by Darcy Burke
“Why must it be a trade?” She reached for him. Her hand upon his in a tender caress, smaller fingers between his larger ones.
Always filling his gaps, giving him back sanity when he had none.
He didn’t pull away. He remained transfixed by the feel of her skin against his, soft and unchangeable. Countless nights he’d spent in Sussex brothels, losing himself in the most depraved ways, yet nothing could ever compare to the subtle grace of her touch. He was undone by it, the seams of his consciousness frayed and transmuted into something entirely different. A new form of him, who wanted only to be loved by her, to finally be chosen above all else.
When she’d been his before, he’d been second in her heart and he’d understood that because she owed her father fealty. This woman that loved fiercely and felt deeply would be his upon marriage. The depth of her loyalty had astounded him.
Now, he wondered if she would have ever been his.
“I can’t choose between the two of you, Daniel. My memories are the past and they are as much a part of me as whatever this is between us. We are but the sum of our experiences, don’t you see? To ask me to deny what I know to be true—that my father was a good man whose vices were not so dark as Bartleby claims—is to ask me to deny a part of myself.” She stroked her thumb against his in small, interlocked circles. Past and present, together in one.
“You can love the man and recognize what he did is wrong,” he said. Surely she could understand that. The two were not mutually exclusive.
“Not when I know in my heart that he has been as falsely accused as you.” Her fingers slowed, the circles she drew no longer connected. “I believed in your innocence, Daniel, when the constable had a witness. I believed in you because I loved you, damn it, and I loved Papa. I owe him the same allegiance.”
Because I loved you. Always he would live in the past tense with her.
“A man in the ground, however dear he may be, is not alive. I am, and I am here.” He wanted to scream at her that she should choose him over a dead man’s memory. Over and over again, he chose her. Needed her.
Her thumb movements along his knuckle ceased, her face taking on a more contemplative bent. “I can’t help but think London is poisoned. We could leave this hellhole, go back to Dorking and see Poppy’s daughter grow up. Raise our own children.”
On the docks as they waited for the ferry, he’d imagined their children with wistfulness. A daughter with Kate’s high cheekbones and his red hair appeared before him and faded away into the mists of his mind. Left in the carriage without the wisps of a dream, he was alone. Her touch failed to chase away the darkness of his mind.
“Or we could start an entirely new life somewhere. I remember how you said you’d like to see where your ancestors grew up. I might make a wretched farmer’s wife, but I suppose I could learn to cook. I made my own lock picks, after all. It can’t be much more difficult.”
He could see her surrounded by the lush greenness of pastoral Ireland, her curls a shining halo around her flushed face. She’d pat her flour-drenched hands against her apron as she called to him in the fields of their farm. Her pistol would rest against the door frame of their thatched cottage because she could never be separated from it for long.
An aura of violence would shroud them always.
“We’d raise our children to be sons and daughters of an accused murderer.” He didn’t want Poppy’s daughter Moira to know that shame, let alone his own children.
“We needn’t tell them that. We’d be free of London and its lies. I know you didn’t do it and you know it. Is that not all that matters? Why must we concern ourselves with the opinions of others?” She shrugged, unconcerned about the dent to his reputation and honor. Her grip tightened on his hand and she tilted her head toward him. Her lips parted, ready for a kiss from him. Wanting. Willing to be with him in a physical sense but never allowing him access to her heart.
He would live with the sins of his past, apologetic for a crime he hadn’t committed. Forever haunted by Dalton’s corpse, begging for justice.
Without the drink, he had nothing to take away his pain. Nothing but her.
“Don’t be like this, Daniel.” Her gaze fell on him, implored him to choose another path. She scooted closer to him, so that their legs overlapped. Another edge forward and she’d be in his lap, his for the taking.
She used his words against him. “Let me love you.”
Her dress had slipped down. Two pert orbs crested above the v-shaped pointed bodice, tempting him with their perfection. He wanted to fling her skirts up, tug down her drawers and rut himself in her tight cavern until she cried out her release.
That was the only damn thing that made sense between them anymore.
He could see it now. They’d never be anything more than this. The rhythm between them didn’t extend farther than the beast with two backs.
“Because we only get along when we’re fucking,” he muttered.
“What?” Her head snapped up, eyes narrowed.
“You and I. You shag me, I shag you, and we achieve nothing.” Daniel threw up his hands. “I told you I loved you, Kate, and you can’t even say it back. All you can say is how you felt about me before I left. We almost died and still you won’t let me in long enough to be anything more to you than the bloke who shares your bed. You’re caught in grief for a man who died two and a half years ago, and you’ll never move forward with me until you can deal with that. It’s not enough.”
She fell back against the bench. “It’s all I can give you now.”
He tore from her, though that took every ounce of willpower he had left. “I want more.”
His throat burned, needing relief but coming up empty. There had to be something to cut the pain. His mind was surprisingly silent, offering no other alternative but to pursue the course he’d started.
She didn’t look at him, staring out in the carriage darkness. “Then I can’t help you anymore. I’ll get my things out of Atlas’s flat and be gone.”
He’d never heard such sadness in her voice. Not when she’d spoken of the attack upon her person, not when she’d mourned her father, not when they’d almost died. It was almost fitting that as she crushed his dreams, she was worn down from the effort.
“I will no longer waste my breath trying to prove to you we are worth fighting for.” He turned from her, toward the door of the carriage.
She took his declaration with stony silence.
The hack stopped at the station closest to Ratcliffe. He would go back to his flat, while she’d return to the temporary housing Atlas had set up. He grabbed the door handle, not waiting for the driver to disembark.
“Goodbye, Kate.”
Chapter Nineteen
Kate stood on the gravel road long after the tenement houses began to settle into evening routines. Fathers returned home from work, rejoined their wives and children at the table for dinner. A woman scooped up her washing from her second- story landing. The smell of soda bread drifted from Mrs. O’Malley’s open first-floor window. Familiar sounds, familiar faces that bled into a kaleidoscopic haze.
Her stomach rumbled in a dull register she would not regard. She had gone back to the lodgings in Bethnal Green to get her greatcoat, the portrait of Papa, and her dresses. That small room smacked of Daniel, of the Gentleman Thief, of everything that had been her complicated existence these past weeks.
She ached for what had been before he came back. When her life had made sense and could be easily categorized. Danger be damned. She’d protected herself before and she could do it again. Did her endurance really matter, when her beliefs in Papa were challenged, and Daniel had left yet again?
This tenement house was where she belonged.
She leaned back against the building, hands clasped behind her back. The sack with her dresses hung from her fingers. The rough, cracked wood scraped at the exposed skin between her gloves and the long green sleeves of her dress. She stayed, fixed to the point, eyes half-closed. Th
e pain pierced, but it was immaterial when everything she knew was painful.
Cold air stung her cheeks, chapped them red and raw. Pressed up against the building underneath the awning, the black night shrouded her.
The journal in the pocket of her destroyed greatcoat weighted her down, like the lead balls in her pistol. She knew what she’d find, yet her stomach tightened inexplicably. Papa was blameless, wrongfully accused like Daniel. Those hastily scrawled words were nothing more than notations on shipments.
Daniel wouldn’t believe that. He clung to the idea that the world was against him. Never mind that Papa had hired Daniel to Emporia in the first place and promoted him to shipping assistant. Someone must pay for Tommy Dalton’s murder and he’d gladly believe it was her father.
Daniel didn’t want her. For if he did, he wouldn’t trust Bartleby’s lies over her knowledge of her father. She’d believed in his innocence when all evidence was to the contrary, but he couldn’t do the same for her family.
She didn’t want to go to Sussex, to live on a blasted green farm in commune with bloody sheep. But she would’ve done it for him. She’d agreed to set herself up in Bethnal Green until his guiltlessness could be proved.
She’d put everything on the line for him.
Inside the building she headed up the stairs, into her rooms, each step taken automatically. Vaguely, she heard voices. She might have uttered a greeting; she was not sure.
She should have told Daniel she loved him. She should have told him that Finn had given her the ring, and she hadn’t pawned it because it was too dear to her. But there was no use in saying what could never be, no use in being weak.
She’d show him he was wrong. Lighting the candle, Kate surveyed her room. Her body ached still from the explosion and she sunk down into the chair gingerly. From the pocket of her greatcoat she pulled out the journal. A few attacks to the nib of her quill sharpened the tool.
She traced the seal of Emporia with the tip of her index finger wistfully, breathing in the rich scent of leather and ink. As a child running through the warehouses at the London Docks, she’d thought the company indestructible. Her children would grow up under the tutelage of Emporia, and their children after them, on and on throughout the Morgan lineage.
But nothing was constant. She grasped the edge of the journal as though it were Papa’s hand once more. Consumption had rendered him useless, unable to recognize her as his daughter. He had still clung to her hand, intrinsically able to understand she offered him support. In death, his grip loosened and his sallow skin was cold.
She opened the book and surveyed the contents. Daniel had been right—she could decode this easily. Almost too easily…had Papa intended this for her to find?
The pages were coded with a simple Caesar shift, her favorite as a child. Papa used to leave coded messages for her with “K” as the key, with each letter of the alphabet substituting accordingly. “B” when replaced turned into “L” and so on. She scratched quill to paper and within no time, the first line became “40, Man, English, no visible scars. 7p.”
Her grip tightened around the quill.
Underneath the top line, another set of coded words were indented. Transcribed from the code they became an address in Bethnal Green. That part of St. Mary’s Street opened up onto Whitechapel Road and the burial ground of those who died in the workhouses. She had been there before and received a sapphire ring from a thief who believed the Met would not track them to a graveyard. Like the funeral processions of the wretchedly poor were sacred cover.
Nothing was sacred. It was the only truth that remained in her twenty-three years.
She blinked. The page was still there. Her translation was unmistakable. Every bloody word Bartleby had said was the truth. Papa had done this.
Sobs wrenched from her throat, shaking her whole body. The ink blurred before her watery eyes. This is all a lie, she repeated over and over again, yet she knew in her gut that the only inaccuracy was her own avowal of virtue.
Clumsily, she rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. Her fingers hit against the scratch on her forehead, a jolt of pain driving through her body in protest before her vision cleared.
From the pocket of her greatcoat, she pulled out the last portrait of Papa painted before he’d gotten sick. Laying it up against a chipped blue flower vase, she stared at his dark eyes. He smiled slightly, for the artist had caught him after she’d said something that made him laugh. There was a crease down the center from where Kate had folded it to fit in her valise before the bank evicted her from the Bloomsbury townhouse.
That man was gone, gone like her old life, gone like Daniel.
The list went on another two pages, cramped script stuck in the margins, words written across each other in inter-lapping fashion until her eyes crossed from the effort it took to decipher. When she was finished, she had a total of forty-three entries and five cemeteries in London: St. Mary’s Street in Bethnal Green, the workhouse cemetery of St. Sepulchre’s-without near Smithfield, Tower Hamlets Cemetery in Southern Grove, and Manor Park on Serbert Road.
Forty-three graves disturbed. Families without peace, knowing their loved one’s eternal rest was shattered. Forty-three cadavers kept on ice in Emporia’s warehouses.
God only knew how many more murdered for what they’d raise on the black market. The Metropolitan Police estimated that one of the Italian Boy’s murderers had stolen over a thousand bodies. Jasper Finn had bodysnatched for at least three years, and if Atlas’s surmise about his connections with May and Bishop were right, his reach could be much more fatal.
And her father had been right in the middle of it.
Kate’s mouth hung open, yet no sound escaped. No words came to her as cries wracked her trembling frame. Her stomach churned. When she was calmer, she looked back at the ledger. One last line to read.
Bile rose in her mouth as she worked out the last entry. “Woman, 25, mangled, no profit.” The doctors didn’t want corpses they could not rip apart themselves in the name of science. The dead were only useful when they were whole.
Kate would never be whole again.
Her stomach seized. She lurched to the window, barely managing to raise it in time before she upended the contents of her stomach. Doubled over, acridness coated her tongue and the frigid air stung her cheeks. Kate gasped for breath before heaving again.
She sunk to the ground. The window remained open. In the alley below, a beggar railed against her harsh treatment of his living quarters. Another window sprung up and a slurred reprimand to the beggar for his loudness echoed. From there, a few more windows opened and an out-and-out shouting match ensued in the alleyway. The bandied insults became one long string in Kate’s mind. The coarsest language could not encompass what her father had done.
She rested her chin on her knees, pulled up against her chest. Papa must have known she’d find the journal eventually. He was an expert with codes, collecting ciphers with each business trip to another country. If he’d wanted to keep this from her, he had plenty of alternatives to choose from.
A bottle of gin rested within arm’s reach on the bedside table. Kate knocked it down, catching it as it fell. The smell of junipers and coriander wafted to her nostrils as she lifted the bottle to her lips. She knocked a sixth back in one fell sip, as Daniel had taught her, remembering the long, lean line of his throat as he swallowed enough shots to stun a horse.
The gin burned. It cleansed her palate, leaving nothing in its wake but the astringent boldness of a cheap distillery. Gripping the glass bottle in one hand, she turned it around.
It wasn’t Daniel’s brand, yet gin would be forever his in her mind. She hugged the bottle to her chest. Pressed in between her breasts, arms wrapped around it securely, the bottle stayed when he could not.
Kate drifted off that night, head lolled against her bedroom wall.
***
Daniel’s head beat in a staccato pulse that bit at his temples and continued on to his forehead. He
had not slept well. Without the aid of gin, he doubted he ever would again.
In his dream, he knelt by Dalton’s body as he always did, but this time he didn’t dream of the false witness and the patrolman. He mouthed the Irish funeral prayer helplessly, unable to bring back Dalton. From the back of the alley, a shadow emerged, passing through the light of the oil lamp attached to the warehouse’s fixture. He knew her instantly, her willowy frame encased in the destroyed greatcoat. The wraithlike Kate moved with an aquiline grace, scuffed boots barely touching the ground as she advanced upon him. She drew up her arm and a glint of silver caught the lamplight, dully registering in his mind. Her fingers closed around the hilt of a serrated knife, blood dripping from the blade onto Daniel’s hands.
“I can no longer help you. You’ll always be alone.” With one sudden thrust toward him, she plunged her dagger into his heart.
In the clouds of the morning, he knew little hope. Four days had passed since his fight with Kate, four long days where he had only left the flat to fetch food and water from the pump two streets over. She had not made any attempt to contact him. No one came by his door, and Madame Tousat had no new messages for him.
If Kate wanted to be with him, she would have chosen him.
He sat at the desk, sharpened quill in his hand. A half-finished letter to Poppy lay across the desktop. What would be the point? He had no good news for her, nothing that would justify her blind faith in him. She had been so certain that Kate would take him back. He didn’t want to tell Poppy he’d ruined that too.
Since returning to London, he had been stalked, almost blown up, and he’d choked a man within a millimeter of his life. He believed he had found Dalton’s killer, but he had no evidence to convict Finn outside of the unreliable testimony of a pugilist and a prostitute.