhaled, shoulders trembling. Bartleby descended into another coughing fit. Kate crossed to the wine cabinet and poured him another glass of water. That was as much charity as she could muster; she wanted to let him suffer, to die before them a shriveled wreck ravaged by illness. Exactly like her father.
The accountant found his voice, his eyes never leaving Daniel’s face “Because you are a monster. You are a bog-trotting brute, not fit to wipe the dust from my boots. And Finn knew it. He saw you for what you are: a disease, contaminating good solid English flesh when you tupped Miss Katherine here. You think I didn’t know about your little nightly activities? Everyone could see it in your eyes.”
“You are vile.” Kate’s hand darted forward. The glass of water tipped as her fingers connected, upending the contents in Bartleby’s lap. He sputtered, brushing at the water frantically. The glass remained intact.
Devil take it.
“Morgan didn’t think that. He defended me,” Daniel murmured.
“No, it was Morgan’s damn belief in you that made Finn peg you. He needed to get rid of Dalton and you’d harm our operations,” Bartleby said. “You’d be the first to rat us out, when the time came.”
“I’ll kill Finn,” Daniel vowed.
“You and your copious contacts?” Bartleby scoffed. “Best of luck to you then. Send him my regards.”
She tugged on Daniel’s hand in an attempt at leading him toward the door. He remained, Hessians pressed deep into the luxurious carpet, jaw clenched.
“We are done here,” she hissed, with another pull to his hand.
He started, as if registering her voice for the first time. His grip on her hand tightened. Allowing her to lead him toward the door, he stopped when Bartleby called to them again.
“Oh, Miss Katherine?”
She didn’t turn around. Let him call, for she was done with his lies.
But Daniel cocked his head, urging Bartleby on. The chair creaked as Bartleby pushed himself up, hobbling over toward them. He went to slide something between her right arm and side.
She caught his wrist, digging her nails into his tender flesh until he yelped in pain. “Don’t you touch me, you bloody blackleg.”
“I thought you would want your father’s ledger.” He held out a leather bound volume. Embossed on the front cover was the seal for Emporia. For three years she’d looked for it in every secondhand shop she passed.
She snatched the journal from his hands, the weight of it somehow reassuring. “I ought to shoot you for keeping this.”
Bartleby held tight to the door frame. “Would you prefer I have handed it over to the Thames River Police? I did you a favor.”
“Don’t do us anymore favors,” Daniel said.
As they left, Kate’s mind spun with frantic possibilities. Finn had taken Daniel from her and tried to kill her. Had her father really had been involved with resurrection men?
She feared even her memories were no longer whole.
Chapter Eighteen
The hack that pulled up to the waystation in Westminster was intolerably small. Every rut in the road jostled them on top of each other. Kate’s skirt was flung up over his leg, while his shoulder rubbed against hers. His scent filled her nose, penetrating every last crevice in her mind until she breathed in only Daniel.
Kate needed silence. She needed to be alone. In the temporary flat, she could sprawl out on the bed and comb over her father’s ledger in peace. There she’d find the answers she sought: Bartleby was a liar and Papa hadn’t been involved at all.
She smoothed a hand over invisible wrinkles in her skirt. Had her father truly helped to set up Daniel? She thought of the O’Reilly ring, tucked away until she could bear to fence it.
Daniel broke the quiet. “Christ, that meeting.”
“Hmm?” She blinked at him.
“He told us everything.” Resting his elbow on his knee, two fingers spread across the bridge of his brow, he was a man bereft.
“He told us nothing. Surely you don’t believe Bartleby’s falsehoods.” She undid the knot underneath her chin and removed her bonnet. There was no clarity to be found in this carriage, but at least, she could dispense with the obscurity of the wide-brimmed fabric.
“What reason would he have to lie? The man is dying, Kate. The doctor was being charitable in his estimation. I doubt he has more than a month left.” Daniel sighed.
She turned to face him. “Hatred for my father is as good of a reason as any.”
Daniel grimaced. “So he lies to your face, and takes the real murderer with him to his grave? That defies logic. Bartleby is not a valiant man. If he could earn a small bit of fame by lording his knowledge over you, he’d do it. By his own omission, he wants revenge on Finn for ending his windfall.”
This was not the time to discuss this. Later, when she’d had a moment with the journal, they could broach the subject. “Remember who you are speaking about, Daniel. You expect me to believe the words of a fraudulent accountant over what I knew of my own father?”
“When it could save my neck, yes, I certainly do,” he snapped.
He asked too much of her. He started to reach for her, but stopped when she spoke.
She didn’t flinch from his gaze. “I can’t do that. Can’t you see I need time?”
He pulled back completely from her, pressed himself up against the window. “Do you love me so little that you wish to see me hang?”
“My love for you—whatever I may feel—has little to do with my feelings for the man who raised me. Don’t try to draw comparisons when none can be made.” She spoke through gritted teeth, each word a warning to him that he should drop the issue.
“I’ve done everything you asked, Katiebelle,” he pleaded, desperation lacing his voice. “I’ve stayed by your side every time you’d have me these past two weeks. I’ve let you use me as a veritable punching bag. I’ve apologized more times than I can count, only to have you hurl my sins back into my face. And I’d do it all again, if it meant I could win your heart, but I won’t put my life on hold so you can play pretend with your memories.”
He thought everything she did—everything she was now—was naught but a joke.
She spun on him, shifting her weight so quickly that she elbowed him in the chest so hard it knocked his breath away.
“You left,” she hissed, low and lethal. “Then you returned out of nowhere. You were kind to me, and so I should fall at your feet, forsaking all else for the greatness of Daniel O’Reilly. Forget what I knew before, forget the family I mourn every day, forget the woman I’ve become because you decree it to be so. Because some wretch claims what is obviously a lie!”
“Your father worked with resurrection men. How much more evidence must be put before your eyes before you open them?” He snatched the ledger off her lap, waving it in her face. “How about this? Will you even looked at the contents, or are you too damned scared of what you’ll find?” He flipped through the foolscap. A page ripped under his harsh thumb.
She cried out, snatching the journal from him.
“You care more about this bleeding journal than you do for me,” he spat.
“That’s not true.” She cradled the journal in her hands, as far from his reach as she could get in the jammed hack.
“Admit it, Katiebelle. Admit that you’d rather have me take the fall for your father’s crimes than him.” He reached forward, grabbing her chin between his forefingers in a vice grip.
“Let me go!”
He didn’t release her.
“Daniel, please,” she pleaded. “Please, can’t we rest? I need time to process all of this. I bedded you again, for God’s sake. Do you really believe that means nothing to me?”
He dropped his hand to his side. Her shoulders shook as she sucked in air. Her cheeks burned, but she didn’t retreat, her face so close to his she could snatch a kiss from his quivering lips.
His hand fell upon hers, skin that sizzled through her resistances. She wanted to give in to his touch, to believe that eventually, with time, he’d understand. He would move on from the rage that built up within him and realize that this was lunacy—surely Papa could not be involved. She laid her forehead down on his, breathed in his spicy scent. This could all be fixed, if she simply waited.
She tilted her head back, kissing him. Lips to lips in a desperate lock that left them both breathless, yet unwilling to pull away, for then the moment would be over and they’d have to face the coming end. He ran his tongue against the seam of her lips, as if memorizing the taste of her for the last time. She opened her mouth to grant him access and his tongue darted in.
They kissed like adrift sailors, their lips the only raft to keep them afloat in stormy waters. Greedily, she drank in everything about him.
She blinked, and then it was over. Leaning against the cushion, she patted at her upset hair and straightened her dress. Order where there had been passion. She schooled her features into a careful mask and suddenly she knew that he’d kissed her for the last time.
The hack’s wheels churned in time to the brutal pounding of her head. Sapped of strength, she laid her head against the blue benchseat and breathed in deep. Everything smelled like him; he was inescapable. Her thigh pressed up against his.
Yet that closeness lied and twisted her until she had nothing left.
***
“Tell me you love me.” Daniel didn’t know why he said it. He couldn’t be patient any longer, couldn’t give his heart up for her to stomp upon it in her half-boots.
Kate drew back to the furthest reaches of the carriage. Her shoulders hunched.
“You promised you wouldn’t push the issue. You said you’d give me time.” She spoke in a half-plea, half-reproach.
“As you vowed you’d help me to find Tommy Dalton’s murderer.” He kept his gaze fastened on the hack’s window, for if he looked toward her, he’d fall right back into her arms. “If what we have means something to you, come with me to the constable. Tell him we’ve found new evidence in the Dalton murder and they need to talk to Laurence Bartleby before he dies.”
“You know I can’t do that.” She looked away.
“No, you won’t do it.”
“If what Bartleby says about my father is true, then Papa must have had a good reason for partnering with Finn’s resurrection men. Perhaps he was trying to protect us—”
“God damn it, Kate, how can you be so worldly and so immature at once?”
Pain flashed across her face. He’d hurt her. In her mind, the worse thing she could ever be was innocent. She sputtered for a second. He could almost see the wheels that turned in her head.
“How can you be?” She flung back. “So I go the constable. The first thing he will ask me for is evidence, and then what should I tell him, Daniel? That he should arrest a man based on the words of a Jacob’s Island prostitute, a pugilist, and an accountant cited in the bankrupting of a shipping company? He would laugh in my face.”
He cursed in Gaelic. She was right. No one would listen to them. While Jasper Finn would face trial by jury if arrested, they’d need some impregnable evidence to get him to that point. Something to make Finn, with half a dozen law officials on his payroll, more appealing to the jury than the Irish son of a farmer.
He scoffed. “Why bother, is that what you are saying? Accept my fate, and let them hang me for the pathetic drunkard I am. Is that it?”
“You’re not being fair,” she protested. “I never said any of that. You put words into my mouth and persecute me for them. Ask me for my opinion, Daniel. Don’t condemn me without it.”
“You don’t have to voice it. I know what passes beneath the surface.” He was utterly aware he’d never be worth anything. Not to her.
“So now I don’t get to speak, either? Is there nothing left that is truly mine? I should be nothing more than a sycophant, perhaps?” She was as far away from him as she could get in the cramped hack.
“I didn’t mean that,” he protested. “I’ve said I support the life you lead. I support you, damn it.”
“As I support you, but you don’t seem to understand what’s going on here. Tommy Dalton was murdered.” Her voice, with its quietly rhythmic lilt that once sounded like an angel’s harp to him, tore at his insides.
“I am well aware. I see his bloody body every night as I sleep.” He couldn’t make her understand that pain.
Patiently, she ignored his outburst. “Murder requires evidence and we have none. It has nothing to do with your religion, your heritage, or your blooming class. There’s a justice system in place for a reason, Daniel. I know you don’t believe in it, but I do.”
“Do you really?” he retorted. “If it was your Papa set to face the hangman’s noose, would you blame him for escaping? If you could save him, wouldn’t you risk everything you could?”
Her eyes fell to her clasped hands in her lap. “You know I would.”
He cupped his ear mockingly. “What? My apologies, I’ve grown a bit deaf from the blast.”
She met his gaze, steely like a razor’s edge. “You know I would.”
“Yet you can’t forgive me for doing the same.”
For a second, he thought he had her. She’d admit she was wrong. These past three years she’d been harboring resentment against him that she should have released. She loved him, needed him, wanted to start a new life with him.
But the seconds turned into long minutes and still she said nothing.
She finally spoke. “It is different.”
One pithy statement to end it all for him.
“Yes, it is.” He sighed, the weight of her betrayal crushing him. “It is different because I love you and I’ve
never once lied to you.”
“He raised me. When my mother left, it was just us!” Clear and loud, her history rang out in the carriage, over the din of the wheels.
“He was my mentor, Kate.” Daniel let out a shaking breath. “Don’t think for a second that I don’t understand his impact on your life, because he changed mine too. Plucked me from the obscurity of the warehouse and made me his assistant.”
It had all been spurious.
Morgan and Finn had needed an easy target.
“He cared about you. Why can’t you see that?” She turned back to him, her eyes burgeoning with tears that didn’t fall because she could not let that one sign of weakness be shown. God forbid she be anything but impregnably strong around him.
Her finger ran across the journal’s cover, a delicate, intimate touch. She undid the leather ties and flipped the journal open. Her brows furrowed as she peered at the contents. Then, she passed it over to him.
He looked down at the scrawls in handwriting he recognized as undeniably Morgan’s. Yet none of it made sense: combinations of letters and numbers in a seemingly endless and indiscernible tangle. “It’s encoded.”
“So it would be no help to the constable even if I were to hand it over.” She couldn’t hide the joy in her voice any more than she could erase the relief on her face.
“You knew him better than anyone. You could decode it,” he suggested. “You studied ciphers.”
“That was years ago.”
“You could at least try.”
“He’s dead, Daniel. Let his memory stay unblemished.”
The matched team’s hooves struck the ground in a constant beat. Shouts echoed from the outdoor market. But nothing echoed more in his ears than Kate slamming the journal shut.
“At the expense of my freedom,” he said, as the truth of it hit him hard. Knocked out his breath, clutched at his chest. There could be no place for him in London as a persecuted man. He might be able to avoid discovery, but the accused crime would linger over him until he succumbed back to the drink to make the nightmares abate. The world thought him a murderer and he had let them think that. He had run when he should have stayed; now he stayed when he should run.